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After this, she lies in bed weeping with her lips pressed together, and finds herself submerged in a fantasy of her and Neil years in the future, spooning in bed in the dark, with her telling him in a low dignified voice about how miserable he’d made her when he rejected her, how alone she thought …

On one of these nights, attempting to break these self-soothing habits, which make her hate herself in an intimately special way, she adapts an exercise from her old therapist, who once had her write a list of things she liked about herself; instead she makes a list of everything she dislikes about…

The main outcome of all this is to make Alison wonder if she should start a podcast, maybe one about owning a raven, though she has nothing to say besides Don’t. [...]

No surprise, then, that she finds solace in the simplicity of hate—how comforting it feels to hate Neil, how succulent the fantasy that the world’s full complement of injustice could be concentrated in one stupid guy, and that to hate him silently, invent ways to undermine him, conscript others int…

She has no intention of going home with this guy, until after three whiskey-gingers she starts talking about how bloated she’ll be tomorrow, which somehow doglegs the conversation toward her eating disorder, then her situation with Neil. The Feminist’s attention activates like some motion-sensing l…