A syllabus on feminine longing as an all-consuming state

April 8, 2026

I Wanted To Love You More, Tracey Emin and Louise Bourgeois, 2009-10

When I was a kid I loved food so much that I wouldn't dare eat it. Some weekends my parents would round me and my cousins up in our silver minivan, and we'd head to the Johnny Rockets located inside a mall. I'd sink into the red vinyl booth and fake read the children's menu. There was no need for me to actually read it because I already knew what I wanted: a mini burger cooked medium rare with lettuce, tomato, pickles, onions, cheese, ketchup, and mustard. I didn't even like slices of tomato or onion yet at this age, and I'm not sure if medium rare patties were my preference or just something my dad told me was good. But this image in my head of the perfect, most picturesque burger was enough to get me salivating.

When my burger arrived, I'd intently stare as the waiter set it in front of me, and wouldn't stop staring at this beautiful hunk of a thing for the rest of the meal. Something about the sesame seeds on top of the bun looked so dainty and purposeful. The varied colors and textures of the meat and toppings formed a sculptural masterpiece. My mother would plead with me to eat at least half of the burger, and ask why I ordered all of this in the first place if I didn't want it. I couldn't explain to her this complicated relationship I had with my object of desire. I knew if I took a bite it wouldn't be so beautiful and picturesque anymore with a gaping hole in the side. Or even worse, if I really liked the way it tasted I could risk devouring it all and having what I loved so much gone forever. I was lost in my own wanting. Desire and permanence became so clearly a paradox. If I wanted the burger that badly I would just have to stare.

I Wanted to Love You More is not only an artwork I am referencing. It also just describes a feeling I have always had, for things not yet had, things lost, the past, and what could have been.

Some of these choices will seem rudimentary, and that's ok with me. Most of them are canon for my experiences, discovered when I was really young and needing to recognise my feelings in others. I've spent my whole life inside a particular kind of wanting that doesn't pass or resolve or turn into something else. It just reorganizes everything around it. Every work here speaks to that, to longing not as a feeling you move through but as the medium you move through everything else in. I return to them and feel exactly what I felt the first time.

While this is a syllabus, I really see it as the chorus to my life.

BOOKS & ESSAYS

Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson (1986)

Start here. Carson argues that desire requires a gap, and the gap is the condition of desire itself. The wanting ends the moment it's fulfilled. I couldn't eat the burger because eating it would end it. Once I understood this, the impulse to close the distance went away. You just learn to live inside it.

The Four-Chambered Heart, Anaïs Nin (1950)

Nin and her lover lived on a houseboat on the Seine that he named Nanankepichu, meaning "not really a home." The novel follows a woman who gives everything to a love that can't hold her, and keeps giving anyway. Longing is the water Djuna floats on, and it’s also what drowns her.

Bluets, Maggie Nelson (2009)

Two hundred and forty propositions organized around a color and a grief that won't lift. This book showed me what it means to live completely through the lens of your obsessions, that you can number their features, catalogue their textures, and make a home in them. Nelson uses blue as a lens to examine desire, pain, and the intersection of aesthetic beauty with personal suffering. She goes further inward rather than out. I have an extremely beat up copy of this book with too many text underlines in blue ink.

I Love Dick, Chris Kraus (1997)

Chris’ longing consumes everything: meals, conversations, her marriage, her sense of self. And in consuming everything, it produces a form of progress in her life. Chris is a married, struggling filmmaker who becomes obsessively infatuated with a British academic named Dick. She and her husband send him letters, turning her obsession into an art project and a journey of self-discovery. Kraus writes until she finds out who she is.

Sorry, Tree, Eileen Myles (2007)

Desire expressed mid-thought, still warm, a little frantic and embarrassing. What I love about these poems is that the wanting is ordinary and specific, arriving fragmented yet matter of fact. Longing as the texture of a regular day. Myles merges intimate personal experience with direct political commentary, viewing the two as inseparable.

Agua Viva, Clarice Lispector (1973)

Lispector's wanting has no object, no person, no past. It reaches toward existence in its raw state, the present moment before language arrives. This is where I think longing leads when you follow it all the way: toward everything, all at once. An intense, philosophical exploration of consciousness, the act of creation, and the limitations of language, capturing the raw experience of simply being.

MUSIC

It's So Hard to Tell Who's Gonna Love You the Best, Karen Dalton (1969)

Dalton's song titles already act as descriptors on their own. How Did The Feeling Feel to You? and It Hurts Me Too already function as expressions before you even press play. But then you listen and the rawness of her voice makes you feel her pain in your body.

