My only important relationship in those years was with a much older married man. As a result of this situation, I learned that each unreal relationship is its own Prospero’s island and that dreaming and unreality keep you on your island. I learned, too, that the false dream is better enacted than actually lived.

But there were many real-world consequences for me, too: I became a rather weird, fatalistic individual about relationships and had, for a time, the idea that they needed to be conducted under a cloak of secrecy. I became used to thinking of myself as a vaguely illegitimate presence in the life of someone important to me, and I became accustomed to providing protection to brilliant, narcissistic, charismatic, fiercely ambitious men—men who never quite thought about extending the same protection to me, no, not quite.