Episode 3: “Rebecca van Laer on Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and theorizing one’s own writings on love”

Episode 3: “Rebecca van Laer on Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and theorizing one’s own writings on love”

Naomi is joined by the writer Rebecca van Laer. They discuss Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, writing as self-annotation, how to Pale Fire oneself, and more.

To preorder Naomi’s new title, Marginalia: an autobiography from Autofocus Books, please click here.

Rebecca van Laer is a writer based in the Hudson Valley. She is the author of a novella, How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, 2022), and a memoir, Cat (Object Lessons/Bloomsbury, forthcoming in October 2025).

Music: lofi london by snoozy beats is licensed under a Attribution 4.0 International License.

What is Reading Around the Margins?

In each episode of Reading Around the Margins, Naomi Washer talks with writers, readers, translators, publishers, and booksellers about how they interact with their books as objects; how their own marginalia consciously or unconsciously informs the books they come to write; and how the experience of reading brings a book into existence.