Hello Stranger, Barbara Lewis (1961)

The only single on this list. It does a number on me every time I hear it. It makes me imagine all the what ifs.

Breakout, Louisa Mark (1981)

Lovers rock as a genre exists entirely inside this feeling: the ache of attachment, the dread of things changing, the specific grief of lost love and betrayal. Songs such as Keep It Like It Is make my heart ache while also revealing the beauty and sensuality in this feeling.

Bury Me at Makeout Creek, Mitski (2014)

Full of songs that became longing anthems of the 2010s, many of which I listened to first as an early teen and now continue to in my late twenties, First Love / Late Spring among them. The album captures that specific feeling of being completely consumed by another person, heartbreak as a total state, enormous, and wielding.

Strange Cacti, Angel Olsen (2011)

Recorded alone, lo-fi, spectral. Strange Cacti sounds like crying so much you can't breathe. The literal feeling of being crushed by heartbreak and desire, unmediated, raw. There is no other album in existence that captures my feelings as much as this one. When I have been heartbroken and alone, I return to it. I even play it on guitar, and when I sing I feel as though her lyrics are my own articulations. They are so specific, but somehow fit exactly what I am trying to express.

Crush Songs, Karen O (2014)

Recorded in an apartment, this album sounds like expressions after freshly crying. Small, domestic, adolescent in the most genuine sense. Karen O left a note in the album cover, reading, “When I was 27 I crushed a lot. I wasn’t sure I’d fall in love again. These songs were written + recorded in private around this time. They are the soundtrack to what was an ever continuing love crusade. I hope they keep you company on yours.”

VISUAL ART

The figurative works, Tracey Emin (1990s–)

Emin's monoprints and paintings depict the female body in states of longing, grief, and desire, loose, raw, barely contained by the page. Works like And I Said I Love You and Riding for a Fall make the interior life physical. She inserts her body into many of the paintings alongside text, so it feels like both an immediate diary entry and an embodied grief. Her feelings are rendered so directly that it is sometimes almost uncomfortable to look at.

Do Not Abandon Me, Louise Bourgeois & Tracey Emin (2009–10)

Bourgeois painted sixteen torsos in gouache and passed them to Emin, who carried them around the world for months, too scared to touch them, before finally adding her own figures and handwriting over the bodies. This is where the title of this syllabus comes from. One of Bourgeois's last works before her death: two women, across a generation, exchanging their longing like a passing of a torch from one woman to another.

Take Care of Yourself, Sophie Calle (2007)

Calle received a breakup email that ended with the words "take care of yourself." So she asked 107 women to interpret it, each through the lens of their own profession. Singers sang it, lawyers prosecuted it, a child read it plainly. What I love about this work is that grief becomes collective, turned over and over until it's something else entirely. Longing metabolized into a project that outlasted the person who caused it.

FILM

One Million Yen Girl (百万円と苦虫女), Dir. Yuki Tanada (2008)

Released from prison, a young woman decides that life could be much easier if she moves to a new place every time she saves enough money. She allows herself to fall into a relationship along the way, but ultimately chooses her own desire over it. She keeps moving. What I love about this film is that it understands restlessness as a form of faithfulness to the wanting, and that sometimes choosing your own life is the most radical act of longing there is.

Amiko, Dir. Yoko Yamanaka (2022)

Amiko's longing for a boy who has left their hometown is total, consuming, socially illegible. She pursues it with a commitment the world around her reads as excessive. Yamanaka refuses to correct her, and I think that's what makes this film so good. The wanting held as a complete and serious way of being in the world.

Frances Ha, Dir. Noah Baumbach (2012)

Frances wants a life she can't quite name, one that keeps shifting just past her reach. This is the film on this list I've returned to the most. An ordinary portrait of the condition, and the one that, for a moment, makes me feel least alone in it, especially having come into adulthood in New York City myself.

Pearl, Dir. Ti West (2022)

End here. Pearl wants what Frances wants, to be seen, to be extraordinary, to escape, but she is trapped on a farm in 1918 with nowhere for her wanting to go, and there is no one who sees her in the ways she wants to be seen. What this film expresses that the others don't is that longing doesn't always turn inward. When it has nowhere to go and nothing to contain it, it can become rage. Her suffering is not kept to the interior or the domestic, and is something that breaks out of it entirely.

This piece was inspired by the Syllabus Project. I wish they would come back!