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The year you turn forty, your pretending escalates for the first time in more than a decade of slippage, and you find yourself splintering off occasionally—usually when you are alone, but sometimes with your husband too—fragmenting into your latest novel’s protagonist, Mary. It is the mania, you te…

“Why can’t you ever support me?” he sometimes screams when he is angry. You moved east to live with him; dropped out of your PhD program to follow him to Europe and then raise your children; you do almost all the child-rearing, cooking, coordination with teachers, doctors, parents of other children…

“Why can’t you ever support me?” he sometimes screams when he is angry. You moved east to live with him; dropped out of your PhD program to follow him to Europe and then raise your children; you do almost all the child-rearing, cooking, coordination with teachers, doctors, parents of other children…

What you know now: There are ways to cheat without cheating. There are signs you are not living the right life for you, even if your life looks almost unfathomably pretty and privileged compared to where you come from or in other people’s eyes. There are ways the body screams truths when the voice …

When you pretend to be Karen, and write about her, she appears to be your polar opposite, based on someone else entirely. But the longer you write about her, the more you act as her no matter where you are, the more things begin to click into a certain kind of place: you feel yourself becoming some…