In May, The Unread Book Club turns to Facing Codependence, a work that takes seriously a question that is often misnamed or oversimplified: what does it mean to lose oneself in relationship, and how does that loss take shape?

This is not a book about “fixing” relationships in a surface-level sense. It is a book about patterns, about how our earliest experiences of care, neglect, intimacy, and boundary become internalized, and then quietly repeated. It names codependence not as a flaw or diagnosis to be worn, but as a learned way of relating, one that once made sense, and may no longer.

The book resists the idea that our ways of loving are fully conscious or freely chosen. Instead, it asks what it means to recognize the structures we’ve inherited: where we overextend, where we collapse, where we confuse care with control, or selfhood with responsibility for others.

For that reason, it opens a more difficult and more honest conversation. Not just about relationships “out there,” but about the subtle agreements we carry within them, the ways we organize ourselves around others, and what it might mean to relate without abandoning oneself in the process.

We will pay particular attention to the idea of boundaries as something more fundamental: a sense of where one ends and another begins, and how that sense is formed, distorted, or lost.

No reading required. You do not need to have finished the book to attend. Reading a chapter, a single passage, or simply arriving with curiosity is enough.

Event Details:

📅 Date: Wednesday, May 27th
📍 Location: Zoom
⏰ Time: 8:00 PM EST / 7 PM CST / 6 PM MST / 5 PM PST

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