Lesbian Love Between War and Obsession

“I planned to abduct her. I intended to lock her away in a separate house, hide her from everyone, admire her privately and in secret, and be sure that she would belong to no one else again. I didn’t even care whether she felt the same about me.” Here, romance tilts into possession, longing into violent fantasy: the narrator wants to claim the beloved as her own — even if the feeling isn’t returned. Love here isn’t salvation but an obsession with a dangerous claim of ownership.

“Butter Me Up! Lull me to sleep!” (Amazon affiliate link) is the first prose work by Ukrainian poet Liliia Zhernov, who has worked as an international lawyer. She lives in Zurich and works as a production assistant and PR manager for a theater collective. In her book, two wars overlay one another: the war in Ukraine; and the war inside the unnamed narrator. Bombs, death, and the devastation of homeland stand beside a private emotional upheaval: the private is not shielded from the political, but haunted by it.

Love is not romantically idealized but inscribed in the body as pain. The heart, bones, skin and veins become repositories of memory: “Since you are gone, I hardly see my heart anymore / My bones and veins / Transform into sharp needles.” The body itself refuses to forget. The language of the book moves between prose, letter, poem, and memory. Its fragmentation is more than an aesthetic choice; it mirrors the narrator’s state. A coherent story of this love is no longer possible; what remains are images, phrases, scents, and bodily traces.

Love Is Already Destroyed

The real tragedy is that the love is already destroyed. The text hardly allows for any carefree, ardent phase of being together; even the loveliest memories already bear the mark of their eventual loss. So this reads less as a love story than as a retrospective mourning work — the reconstruction of something that perhaps never had the chance to exist untroubled: “I will never permit you to be mine…” becomes the book’s emblematic line, its meaning oscillating between desire, self-imposed prohibition, longing, and loss. From the first page, love appears as something the narrator cannot truly permit herself. Desire carries its own prohibition within it.

For that reason, personally, I found it difficult to connect emotionally with a lesbian love. The relationship is so suffused with loss, pain, dependence, prohibition, and obsession that it doesn’t strike me as something easy, mutual, joyful, or natural. What remains is a love told primarily as loss.

Writing as Memory and Anesthesia

The title — in German the imperative to “lull” — signals the function of writing. The text keeps the beloved artificially alive — and at the same time numbs the narrator. Writing is memory and narcotic; a plea for love and self-soothing. The narrator doesn’t necessarily want to be healed, but to continue dreaming with the beloved in memory. This becomes clearest in the metaphor of the “love tonic”: even where there ought to be silence, pain, and calls for rescue, she keeps writing. Writing becomes a drug, a form of self-harm, and at the same time the last recourse to reach the beloved at all.

The beloved herself scarcely becomes a full figure. She appears as something hard to grasp, built from fragments: letters, scraps of memory, scents, bodies, rooms, and rhythms. “She” remains consistently “she” — while the narrator describes herself as “Pain.” In this linguistic asymmetry lies the entire obsession: one person becomes the unattainable object, the other the wound in herself. Even the later heterosexual relationship with children does not erase this love. Living with a man reads as a parallel existence, “after many years of our lives, spent together and yet apart.”

You Don’t Read This Love Story Innocently

Time and again, the narrator breaks the fourth wall. She speaks directly to readers, dirties them, makes them accomplices, and at the same time accuses them of voyeuristic pleasure in reading her intimate history. You don’t read this love story innocently: the book pulls its readers into the obsession and makes them part of its desire. This creates a self-referential loop: the narrator herself writes poems about her beloved, and the question of who is telling whom becomes part of the text. “Just say: ‘She — that’s me.'” The lines between author, narrator, and beloved figure become intentionally porous. The beloved is at once a character, a memory, literary material, and a projection surface.

Formally, “Butter Me Up! Lull me to sleep!” remains a notably slender bilingual edition: roughly 80 pages per language, German-Russian. The translator, Daniel Henseler, is prominently credited on the cover, a welcome visibility for translation work. At 24 euros for such a slim volume, questions about the material value of the edition arise — especially given the book’s modest physical footprint.