Because your love life is a mess. Or it was once. Or you have sat with a close friend for months, sometimes for years, bolstering her and listening as she weathered her own storm. Or all of the above. Miriam Gershow, author of Closer and Survival Tips: Stories, says of A Woman in Pink, “Anyone who has ever made unwise choices in love, which is to say everybody, should read it immediately.”

For A WOMAN IN PINK, “It’s only love if it hits an artery.”

I am A WOMAN IN PINK studying my reflection. “He was lost to me. I was lost to me. In the mirror, I saw a jumble of fragments resembling a person, and didn’t know her at all.”

I am A WOMAN IN PINK, “the focal point in a grim snapshot, a woman alone at a bar. Only now I was even more tragic than at home, because now, my tragedy was on display.”

For A WOMAN IN PINK, “He was always there and never there. I couldn’t have him or mourn him. And so I was not well or sick, but held by a persistent, dull aching, the kind a person became accustomed to, the kind a person learned to tolerate.”

I am A WOMAN IN PINK, gauging Dutch’s metamorphosis from drink to drink. “I sagged when I saw the darkness descend on him, our beautiful day then over. I was learning to be reactive, to watch for the darkness, to measure and modulate my responses to it.”

I am A WOMAN IN PINK, “more adept, since meeting Dutch, at being the only woman in a group of men. I knew when to be demure and when to be one of the boys, when to flash a smile or my intelligence like a badge, when to talk and when to remain quiet, when to fire a joke like a single shot.”

A WOMAN IN PINK speculates, “Maybe for women, our malleability and our appeal went hand in hand. Maybe we could be loved or we could be principled, but we could not be both.”

I am A WOMAN IN PINK, fearful of Dutch’s new wealth. “Did it draw him from me? Did it open a gulf between us? I secretly wondered and worried. Now he could pass through doors that for me remained closed.” 

A WOMAN IN PINK says of Dutch, “His brokenness made me love him more. I was designed to run toward it.”

I am A WOMAN IN PINK and wore “a pink dress that night, like June Carter’s in Walk the Line, when she and Johnny Cash first met, backstage. When Dutch looked at me like that, the way Johnny looked at June, every nerve inside me hummed.”

For A WOMAN IN PINK, “the sudden, full brilliance of day was a shock. Then, just as quickly, she was struck, flying through the dark.”