The book is fundamentally a love story, but it is not a romance. In fact, it is fairly unromantic because it tackles the horrors of falling in love and trying to meld your life with someone else's: the vulnerabilities, the dirt, the shame, the fear, the dizzying, addictive highs but the devastating lows. This is compounded by the fact that Regan (the woman in the hetero pair) has a  mood disorder. I also have a mood disorder, and it took me until reading the author's acknowledgments to realize that the highs and lows Regan experiences were exceptional in some way. This is part of why this book affected me so much, I think--I saw myself more clearly in this book than I have in many, many books. Bipolar disorders are very misunderstood, and there's a lot of shame associated with them, but they are very, very hard to deal with. The author references one of the central challenges directly: never knowing if something is real or not and thus everyone not taking you very seriously. That's Regan's experience entirely. 

The man, Aldo, is a Ph.D. student so that immediately endeared him to me, of course, but he is entirely obsessed with his research to the point of not having space for much else in his life. But in falling in love with someone who is chaos and impulsivity, he has to figure out how to make space for other things. And that depiction was so heartbreakingly wonderful I felt it deep in my bones. I don't know if everyone else would love this book as much as I did because the characters spoke to me on such a personal level, but I thought it was wonderful. 

The book also does interesting things with form and style which was fun, this sort of layering of the writing style that forces the reader into weird and often uncomfortable positions to try to understand what the characters are doing--which is what happens when you try to get to know someone intimately. You have to bend and twist to try to understand the world how they do so you can connect with them. It is a very well-constructed piece of art and I would highly recommend it to people who like books that delve into what it means to be human.