But there was also something mephitic about the thing.

We’d sit at Mexican restaurants with our machine-dispensed margaritas and fulminate about the representation of women in the pages

I couldn’t have imagined that anyone had ever mentioned any sort of resemblance to the sex, lies, and videotape Spader, a louche vagrant who videotapes women talking about their sex lives, to David as praise.

In high dudgeon, I stalked up toward the exit. Back to my point about how anger is a process and a choice.

during a particular recent phone conversation with him I had experienced an existential “I am a fraud” moment—a line he repurposed (to my biliousness) in the first sentence of his celebrated tour de force “Good Old Neon.”

I spent my afternoons with a babysitter, a small, stolid gray-haired lady named Mrs. Albrecht