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We can never know what to want, because living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come . . . There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning,…

“And it seemed to them that they were within an inch of arriving at a decision, and that then a new, beautiful life would begin,” Chekhov concluded his seminal 1899 adultery story “The Lady with the Dog,” which Nabokov considered one of the greatest pieces ever written. “And they both realized that…

“Art cannot save anybody from anything,” wrote Gilbert Sorrentino in perhaps the first sentence from a book that I ever underlined, ever committed to memory, suspecting it would somehow both belie and also exemplify the many truths of me. Who was that girl, barely nineteen, who knew so little of bo…

I tried to keep myself away from him by using con words like ‘fidelity’ and ‘adultery,’ by telling myself that he would interfere with my work, that if I had him I’d be too happy to write. I tried to tell myself I was hurting [him], hurting myself, making a spectacle of myself. I was. But nothing h…

For the anthology Homewrecker, in which A had a story years before becoming an Adulteress herself, the editor, Daphne Gottlieb, wrote: “I am a few years older now and I know this: There are tastes of mouths I could not have lived without; there are times I’ve pretended it was just about the sex bec…