What does it mean to say ‘I love you’? What do you hear when I speak those words at night, in bed—in the bunkbed as I tuck my children tight in their sheets—or maybe the bed is his, by the window, and I whisper ‘I love you’ as he takes my hips in his hands. What do I want to convey with those words…
Ariadne is a single, fortysomething writer and mother embroiled in an affair with a married man. At the core of her current manuscript, a book about the declaration of love, is the need to understand why: why her lover has returned to his wife, why their relationship still lingers in her mind, why she’s unable to conquer her longing. To make ends meet while writing, she joins a research study in which she’s paid to live with an AI device called Dirk.
But the study quickly enters uncharted territory. Capable of mapping Ariadne’s brain—and, to some extent, reading her mind—Dirk calls into question issues of both privacy and consciousness: how we communicate our thoughts to others, what it means to embody our desires, and whether we ought to act on them.
I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind is available for purchase at your local bookstore, online, or directly from the publisher.
Praise for the book:
“a grandly ambitious, genre-bending examination of the ambiguities and permutations that underlie our experience of love and the ways it affects us.” —Quill & Quire
“Marianne Apostolides’ latest book, I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind, interlaces an intellectually-engaging discourse on attachment and desire with an intimate picture of the primary character, Ariadne. […] The narrative is both agonizing and darkly humorous.” —Canadian Literature
“What I Can’t Get You Out of My Mind does masterfully is examine love through the lens of Ariadne, poetically weaving in the philosophy and literary writings that inform her understanding of the world. […] the book is captivating, inquisitive, and provocative.” —Room Magazine
For information on the book’s origin, and to read various excerpts from an earlier version of the book, please see the section On Writing.