In Love , two women fight until they understand their fighting as a pretense to touch. The fighting is a kind of intimacy, an annual rite of slapping, biting, and hair-pulling that eventually gives way to a “realization that the fights did nothing other than allow them to hold each other.” The epiphany that they are longing to hold each other is eclipsed by a more creative violence. In lieu of brawling, there are stolen rings and invocations of traumatic history that divert them away from the need to be held. For decades they live and age alongside each other in this way, hurting each other more inventively, unable to transcend the poor contact of fighting in favor of real, tender contact until the last pages, when they are allowed the full epiphany of an embrace.…