Thirst for Salt by Madelaine Lucas
a review, thoughts & more
What continues to surprise me, and what I still don't understand, is not the reason that love ends but the way that it endures.
Bite by bite, the salt coating my mouth, I came to regret my decision. My childhood best friend and I, maybe six or seven, were attempting our foray into culinary independence under the watchful eye of her father. After I plated mine, we brought out the salt shaker. I didn’t realize how quickly it would come out, my dexterity faltering or perhaps still developing, so I was left with a fried egg swimming in a sea of salt. Her dad said no worries, he can make another for me real quick. I insisted, ‘No, I like this much salt.’ They didn’t believe me. They were right.
It stuck with me, the craving for salt. It felt, and feels, necessary. In life, too. Friendships, love, creativity, the summer sun, journaling, baking strawberry rhubarb pies, a warm coffee in the morning, hugs, flowers, pottery, Mary Oliver poems, first beach trip of the season, mundane intimacy, reading relatable books, the magic of New York City… all necessary salt.
This past fall, I was in New York City for my first traveling work event one Friday late in October—and my first NYC in the fall experience. It was a beautiful day where the leaves were technicolor and the breeze carried the last bit of warmth. Accompanied by my boss and her boss, we observed, took notes, and interviewed the stylists of a marketing activation done in partnership with Pinterest: a fully shoppable, immersive shophouse located in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone. (Check out my write-up here!)
Afterwards, we ventured into Books Are Magic. I browsed their collection of up-and-coming authors and in-the-know reads. I landed on All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews and Thirst for Salt by Madalaine Lucas. The former I couldn’t quite brave (it’s a wip), and the latter, I chose after reading a brief but powerful review, with its promise of a “doomed romance for fans of Salley Rooney & Elif Batuman.”
As I delved into the novel, I quickly became consumed with its lyrical prose, deeply rich characters, and the sensual voice of an unnamed woman reflecting upon the past, reflecting on what could have been. The protagonist quickly plunged back into her 24-year-old self, the age I am now, when she raptured a 42-year-old man. Each page resonated with the ache of unfulfilled love and the bittersweet longing of lost possibilities.
But nothing had really happened yet, I thought. What I'd lost, it seemed it was and would only ever be imaginary. What was I crying for, except the loss of one vision of what my life might have been, one I'd lived out in dreams? As all lovers learn, when love ends, you lose the future as well as the past.
Even though love surrounds me, I’ve never been loved. And so, I found myself rooting for the protagonist, navigating the murky waters blindly, as she quietly loved Jude—older, so self-assured, yet fleeting all along—despite what warning signs were so visible to me as a reader. The ache of unlived potential lives never truly fades, does it? I’m not sure, but I’m still hoping that it’s not true that some desires are destined to linger unresolved forever.
Like a stream of conscious thought, no turbid waves to cause disruption, Lucas’ eschews quotation marks for dialogue, weaving an intimacy that enveloped me completely into the narrative, into the protagonist’s mind. Thoughts and spoken word blending seamlessly amidst one another.
Looking back, it seems that was how Jude always was with me: keeping his distance, never asking for anything I might not want to give. That steadiness that I took to be a strength—his consistency—I realize now was a kind of boundary, a way of drawing a line in the sand. Like a sprinkling of salt at the threshold, it was a kind of spell to keep himself safe, unchanged. What he needed more than anything was to believe he needed nothing, that if I should ever leave, he'd remain the same man. But I had his key in my coat pocket and I was happy then, because it seemed like he was letting me in.
Throughout, my mind kept circling back to a Mary Oliver quote that floats through my Pinterest here and there: “If you are in the garden, I will dress myself in leaves. If you are in the sea I will slide into that smooth blue nest, I will talk fish, I will adore salt,” from Section 7 of “Rhapsody,” in The Lead and the Cloud: A Poem. In these lines lies a willing surrender, an offering of self to become whatever the beloved might desire. To merge with an environment for another is to oscillate between visibility and invisibility.
In Thirst for Salt, Lucas enchants us with a narrative so poignant, so achingly familiar, so tender. Feelings of vulnerability morph into feelings of naiveness, impressions and understandings toss and turn, and one learns to submit to love, even in the face of inevitable—or maybe just possible—devastation.