I thought about that. I wrote mostly about men. I hadn’t interviewed a lot of women. Whenever I did, the stories were always about the struggle to be the kind of woman who got interviewed—the writers who were counted out, the politicians who were mistaken for secretaries, the actresses who were told they were too fat and tall and short and skinny and ugly and pretty. It was all the same story, which is not to say it wasn’t important. But it was boring. The first time I interviewed a man, I understood we were talking about something more like the soul.

The men hadn’t had any external troubles. They didn’t have a fear that they didn’t belong. They hadn’t had any obstacles. They were born knowing they belonged, and they were reassured at every turn just in case they’d forgotten. But they were still creative and still people, and so they reached for problems out of an artistic sense of yearning. Their problems weren’t real. They had no identity struggle, no illness, no money fears. Instead, they had found the true stuff of their souls—of all our souls—the wound lying beneath all the survivalism and circumstance.

[...] I’d send two or ten or forty pages to my agent, and he’d say the same thing, that none of my characters were likable. I thought of Archer. His characters weren’t likable. He wasn’t likable. I thought of how hard I worked in my stories to be likable to the reader. I remembered a creative writing class I took in college, where the professor, a cynical screenwriter who’d written exactly one movie that got made, told us that when our characters weren’t likable, you could fix it by giving them a clubfoot or a dog. I gave one of the gang members a clubfoot, and my agent wrote in the margin: “WTF?” He told me I had to write something closer to the truth. So I began writing this YA novel a few months ago, the one about my youth, the one that was going nowhere, and I sent him the first tet pages about four months ago but I never heard back. I read the pages again and I saw the problem. My voice only came alive when I was talking about someone else; my ability to see the truth and to extrapolate human emotion based on what I saw and was told didn’t extend to myself.

When he was fourteen, he told his mother that he was ashamed of being fat and short and so she took him with her to a Weight Watchers meeting, where he listened to a room full of sad women talk about how unlovable they were and how temporary they felt in their bodies.

“Your life is now,” said Sandy, the leader. She wore denim skirts and brightly colored shirts with matching tights and big, costumey earrings. “You have to live as if your life is already in progress.”

Young Toby didn’t understand what this was about. Of course life was now—at least it was for the grown-ups. He didn’t understand why they had emotional barriers to the diet beyond the major one, which was that food was comforting and delicious and good. It all made perfect sense to him now: Food is comforting and delicious, but it is not good, and one shouldn’t be seduced into thinking it might be.

Fine. He followed the plan, and he lost five pounds the first week. Then more, then more. The women would grumble at his weight loss: He was a boy and he was a teenager—his metabolism was ideal. His mother would drive him home and say, “See? They’re jealous because you’re successful.” She loved that. She loved him, more than she had before. He never went off the plan until he was twenty-four and stopped eating carbohydrates completely. He was never going to end up like one of those women.

The yoga studio was in the eighteenth-floor penthouse of a residential building, a perk to its residents and an à la carte offering to anyone else. The windows were big and high up enough so that on a clear day, you could see the park. The sun was going down. He loved the dusk—the blue twilight, especially in summer, when the streets crowded with people who had knowledge of winter, who had seen endless days where the streets were inhospitable. The sky was a glowing purple-blue. Had he ever really taken a moment to appreciate the dusk? He loved it. He loved everything right then. He looked out onto the world and was so excited about the number of dusks that lay ahead of him. He wanted to use every single one of them well. He wanted to spend each one of them with only people he loved. He wanted to run to the camp upstate right this instant and take his children outside their bunks and apologize for all the wasted twilights. He wanted to pick each child up and spin them around. He wanted to tell them that if they miss a twilight, not to worry, it will always come again. He wanted to show them that this was how he was naturally, not the mopey jerk they’d seen lately, not the person who stopped believing in potential and excitement and surprise. He would remember this moment and he would become himself again. Poor Toby in all those other block universes. Poor Toby who was still just figuring it out. This Toby knew. This Toby couldn’t believe his incredible fortune, to have this many twilights lying in front of him, and all the bad ones behind him.

[...] anyone who has ever been to just one session of couples therapy could tell you that beyond your point of view lies an abyss with a bubbling cauldron of fire, and that just beyond that abyss lies your spouse’s point of view. If he were to be a real scientist about this, would he be able to find empirical evidence that Rachel had a point in rejecting him? That Rachel was right to hate him this much? Yes, right then, for the first time, he could see it. He could make his way across the abyss, and just for a minute, he could see that he was the same vile, fat, needy piece of shit he always was.

