Everyone is right: this is the most important book about men and women written in the last century. If you are not a man (or even if you are one) and you feel curious about why the current state of heterosexual relations leaves you feeling angry, empty or ill-used, you can use this book to explain yourself to yourself, and become a wiser, or maybe just more complicated, person.

As a writer—especially as a woman who has written “personal” material—I’m grateful to Kraus for deploying the materials of her life in rigorous and compelling ways; for holding vulnerability “at some remove” in the face of those determined to read any act of self-disclosure as narcissistic or self-pitying. But as a reader, Kraus makes me confront my own hunger for autobiographical access; it makes me aware of how much I crave a sense of the true story beneath her written narratives, even as I respect the ways they refuse to deliver any kind of one-to-one correspondence between lived and constructed experience.

What remains so brilliant about the book is the real, useful thought that Kraus builds out of her romantic fantasy. This starts, though doesn't end, with her consideration of love and desire, how "sex short-circuits all imaginative exchange". Chris and Sylvère separate; Chris and Dick do sleep together, but still he remains distant, callous, even as Chris is driven to lonely despair, spending a cold winter holed up in Upstate New York. She gets lost in the woods and nearly dies, and goes to the toilet in the yard because the pipes in her house have frozen: images such as these go a long way to balancing out the discussions of critical theory - Deleuze and Guattari and the like - that dominate later parts of the book...You can call it a novel, then, but it's as a philosophical and cultural critique that I Love Dick bites hardest.

Though grounded in what are apparently not just real but devastatingly painful events, I Love Dick is not so much a roman-à-clef as a formidable novel of ideas: a novel that pretends not to be a novel, that keeps breaking apart or shifting into other forms, in part because it is built explicitly to grapple with the question of how inherited forms warp and limit women’s lives. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, Audre Lorde wrote, and in Kraus’s hands the classical form of the novel continually destroys itself, enacting structurally the same refusal of constriction that Chris begins to insist upon in her own life.

I Love Dick detonated something in me, but it’s been a slow demolition. With each quiet, contained blast I grow more sure that by recognizing our own billboards of desire and failure, and perhaps even finding some dignity there, we are also moving the culture towards the “subversive utopia” that so many women, artists or not, hoped and hope for. When I quit that desk job in November, with no real plans to speak of, I remembered I Love Dick. That Kraus, who considered herself a failure, could write this book at all gives me a shot of courage, and makes me less willing to wait my turn to really live.

Is Emily Gould right, then, that this is the most important book about men and women written in the past century?...I agree that it’s a strange sort of instant classic that takes more than a decade to find its fans; but this is the best way I can find to acknowledge this book’s huge charisma while also admitting that it didn’t really work for me. ‘When the form’s in place, everything within it can be pure feeling,’ Kraus writes of Schoenberg at one point, fully aware, I’d imagine, that her own work too has this self-reflexive neatness. Kraus has also said how much she hates ‘hetero-male … Story of Me’ novels in which ‘everything else’ becomes ‘merely a backdrop to the teller’s personal development’. And yet, her own book is driven exactly by ‘the teller’s personal development’, from frustrated wife to spurned lover to independent woman artist. Beneath the posing and the psychodrama, I Love Dick is an instant-classic feminist Künstlerroman.

Kraus is interested in the dynamics of exposure itself: why we judge acts of self-exposure as self-absorbed or needy, especially if they come from a woman; how any trace of the self can become a kind of shameful stink, the whiff of some failure of imagination or, worse yet, self-pity or self-aggrandizement. She hates that one female artist’s “willingness to use her body in her work” is immediately labeled “narcissism.” Kraus uses this critique to imply that she has a different set of purposes in her own acts of self-exposure, and one of them, of course, is an exploration of our fascination with exposure itself. Her book, which her husband (in its pages) calls “a new genre, something in between cultural criticism and fiction,” explores the particular tenor of exposure we find when autobiography comes packaged in a novel; the exposure is a bit obscured, a bit skewed or destabilized, as if nestled between scare quotes. We feel ourselves subject to the opaque terms of an authorial presence that refuses to neatly categorize its offering: We are, at once, deeply immersed in the Icy North, its extreme exposures, and deeply aware of the hands that built it for us.