The Fortress: A Romantic Love Story Novel - Perfect for Valentine's Day Gifts & Couples Reading

I was originally drawn into Trussoni's misshapen love story when she published a series of stories as a "True Love" column on The Rumpus. She indicated that she was in the process of crafting a memoir. As I eagerly awaited each new installment of the story of her and The Magician, I knew that this book was something worth waiting for; when the column was taken off the site and I found that the book had a publication date, I pre-ordered it immediately. Thus the wait began.Deftly weaving together the elements of her story, Trussoni effortlessly shifts from the heavy strangeness of La Commanderie—a fortress in rural France—to everything that brought her there and made her family what it was. She was instantly taken with Nikolai when she met him a decade earlier, and he swept her away with mysticism and passionate need. I'm a lot like Trussoni, and currently in the midst of writing a play based on a doomed relationship in which instinct and reality were set aside in favor of obsessive desire. So the timing of her memoir's publication could not have been better. She examines the repetitive pattern of gaslighting in which Nikolai not only lied to her but made her doubt her own perceptions, as well as the forces at work in her personality and past that allowed her to keep pushing aside her gut feelings and stay with him. Her children were, on the one hand, a powerful reason to stay together, and on the other bore the brunt of her ex-husband's callous whimsicality. As she comes to see his possessiveness play out in their daughter's life and his emotional hardness take form against her son, Trussoni "recognize[s], in [her] daughter, [her] own need to believe in the impossible."Belief and desire—belief in desire, desire for belief—are at the book's heart, and it is impossible not to be pulled along in Trussoni's struggle with her husband and, more importantly, with herself. Refusing to paint herself as a victim of circumstance, she instead takes a searing, incisive look at herself, laying bare her susceptibility and the unique and painful ways it was exploited. And yet this really is a love story: the explosive beginning of her relationship with Nikolai echoes far into the book, underscoring the great painfulness and slow deterioration of betrayal as he repeatedly tells her what she wants to hear and then does the opposite. Knowing what I already knew going into the book, I was looking forward to the precise details of the unraveling, and in no way does the book disappoint. The only thing is that you are signing up to have your heart broken by cracking the cover of The Fortress. If you can live with that, then prepare your entry into a world that engrosses, tantalizes, frustrates, and astounds.