[...] What had he been thinking, raising his children among these people? He’d forgotten something essential about life, which was to make sure his children understood his values. No matter how many times you whispered your values to them, the thing that spoke louder was what you chose to do with your time and resources. You could hate the Upper East Side. You could hate the five-million-dollar apartment. You could hate the private school, which cost nearly $40,000 per kid per year in elementary school, but the kids would never know it because you consented to it. You opted in. You didn’t tell them about your asterisks, how you were secretly and privately better than the world you participated in, despite all outward appearances. You thought you could be part of it just a little. You thought you could get the good out of it and leave the bad, but there’s so much work involved in that, too. You take your children to a concert and expect them to hear your whisper from the background that it’s not all for them. You can’t expect anything of them. [...]

[...] That was a time when he was still sure that if Rachel could just see her anger and her nastiness through a neutral screen, she could get help and they could move beyond it. But he was also already thinking that maybe this was a last-ditch effort before realizing that this was not something that could be fixed.

It was the same bullshit. She said: “I feel like I’m being punished for earning a living.” And “I feel like I have to tiptoe around my success, that he loves what the money brings and hates me for bringing it.” And “I talk to him plenty nicely. He screams and throws things when he’s angry and I do my best to stay neutral. I do it for the children. I wish he would, too.” He was made physically weak from her accusations and her lies. Were they lies? Or did she actually believe all of this? As much as Toby tried, it became clear that the advantage in couples therapy accrued to the person who could hold their shit together. He wanted to cry, he wanted to hold his fists up at her and make her hear him. As they went back and forth, Toby trying to refute every half sentence, even knowing that that was the wrong thing to do, he could feel himself losing the room. Dr. Joe took his glasses off and used the heel of the same hand to wipe his eye in what appeared to be poorly veiled exhaustion.

“She was really unhappy,” Amy said. “She had been unhappy for such a long time, but the kids, blah blah blah, you know how it is.”

“I do.”

“She was going to leave David.”

Toby shook his head. “What?”

“He cheats on her. He doesn’t give her access to the money. He gives her an allowance. Can you imagine? She gets to raise the kids and keep the house nice and entertain his asshole friends on poker night. She was a lawyer.”

Toby sat, stunned, and realizing that his entire problem in life was that he could still be stunned by information that revealed what seemed to be true most of the time, which was that things weren’t what they seemed.

Toby almost said, “But they seem fine,” and then remembered that he had never known Karen Cooper to be conscious. Instead he said, “Mr. Cooper seemed very devoted.”

“Of course he did. Have you ever been married?”

“I— Yes.” She waited. “I’m in the middle of a divorce.”

She laughed, incredulous. “Now she’s going to die. I can’t believe that now she’s going to fucking die. You know, anyone who sees this will think it’s a great tragedy that this happened to such a young woman. But they won’t realize that the actual tragedy is that she was just about to get away from him.”

For a few minutes, lying in his bed, still in the vapor of his dream, he’d forgotten what had happened to them. For a few minutes, he’d forgotten that they were a mess. He didn’t like remembering the bad moments, but he didn’t like remembering those moments, either. He liked to find the point in every single memory, even the good ones, where she was telling him who she really was. If he could do that, this could never happen to him again. He whacked off quickly, too quickly, then got out of bed and spent the next hour hating himself for letting his guard down so egregiously as to dream of her.

“Have you heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? You have an imperative to seek out food and shelter. But once you know food is widespread and available, once you really know it, you can wonder what you like to eat and how much you want to eat. Once you have access to shelter, you can begin to ask yourself where you want to live and how you want to decorate it. What if one of the imperatives we never understood was about love and therefore marriage? Meaning, what if we search to make sure we are lovable and worthy of someone who commits to us absolutely and exclusively, and the only way we can truly confirm we are worth these things is if someone wants to marry us; someone says, ‘Yes, you are the one I will love exclusively. You are worthy of this.’ And then, only when you’re actually married, once this need is fulfilled, you can for the first time wonder if you even wanted to be married or not. The only problem with that is that by the time you realize you have access to love, you’re already married, and it is an awful lot of cruelty and paperwork to undo that just because you didn’t know you wouldn’t want it once you had it.”