Sarah Haas

Jealousy

An obsessive, propulsive memoir tracing jealousy's arc through a relationship and investigating our darkest emotional impulses throughout the history of art, myth, photographic technology, and perception

Where does jealousy begin? With the gods? At birth; in childhood? Or in the moment a dating app match lights up a phone? 

Jealousy recounts a relationship across familiar milestones—first dates, growing intimacy, sexual frenzy, turmoil and conflict, and finally marriage and childbirth. But it is also a story of unraveling. When, in the early stages of courtship, Sarah Haas inevitably discovers a former partner in an old Instagram post, she becomes consumed. She stalks and she spirals, her ever-shapeshifting obsession assuming the forms of imitation, anger, violent ideation, shame, and insatiable desire. Her jealousy forces her to confront the profane and forbidden emotions coursing through her, and examine the way they manifest in the world around her, too—in Las Vegas hotels, abandoned malls, selfies, iPhone haptics, and mass shootings. Emerging from Haas’s personal story is a bigger narrative about art and culture, one that probes the history of the recorded image and its consequences. 

At the heart of this memoir is a fascinating provocation: What if the only way to understand ourselves is to embrace jealousy? To admit it as a part of the self—even if the worst, most despotic part—and then to honestly describe and so face it.