Betancourt

By Manuel Betancourt Catapult: 240 pages, $27 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

It’s telling that Manuel Betancourt’s new book, “Hello Stranger: Musings on Modern Intimacies,” grounded in queer theory and abolition, takes its title from a line from the 2004 film “Closer,” about two messed-up straight couples.

The choice of “Closer,” “a bruising piece about the rotting roteness of long-term intimacy,” as Betancourt puts it, is an experience familiar to many.

Betancourt tells us that “Hello Stranger” begins in “a place where I’ve long purloined many of my most head-spinning obsessions: the movies.”

Betancourt wants to show that the way we relate to others often tells us “more crucially” how we relate “to ourselves.”