Thirst for Salt
“There must be people out there who are not drawn to the shadow of what could have been, who feel no pull toward the other lives they could be living, but I certainly have never been one of them.”
Thirst for Salt follows a woman in her thirties who looks back on a love affair that marked her twenties and tells us her story. At twenty-four, she leaves the edges of her old life behind and moves to a quiet beach town, where she is in an intense relationship with Jude, a man nearly twice her age. Their connection is tender, physical, and quietly consuming, shaped as much by what’s said as by what’s left unsaid.
The storyline moves between past and present: the remembered summers by the sea and the woman she has since become, how her thoughts shaped her and shape her now. As she settled into Jude’s world, she is also learning how to exist as an adult woman: that means how to navigate her relationship with her mother, the presence of her housemate and friend Bonnie (and Petra), and Jude’s behaviour but history too.
What gives the story its depth isn’t a dramatic breakup or grand declaration, but the way small choices and silences accumulate. Love isn’t portrayed as a neat resolution or a wound: it’s something that shapes people unevenly, often without intention. The characters try, fail, and reach for each other in ways that feel achingly human, and that is what made me love it deeply.
At its core, it’s a novel about how intimacy leaves a trace, how a relationship can end, yet still live on in memory, in desire, and in the person one becomes afterward. It is for the nostalgic girlies like me, who always ask themselves questions, delve in memories and in the past.
“You’re hung up on the past, my mother said to me earlier tonight.
Why carry all that around with you?”
TW: abortion
Themes:
love and its afterglow • memory • desire • solitude • coming of age • womanhood • imperfection in relationships • the beach
Did I like it?
Yes. It felt like someone sitting across from me and quietly telling me their story : unembellished, a bit raw. I enjoyed this book because it doesn’t simplify relationships; it lets them be messy, layered, and tender in all the wrong ways. That makes it relatable. The book shows how the past doesn’t just live in our minds; it settles in our skin, our reactions, our anxieties. Our bodies remember old loves, old fears, old tensions. It stores touch, desire, stress, and tenderness long after the relationship has ended. Thirst for Salt understands how desire, loss, and stress leave traces that don’t fade just because time has passed. It’s not a coincidence that the book starts in the present with the narrator looking at a photograph and delves into her past: memories ambush you, uninvited but irresistible.
It captures the anxiety of falling in love for the first time (that mix of desire, uncertainty, and fear of losing what you don’t fully understand yet). Also, so you know but the 18-year difference isn’t scandalized but used to explore experience, imbalance, longing, and the desire for safety or identity. The narrator herself tells us how she is looking for stability, guidance. “I needed guidance, I told him, structure” and somehow it is powerful how she’s drawn not just to Jude as a person, but to the stability he represents. She needed that relationship at that exact time.
“So sure, in these moments, that if he ever tried to leave me, I wouldn’t let him. Undignified, the scene I’d make. Not too proud to beg.”
It also speaks to the experience of being the eldest daughter in a complicated household, trying to hold things together even when your parents are doing their best but still leave cracks. There’s a particular kind of quiet responsibility that comes with that role : you grow up faster than you should, absorbing the emotional temperature of the house, translating chaos into something survivable. The narrator isn’t at all dramatizing her childhood, but you feel the weight of it in the way she moves through love: cautiously, hungrily, always half-attentive to the possibility of absence.
Her mother isn’t villainized, just imperfect in a way that leaves traces. What’s interesting is how the narrator doesn’t reject that model outright. Instead, she mirrors it, negotiates with it, tries to fix it in her own life without fully realizing she’s reenacting old patterns. That’s something many daughters will recognize: the inheritance of emotional labor, the instinct to manage rather than demand, the belief that love is something you hold together with both hands so it doesn’t fall apart.
The novel doesn’t shout about this, but it’s there: in the longing for safety, in the way desire gets tangled with caretaking, in the ache of wanting a love that doesn’t require vigilance. And maybe that’s why her attachment to Jude feels so believable: it’s not just passion, it’s refuge.
