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Sometimes what I wanted from my lawyer was impossible—her assurance that I was justified in ending my marriage. She had given me no sign she felt this way, or that it was her job to feel any particular way about my marriage at all.

Still, sometimes I wanted to believe that in taking this case, s…

During a conversation two years earlier, when I was already unhappy enough to consider leaving, I told Harriet I was worried about the harm I would cause if I left. She told me I was right to worry. I would cause harm. She also told me no one moves through this world without causing harm. I’d wante…

Looking at those lovers, gleaming and entangled, I remembered the first time C and I went to dinner, at an Italian restaurant tucked inside a brownstone. As C walked me to the subway afterwards, it started raining. Dark spots speckled the sidewalk.

C offered me his jacket. I refused, saying it w…

In class, I spoke to my students about breaking open the anecdotal stories we all tell ourselves and others about our own lives. You have to dislodge the cocktail-party version of the story, I said, in order to get at the more complicated version lurking beneath the anecdote: the anger under the no…

If writing was my great love—and I was starting to believe it was, perhaps more than any man would ever be—I often wondered if it was ultimately a form of self-love, a kind of poison. Maybe submitting myself to another’s needs—becoming a wife, and then a mother—was precisely the antivenom I needed.