Lauren Berlant's final book explores the contradictions of wanting connection with other people while finding them unbearable. Berlant, who taught at the University of Chicago until their death in 2021, developed influential theories of affect, intimacy, and 'cruel optimism'--attachment to things that harm us. This work examines what happens when we approach others knowing they will disturb us, drawing on psychoanalysis, queer theory, and affect studies. Berlant argues that inconvenience--the disruption others cause to our fantasies of self-sufficiency--is not a problem to be solved but a fundamental condition of social existence. The book analyzes films, literary texts, and everyday encounters to show how we negotiate the gap between wanting intimacy and fearing its costs. Berlant writes in a demanding theoretical idiom that rewards patient attention, producing sentences that must be read twice to yield their meanings. They trace the politics of inconvenience: how some people are made convenient to others, how care work distributes inconvenience unequally, how dreams of frictionless connection disguise the labor required to sustain relationships. The book extends Berlant's career-long project of understanding how we attach to the world despite knowing it will disappoint us, offering neither consolation nor cure but clearer sight.