On Claire Messud’s Melodramas

In Claire Messud’s latest novel, This Strange Eventful History, a woman finds out that the object of her unreciprocated love had been cheating on his wife. For years, she had obsessed over him privately, plastering onto his image the idea of a perfect man. The revelation of his infidelity totally ruins the picture, and tears her to bits: it’s like “a hurricane, destroying in minutes the delicately spun and so long preserved shimmering web of her love affair—yes, she’d considered it all these years a love affair, though they had never held hands, let alone kissed.”