It may not be possible to start The Dry Heart and not finish the book before closing it. It is as if this intimate, unsparing account of a marriage's unraveling gets right under your skin and there's nothing to do about it but to keep reading as if scratching a phantom itch. The clarity and directness of its prose feels at first like an unbearably and intensely focused light... it reveals all, like a the lamp of an operating room. Another metaphor, from the title, is even better: this text is dry and desiccated in a breathtakingly clarifying way. What a title. What a first line.