Modern Love
Back of the Book
“People used to tell me, if you keep on writing maybe you’ll make a name for yourself,” New York–based artist and writer Constance DeJong (born 1950) wrote in Modern Love. “They were right: My name’s Constance DeJong. My name’s Fifi Corday. My name’s Lady Mirabelle, Monsieur Le Prince, and Roderigo. Roderigo’s my favorite name. First I had my father’s name, then my husband’s, then another’s. I don’t know. I don’t want to know the cause of anything.”
Modern Love, DeJong’s first book, was published in 1977 by Standard Editions, an imprint co-founded by DeJong and Dorothea Tanning. In 1978, the text was adapted into a 60-minute radio program accompanied by the “Modern Love Waltz,” a piano composition by Philip Glass. In this new edition, DeJong’s debut novel is brought back into print, her dissonant shifts of voice and inimitable staccato rhythm made available to a new generation of readers.
We Love It Because
Constance DeJong’s historic post-modern art piece, now in book form, contains an instructive candor that echoes through the many voices she dons. An eclectic but obviously, undeniably profound reflection on the creation and destruction and re-creation of a self from the ashes of itself, the experience of many selfhoods contained in one, and the reifying power of art as presentation, Modern Love remains a genre-bending modern classic.
Memorable Passage
[Something] tells me if I continue turning my insights into adjectives I’ll turn into a criminal. I’ll steal the splendor of this moment and commit it to a long, sorry sentence. I’ll murder people and bury them in gorgeous metaphors. I’ll mutilate events and objects, cut and arrange everything into pretty patterns. Into spectacular but empty images.
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