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“It’s a scrim,” I said.

“What do you mean, a scrim?”

“It’s like a scrim between me and anything I try to write. No matter what I’m working on. I’m not ever quite…touching it. There’s an obstacle.”

“A scrim.”

“Yes.”

She quoted from the Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped: “I scrim, you…

In the morning there was a funny e-mail from him. He’d looked up an article I’d written about Raymond Carver. He said he thought I was cool. I groaned, as if in pain. He knew how to get under my skin: looking me up, calling me cool. He was reading me as easily as I’d read him. Or maybe anybody and …

He gave me a disbelieving look. “You’ve never kissed anyone besides your husband in—how long? How many years have you been married?”

“Fifteen years. But we were together for a year before that and I never cheated on him.” Fact. “So sixteen years since I’ve kissed someone else.”

“Just…Wow.” We…

I confess his sinning was what interested me. He was so ridiculously, overtly on the make, it sort of took me aback and even impressed me. Here I was, being so good, trying to keep my shit together, trying to be better than the craptastic girl I’d been, and he was just running around being bad. I d…

Your daughter, solemn and big-eyed and possessed of a slyly wicked sense of humor, is twelve; just around the age you were when you started going off the rails. Does her twelve-ness fill you with anxiety? If so, you’re not quite admitting it to yourself. She grows more beautiful every day, even as …