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Like God, my father expressed himself through absence: it was easier, perhaps, to be grateful to someone who wasn’t there. He too seemed to obey the call of civilisation, to recognise it when it spoke. As rational beings we allied ourselves with him, against the paganism of my mother, her cycles of…

I thought I chose divorce as a subject because it was necessary, by which I meant there was still something unseen and unsaid about what was everywhere. I thought I chose divorce because of circumstances—my grandmother, my mother, my marriage. I had not chosen to inherit or live those stories of se…

When I did finally understand that there are two sides to every story, it required letting go of my previous understanding, which is that very basic version fit for kids and other precious idiots. It is not a maxim designed to teach you that no one is wholly right or wrong. It is only that no one e…

So I had been watched exactly the way I had wanted to be, like a character in a book—without my knowing but without embarrassing myself, by someone who cared what I thought as well as liked hearing what I had to say. I was too lucky, I thought, too lucky and so inevitably cursed. No one had ever wa…

Letter from an Unknown Woman is a story about love that can only exist beside an object of affection—love that takes shape around what’s possible, wanting more than what you have while lacking the bravery to live without it. The same month I saw the film for the first time, the critic Molly Haskell…