Less, by Andrew Sean Greer, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2018. I’ve had it on my bedside table for months now, thinking it must be way too serious. But wanting to read for pleasure, and not some book I feel obliged to read because I’m interviewing the author next week, I finally opened it.

It’s the story of Arthur Less, a failed novelist about to turn 50. He receives a wedding invitation from an old boyfriend, and rather than say no - that would look like defeat - accepts the invitations on his desk to half-baked literary events around the world.

It’s sharp, unexpectedly funny, and terribly sad. I’m not afraid to admit I was bawling my eyes out one morning, waking up early, alone, to consume a chapter before work. That’s one good thing about being single, a book can become your companion. I’ve gone to bed with more good books than good men in the past few years, all I can do is keep turning the pages.

Indeed Arthur Less is probably the loveliest man I’ve slept with for a long time. In Morocco, he’s invited to the birthday celebrations of Zohra, who’s also about to turn 50.

“Glamourous, intelligent, resilient, bracingly direct, and prone to obscenities,” the narrator describes Zohra.

“The kind of woman who would run an international spy ring. For all Less knows, this is exactly what she does.”

I’m longing for someone to describe me so. Imagine being so desirable, so exotic.

It seems Zohra has been thinking about love and desire too. She’s decided on two things, on turning 50.

The first is “f**k love”, the second is “get fat”.

While I’m undecided on both of those, ironically, that seems to be where my life has landed.

Zohra is irked because her partner has left her.

“She told me she met the love of her life … You read poems about it, you hear stories about it, you hear Sicilians talk about being struck by lightning. We know there is no love of your life. Love isn’t terrifying like that. It’s walking the f**king dog so the other one can sleep in, it’s doing taxes, it’s cleaning the bathroom without hard feelings. It’s having an ally in life. It’s not fire, it’s not lightning. But what if she’s right? What if the Sicilians are right? That it’s this earth-shattering thing she felt?

“What if one day you meet someone and it feels like it could never be anyone else? Not because other people are less attractive, or drink too much, or have issues in bed, or have to alphabetise every f**king book or organise the dishwasher in some way you can’t just live with. It’s because they aren’t this person. Maybe you can go through your whole life and never meet them and think that love is all those other things, but if you do meet them, God help you! Because then: ka-blam! You’re screwed.”

The pre-Raphaelites, in my very limited knowledge, increased here by reading the companion book published by the NGA, looked outside the traditional depictions of love, indeed many of them lived outside them. Ford Maddox Brown was a widower raising two daughters when he met Emma, a country girl, and their relationship and daughter remained clandestine until they could afford to wed.

Elizabeth Siddal sacrificed expectations of a respectable marriage to work as a model and artist and be with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. John Everett Millias, who painted the exquisite Ophelia, created a series of modern-life drawings on the theme of matrimony, three titled “Married for …” examining rank, money and love, and others considered a prolonged engagement, a bad marriage, and a marriage haunted by a dead lover.

For centuries, nay, for eons, us humans have been puppets to the love and desire we have felt for each other, to the idea of waiting, wanting, to be struck by lightning.

I ask myself what I want now. Sometimes I think I want that companionable love, walking dogs and dealing with dishwashers. Settled.

But I’ve been there. And I know now that’s not what I want. I want that spark, I want the whole lightning bolt. I want that person I can’t live without.

Perhaps driven mad, like Ophelia, due to love and desire.