Crush is a sonically icky word. The sensation it points to—a bubbly elation, a saturated pause—deserves something more mellifluous. If only we could say, “I have a pamplemousse on you,” or “Janelle has a new semaphore,” or “It started as a simple yawn, and now I’m in love!” Unfortunately, those words mean other things. We’re stuck with crush. And what is a crush? Directories tell me it’s a brief, often unrequited, romantic feeling. I disagree. Crushes don’t have to be romantic, or brief. They are best when unrequited.
A crush, to me, is a situation where a character’s affection for the idea of a thing outweighs their affection for the thing itself. My feelings for Paul Mescal are a crush, not love, because I have never met Paul. The image of him that I have in my head says more about me than it does about him. And it isn’t an “obsession” or “infatuation.” Those words seem darker, and imply a level of debilitation. A crush is a performance for my friends. They enjoy sending me Paul Mescal memes.
I wrote a book about a girl who, tired of having crushes on boys, cultivates a crush on a family of skunks living in her yard. It’s called The Skunks. Maybe this is the central question: What is a crush? Can attention and care for a wild animal fill the same space in your life as attention and care for a cute Frisbee player?
A crush reveals so much about a character. What do they find appealing? What assumptions do they make about the object of their affection in the absence of actual knowledge? Is there a hole in their life that this desire was invented to fill? Here is a list of books that, to me, answer the original question. What is a crush?
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During Covid, exiled from college and hoping to live vicariously, I picked up a book with a pale pink cover. It was supposed to be about a girl’s freshman year at Harvard. Instantly, I fell head over heels for the narrator’s voice. On every page, I was taking a picture of some sentence so I could save it in my camera roll. Cinderella was an allegory for the fundamental unhappiness of shoe shopping? So true! Hilarious! Only when the book was over, and I tried to explain it to my friends, did I realize it had been about a crush. The narrator’s feelings for an elusive older guy offer the structure for the narrative. But when you’re reading it, it’s clear that the boy doesn’t matter. The fact that she likes the guy makes her do and think interesting things, but he as a character is not interesting. This is my favorite sort of literary crush dynamic, because it’s the one that most closely matches my lived experience.
This is a book about an intellectually-inclined woman, generally disapproving of pop culture, who falls hard for a member of a K-pop boy band. Interspersed with the main storyline are pieces of the self-insert fanfic she begins writing. Other reviewers have described Y/N as “Kafka-esque.” Not having read Kafka, I don’t feel like I can use that term, but it gets bonkers. Like if you fed hallucinogenic mushrooms to the crush situation in The Idiot.
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
A snobby rich playwright retires to the shore of England, intending to keep a journal that is both autobiography and careful study of the ocean. But then! It turns out that his long-lost childhood crush, Hartley, lives in the same seaside town with her husband. He plots to get her back. A cast of characters from his theater days come to visit. He describes his meals in meticulous detail. I would call this book “a romp,” but it’s also a dark psychological study of the dangers of crushing too hard. Hartley tells the playwright she isn’t interested, but because the thing he loves is his idea of her rather than the reality of her, her refusals do nothing to dissuade him. Tragedy strikes.
Couplets: A Love Story by Maggie Millner
This is a collection of poetry, but I think you can read it as a novel. A woman in Brooklyn leaves her straight relationship for a more passionate queer one, leading to meditations on the nature of poetry and prose in relation to love. Think: polyamory, skillets of onions, NPR. At first, this book gave me secondhand embarrassment. I was like, “Are we allowed to write about a simple crush so earnestly?” But that’s part of what makes it so beautiful. Even if a million other people had crushes and wrote about the experience, and then you read all those accounts, a crush would still feel magical and confusing when it happened to you. And the way to understand something magical and confusing, for a writer, is to write about it.
A woman’s friend commits suicide, leaving her responsible for his Great Dane. He was a problematic thrice-married writing professor; she lives and writes alone. Their bond hasn’t always been platonic. Nunez juxtaposes the person-dog relationship with the person-person relationship, leading to reflections on grief, love, writing, and gender. In many ways, this book is more about love than it is about crushes. The woman knew her friend deeply. In death, though, the friend becomes an idea. She has to choose how she wants to remember him, and that means creating an image all her own. (Sort of like the images we craft of attractive pop stars.)
Here, a girl has a crush on the sport of squash (bear with me). Gopi’s mother dies, and her confused and grieving father decides his three daughters must throw themselves into squash training in response. Depending on the daughter in question, it’s a more or less effective coping mechanism. For Gopi, it works. I read this novel in a book club, and most people were horrified by the parenting on display. But I have to confess I loved this dad. He knows his family needs a reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and that reason may as well be squash. Staying up late watching VHS tapes of famous matches, Gopi and her father use the sport the way teenage girls use crushes—to bond with each other.
Sometimes a crush is visceral. Mrs. S tells a story of desire that is deeply rooted in the body. An unnamed narrator gets a yearlong position as a “matron” at an all-girls boarding school, where she’s quickly enraptured by the headmaster’s wife. Told in the present tense, this is a rare depiction of a crush unmediated by time or distance. Everything feels like it’s happening up close, without an opportunity to step back and see the full picture. What is desire? What is gender? How do you present yourself to the world, and how do you handle the way the world responds to that presentation?
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
A young boy named Calvin goes on adventures with a tiger named Hobbes. To everyone else, the tiger is just a stuffed animal, but to Calvin, Hobbes is a best friend. Ergo, Hobbes is an idea rather than a real thing, and I’m calling this heartwarming classic a crush book. Each set of panels is its own vignette; together they form a joyful ode to childhood and the natural world. You could argue this book doesn’t belong on this list, and you might be right—but there’s a reason people say “I feel like a little kid again” when they’re crushing.
