You Think It, I'll Say It

Isn’t it weird how I was tormented as a teenager by a person who grew up into a banker who talks incessantly about his Fitbit?”

Almost all of Lucy’s vast social-media empire, which, of course, is an extension of her lifestyle-brand empire (whatever the fuck a lifestyle brand is), drives Kirsten crazy

He was the quarterback—did I mention that?”
“Of course he was,” Jason said.

“But you’re happy?” By which, of course, I mean, Is this the point where we both start pretending you haven’t spent the last few years confiding your adulterous fantasies?

Presumably, the campus of Dartmouth in the early nineties—like college campuses in every decade, like towns and cities everywhere—was home to many other virgins, average-looking girls and boys and also grown-ups afraid that they were too ugly to be loved, convinced that this private shame was theirs alone.

Maybe for them that was passion? Simultaneously, she is furious at him—she feels the standard humiliation and betrayal—and she also feels an unexpected sympathy, which she has been careful not to express to him or to her friends. Their deliberately childless life, their cat, Converse (named not for the shoe but for the political scientist), their free-range beef and nights and weekends of reading and grading and high-quality television series—it was fine and a little horrible. She gets it.