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It is both impossible and pointless to try to talk about love. You can put together all the fanciest vocabulary words you know and they’ll still come up short against the feeling in the pit of your stomach. Love resists all attempts at capture. For love, language is tongue-tied.

David Levithan marshals around 200 words to talk about love. In a series of dictionary entries, from “aberrant�� to “zenith��, he records the ferocious rituals of love between a first-person narrator and an unnamed “you.�� The entries are tiny explosions of intimacies that explore the devastating movement from tentative beginning to sudden rupture: the collusion, the fall, the intimacy, the distance, the betrayal, the heartbreak, the bargain, the holding and turning away, in a thousand moments, again and again. And the loving, always the loving, fiercely, brokenly, and as if life depends on it.

In these entries, love is fierce and strange and mundane and petty and wonderful and it’s the best and worst place any place can possibly be. Love swings from beauty and loveliness—��cadence, n. (...) there are times when I’m talking to you and I hit a Southern vowel, or a word gets caught in a Southern truncation, and I know it’s because I’m swimming in your cadences, that you permeate my very language”—to pain and sorrow—��catharsis, n. I took it out on the wall. I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU. YOU FUCKER, I LOVE YOU.�� The novel risks closeness to look at love in all its lights, to weigh it in all sorts of lexicons, and yet—it can only touch the surface: ��ineffable, adj. These words will ultimately end up being the barest of reflections, devoid of the sensations words cannot convey. Trying to write about love is ultimately like trying to have a dictionary represent life. No matter how many words there are, there will never be enough.��

Ultimately, The Lover’s Dictionary is not meant to capture for us what love is, but rather, to testify to the narrator’s experience of having lived it, of having been through it and within it. Love happened, love hurt, and nothing could be more mundane or more extraordinary than that.