The Pain of Pleasure, a novel

Loyd’s erotic and atmospheric new novel traces the storms inside us, between us, and all around us.

Set in a headache clinic in the basement of an abandoned church in Brooklyn during some unprecedented extremes of weather, it explores the intimate terrain of human pain and pleasure, how our bodies can collude with us and against us, mislead us all the way to addiction and emotional and sexual obsession. 

The novel is told from a few vantages: those of the Doctor, a man outrunning some ghosts but especially his own desires; Sarah, a patient of the Doctor's who's disappeared but left him a written account of her days before she vanished; and Ruth, the nurse hired by the clinic's domineering patron, Mrs. Adele Watson, to spy on the Doctor.

Ruth, new to the city, is in exile from everything and everyone she once loved. She soon finds she has much in common with Mrs. Watson whose extreme willfulness is her best answer to all she's lost and with the missing patient Sarah whose journal Ruth reads. The journal chronicles an affair Sarah had with a married man, which she believed would help solve not only her chronic pain but the loneliness it caused her.

But nothing goes to plan, for Sarah or anyone else in the novel.

How can it, especially now when the end of the world keeps bearing down in one form or another? To what do we hold on to when the storms come? Here, in a story that is at once interior and expansive, timely and transcendent, the answer for its cast of characters is to one another, through all their faults and blind-spots, pains and pleasures. They hold on to their longing and love, too, however impossible, to real hope that’s best expressed when shared, in an old church or in other spaces (real or imagined) that bridge inside and out.

Praise for The Pain of Pleasure

“Amy Grace Loyd's writing is intelligent and graceful, lighting up the mind and the body, reaching my brain and heart and spirit. A surprising and bold fusion of ideas and sensory detail that stimulates and illuminates."
—Charles Yu, author of National Book Award-winning Interior Chinatown

“With her brilliant new novel The Pain of Pleasure, Amy Grace Loyd has invented an entirely new genre perfectly appropriate to this climatically-insane age that blends science with high opera, realism with the surreality of altered states, resulting in a narrative that for all of its uncanniness, still roils with the traditional novelistic pleasures of desperate love. It hurts so good to read it."
—Will Blythe, author of To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever and former literary editor at Esquire

”The Pain of Pleasure is a vivid, beautifully-written novel about the line between suffering and salvation. A smart, sensual writer, Amy Grace Loyd has created an unforgettable world in this old Brooklyn church, transformed into a clinic for headache sufferers and peopled with marvelous characters weathering the torment of their own desires."
—Jess Walter, author of the national bestseller The Cold Millions and #1 New York Times bestseller Beautiful Ruins

“Amy Grace Loyd has traveled deeply down into the nexus of pain and pleasure to reveal an endlessly generative pulsing heart. Akin to the style and intimate designs of Marguerite Duras with the epic smarts and atmospherics of Richard Powers, her new novel reminds me that to fully embrace life means to let go of easy binaries and enter embodiment without apology. Take the leap. This book is thrilling.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of the national bestseller The Book of Joan, the story collection Verge, and Thrust

"Loyd’s vibrant latest involves alternative medicine and a missing person’s case. In an experimental neurology clinic in the basement of a deconsecrated church in Brooklyn, Dr. Louis Berger treats his patients’ migraines with marijuana and other, less orthodox, methods. Loyd delves into each player’s side of the story [and] crafts memorable characters... This is worth a look.”
—Publishers Weekly

“In her second novel, Loyd explores how suffering and our efforts to escape it define us… [She] is a sensuous writer who lingers over details…no 21st-century reader needs an explanation for aberrant, alarming weather, and Loyd’s choice to make this part of the background of her fictional world creates a wonderfully eerie undertone.”
—Kirkus Reviews