When you pretend to be Karen, and write about her, she appears to be your polar opposite, based on someone else entirely. But the longer you write about her, the more you act as her no matter where you are, the more things begin to click into a certain kind of place: you feel yourself becoming someone else. Not Angie, of course, but a facsimile of Angie by another name, the symbiotic Angie of your desires. Your shy insecurity morphs into a sarcastic bravado; you become class president; you lose thirty-two pounds even though your mother has never been able to manage it. You stop crying.

It seems important to stipulate this as a key element of your pretenses: for more than a decade you stop crying, even when alone.