Our story begins in 1989, with the publication of Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. In this collection’s title story, two couples discuss love and relationships over a bottle of gin. Mel and Terri have been together for a while, and by now, their unhappiness peeks through their heroic courtship story. As Mel launches into an anecdote, he says, “it ought to make us ashamed when we talk like we know what we’re talking about when we talk about love.” Immediately, Terri says: “Come on, now. Don’t talk like you’re drunk if you’re not drunk.”

One of the most touching and thought-provoking stories bears the same title as the entire collection. It focuses on two couples that gather around a table drinking gin and talking about love. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Theme Physical loveRaymond Carver a impus un stil și o modă. A compus o proză laconică, fragmentară, din care lipsesc toate conjuncțiile „cauzale” (pentru că, fiindcă, deoarece, întrucît etc.), ceea ce o face de-a dreptul enigmatică. Autorul trece peste explicații și nu-l lasă nici pe narator să se destăinuie pînă la capăt. Povestitorul este, de obicei, un individ simplu și aproximativ educat. Mai este și instinctiv (ca la Faulkner). Nu-l duce capul la definiții riguroase, la generalități filosofice, la explicații fine. Nici măcar cînd discută despre iubire.

He makes it look so easy. He almost makes it look too easy in this short story collection, as though there isn't much here aside from spare language and even sparer "plot".Basically, the character’s names and jobs seem to matter less than the brand of booze they're downing, or the sort of receptacle they extinguish their cigarettes in. It's possible, in a poem or short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power.” Capturing bliss in one word, crystallising tenderness and love at once into a precious gift and a delicate act of remembrance, Hummingbird, the affectionate poem closing this collection, charmed me in its endearing simplicity and ended up as my favourite - reading this short poem magically transporting to the moment of receiving and later cherishing of a letter or a postcard dear, the one you keep close to you and take with you until it is ragged, almost perished, the words barely discernible anymore, a four-leaf clover in your heart for the rest of your days. So he offers a story of his own as an illustration of what love really is. He is a heart surgeon, and he tells the others about an event that happened several months earlier. An elderly couple were in a car accident when a joyrider crashed his car into theirs, dying instantly. Well, the husband was very depressed for the longest while. Even after he found out that his wife was going to pull through, he was still very depressed. Not about the accident, though. I mean, the accident was one thing, but it wasn’t everything. I’d get up to his mouth-hole, you know, and he’d say no, it wasn’t the accident exactly but it was because he couldn’t see her through his eye-holes. He said that was what was making him feel so bad. Can you imagine? I’m telling you, the man’s heart was breaking because he couldn’t turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife.”