Near the Lacan books I spot Max’s and take it down, remembering vividly the nights I spent underlining it, copying out passages to get them into my body. His book changed so much for me, it helped me understand Lacan to begin with, and I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that it saved my life after Jonathan left me. In it Max wrote something about desire and original loss, and it stayed in my mind, le fait de jouir n’étanche pas le désir original, the act of coming does not quench the initial desire. Desire stems from foundational loss, the moment of separation from our mothers, from being cast out of that oceanic dyad into our own distinct individuality. Mother becomes other and we are from that point on forever adrift; but it is that loss that triggers desire, all our desires forever after. In those early days after the break-up, it was consoling to think that it wasn’t just him that I missed, and that if he were to return to me, the void would remain. Jonathan was the malady, and Max’s book, Lacanian psychoanalysis more generally, the remedy – though not an absolute cure.