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I feel a swell of something I can’t put words to when he comes in to help me make dinner, and awkwardly peels the potatoes with his long fingers, which are more accustomed to turning pages, or holding a pen, or a cigarette. Those fingers, I remember how I fell in love with them that summer, licking…

She recently took it into her head that she wanted to become a psychoanalyst. The idea just came to her one morning, she said, looking out the window at Belleville, the people walking down the street, so many different kinds of people in this small neighborhood in Paris. It was as if Belleville, or…

She had a book about him lying around, and I picked it up out of curiosity, wanting to know more about the master of unstructured structure. Quite the eccentric. Lived in a one-room apartment in the southern suburbs of Paris for most of his life. Wore the same grey flannel suit every day. Saved his…

Since I’ve been married, I find all women beautiful.

Their languid air, their purposeful movements, the turn of a bare arm as it reaches palm-up, the curve of a bare neck as the head tilts back and the blood rushes through. Any arm. Any neck. Even the old women. Oh the old ones! With the laugh l…

Something Clem said has stuck with me for weeks now and I don’t know what to do with it; something like whether psychoanalysis ought to be socially transformative to justify its existence. I’d always assumed it was its own justification, that its capacity for change was baked in. Isn’t there necess…