I met Martha Cooley in 1999 when, as a then-visiting writer in the Bennington MFA program, she gave a series of lectures, one of which covered Milan Kundera. Martha joined Bennington’s fiction faculty, teaching in the program for fifteen years; I was fortunate to study with her there. I was taken by Martha’s crisp, incisive view of the world, and she’s always been one of the voices that sound in my head when I’m working. Her latest novel, Buy Me Love, sings with quirky philosophical consternations surrounding an unexpected windfall as the protagonist, Ellen Portinari, navigates the channels of love, work, and money. And death. There’s always that.