"I read Vigdis Hjorth's If Only at the subway station, then on the subway, then in the airport, then on the plane across the ocean, then in the taxi after landing, then finally in the hotel. I can't separate the feeling of movement and travel from the feelings that book gave me: the vertigo of falling disastrously in love with exactly the wrong man, being shunned by him, taken up by him again, suffering from the love, and all the twists and turns of the relationship which the book depicts. The passage of time in that novel, and the passage of moods through the protagonist's mind and body, mixed with my passage from one continent to another, and across time zones, feeling dizzy with sleeplessness and jet lag, were perfectly suited to each other. It was one of the best reading experiences I've had."
Sheila Heti,
"The novel offers neither redemption nor transcendence as its resolution. And yet Hjorth makes this relationship and its aftermath legible to us as a part of the human experience-one that we can't extract from the type of love we do consider desirable or healthy. At the end of the book, we might find ourselves wondering, as Ida does: 'If only there was a cure, a cure for love.' And we might realize, even as we wish this, that we don't actually mean it at all."
