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The reader senses that the man’s promiscuity, his faithlessness, is to blame for his being repeatedly rejected. But this sense is overridden, and deliberately, by the anger the reader also feels toward the women he has called. He has driven so far. He’s been driving for days. Can one of these women…

But the dating problem. My mother, it should by now be clear, chooses men poorly, and so do I, and this is why I was not dating, do not date. What was happening to me then, at the time when I sat in my mother’s kitchen and turned my sweating glass of lemonade on a damp coaster, was not unlike the p…

[...] And in line, in front of me, there’s this couple. A boy and a girl. I close my eyes and I can still see the backs of their heads at the moment I become aware of them. Two normal heads with normal hair, totally unremarkable. Kids, both of them. Well, kids to me, in fact they were probably in t…

Let me try to explain this another way. As a child, my interests, if you could call them that, were the highly regimented activities at which I immediately excelled. The fact that I’m one dissertation away from a PhD in English, this is at least in part because I read easily and early and because g…

Perhaps the conversation continued beyond my initial refusal. I mean my refusal to speak, so it was more of a monologue, John saying, Don’t you love me, and Shouldn’t we give ourselves a chance to fix this, and We were going to have a baby, and me not trusting myself to open my mouth. How animals, …