In the following essay, Meyer describes the minimal nature of "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," and examines the story's themes of "the difficulty of sustaining relationships" and "the effect of alcoholism as a contributing factor to that difficulty."

Carver had stopped drinking by the time Furious Seasons was published, but he had not yet returned to writing. When he did, his stories were markedly different from what they had been. The obsessions were the same, but the stories were much darker, reflecting the hell of marital discord and alcoholism that Carver himself had experienced. Their style, moreover, was an exaggerated form of minimalism. Whereas he had once worried that a story like "Neighbors" might be "too thin, too elliptical and subtle," Carver was now writing stories that would make "Neighbors" appear positively lush. As one critic has pointed out, in these new texts...