Jennifer Lawrence Gives Everything to Die My Love
Lynne Ramsay’s film is an exceptional adaptation of a story that explores the collapse of a woman’s life with raw intensity and emotional depth.
Reviewing Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, Philip Larkin affirmed that her last pieces were original and effective but then added: “How valuable they are depends on how highly we rank the expression of experience with which we can in no sense identify, and from which we can only turn with shock and sorrow.”
Ariana Harwicz’s debut novel Die, My Love, first published in 2012 by the Argentine writer living in France, carries that same shock and unease. Its unnamed narrator voices her fury, contempt, and desperate longing with a brutal honesty that demands attention.
She is a foreigner in rural France, a writer whose career has paused while she tends to her newborn. Her frustration with motherhood grows into disdain for her husband, whom she finds sexually inadequate, while she begins an affair with a married neighbor.
“A breath of irrationality had set fire to my existence,”
After a stay in a hospital, she appears calmer, but at her son’s second birthday party, her rage surfaces again:
“I hope you all die, every last one of you… Just die, my love.”
Even a diagnosis of postpartum psychosis feels insufficient to explain her turmoil. Among recent works exploring the alienation of motherhood, Die, My Love remains one of the most extreme and unsettling.
Author’s Summary
A fierce and haunting adaptation of Harwicz’s novel, Lynne Ramsay’s film delves into the chaos of maternal rage and identity loss with remarkable cinematic power.