“Although maybe this, too, was the natural way of things. From child to mother to child again. For the first time, I felt a need to establish a life outside her purview, a life that was mine alone”
“I think now that this is something that happens in small families—roles get confused, relationships do double duty. So a daughter might play the part of an overprotective parent, or a mother might rely on the daughter like a partner. Mother as runaway child, daughter as mother, daughter as husband”
And then there’s the brutality of growing up when you feel everything intensely, when you’re earnest and emotional and the world doesn’t soften itself to meet you. She feels things fully, without the protective layer of distance. That kind of sensitivity makes love feel larger than life, but it also makes disappointment land harder, because nothing is ever just casual or half-felt
The novel captures that ache of entering adulthood with no emotional calluses yet, and wanting so badly to mean something to someone, to be chosen, to be unforgettable. There’s a tenderness in the way she remembers her younger self: not naïve, exactly, but exposed. And the world, of course, doesn’t adjust to your softness : it stays indifferent. The pain of that time in her life isn’t exaggerated, but it’s not minimized either. It just exists, the way early love always does: sharp, formative, unforgettable.
“People acted selfishly, betrayed and abandoned one another—that was common. I’d never done anything truly bad or transgressive, but I worried this was not because of a strong moral foundation or sense of virtue. I was no better than anyone else, I feared. It was not that I lacked those kinds of desires, but I was afraid that if I acted on them, they would undo me. In a world without boundaries, I could lose myself”
Quotes I really liked:
« I was looking out at the horizon. At a certain time down south, sea and sky seem to merge, to kiss. Mirroring each other, like lovers do. Above and below, one expanse of silver blue. I’d never known that kind of love—where all boundaries disappeared. »
« I was surprised by the realization that even if he was not reliable in the way that I’d imagined, I did not desire him any less. I could see for the first time how it might feel good to make mistakes with someone, sway together, embrace the drift. And maybe I sensed it, wanted it then. The ways we might either break each other in or burn each other up. »
« I looked around for my mother, but she had remained on the other side of the cliff’s rise, where I could no longer see her. Brief swell of panic—a childhood feeling—at my mother moving out of sight. As though, if I took my eyes off her, she would disappear. »
« But then I remembered all those years between us, a gap wide enough to fall into. Eighteen years—a whole adolescence, a coming of age.
It’s really true for me, I insisted. I wish you could fall in love for the first time again. Or that you’d never loved anybody else before me and neither had I.
He laughed and said, Oh, trust me. I was a pretty shitty boyfriend. And anyway, every time is like the first time. That’s the beauty of love. Love erases. »
« It would also be true to say that I never learned how to make a clean break. I have no memory of the words my parents used to explain their separation to me—if they tried to explain it at all. Maybe, like me, they stood mute in the face of loss, were rendered inarticulate by it. Whenever in my life it has come time to have those conversations with someone, I have felt that I lacked the right language. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. »
« This is only one thing that will happen to you, she said to me in the car, as we passed by the bridal shops and motorcycle dealerships that lined the old gritty freeway that would lead us away from the city, back to her house. One thing, out of so many things. »
« What continues to surprise me, and what I still don’t understand, is not the reasons that love ends but the way that it endures. »
« There’s no shame in coming home—how many times has my mother said that to me over the years? I agreed with her, but after I left Sailors Beach, it was not clear where that was, if it could be anywhere at all. I thought that if no place could ever house everyone I loved, whatever home I hoped to make could only be shaped by absence. It didn’t occur to me that perhaps a home is never a fixed or stable thing but something that can be carried with you and remade. »
Described by the author herself:
“When I’m asked to describe what Thirst for Salt is about, I often say simply that it’s a love story because I believe that love stories, like love songs, can act as vessels for our deeper existential longings. They speak to us about desire, loneliness, memory, grief—about what it means to be alive and wanting. So, the songs on this playlist are love songs. For me, they evoke the emotional weather of the novel the same way a song can recall a long-ago love in an instant, and make you feel it all over again.”
“Thirst for Salt is also a story of coming into womanhood, and at twenty-four, my narrator finds herself looking for models for what kind of woman to be in her relationships with her mother, her housemate Bonnie, and Jude’s friend Maeve. Jude is also bound up with his particular idea of what it means to be a good man. They don’t always get it right, but it was important to me that none of the characters be simply good or bad. They try to love each other but are often misguided and make mistakes—to me, the ways that people hurt each other even when their intentions are good is much more poignant, and human. This song recognizes that there are all sorts of ways that love can make it difficult for us to be the people we want to be. I think that’s why it’s almost too heartbreaking to listen to.”
Madelaine Lucas’s Playlist for Her Novel “Thirst For Salt” – Largehearted Boy. (2023, 7 mars) https://largeheartedboy.com/2023/03/07/madelaine-lucass-playlist-for-her-novel-thirst-for-salt/
