All Fours: A Novel

It was like a ghost asking you to leave your husband for them—there was no kind way to say But you’re see-through.

On the weekends, I was expected to be present and engaged for many hours in a row,

Perhaps at their high school graduation the child would turn and say, “Phewf. I’m awake now, so I can speak about it—that was a trip, wasn’t it?! What an insane number of sandwiches you suddenly had to make, having rarely ever made one before! And look at my body! Let me actually take off all my clothes and show it to you so you can get a good look

My old feeling of stunned abandonment (or perhaps at this point it was a monument to abandonment, a tower) fit any loss, regardless of size.

It had to be annoying that I was answering every question with such uncertainty, but anything more confident would be inaccurate.

She was asking me to describe myself as if I was a horse I owned when actually I was more like a radio program, an ongoing narration that I could barely recall.

For me lying created just the right amount of problems and what you saw was just one of my four or five faces—each real, each with different needs. The only dangerous lie was one that asked me to compress myself down into a single convenient entity that one person could understand. I was a kaleidoscope, each glittering piece of glass changing as I

I wasn't fatter or thinner; I'd incarnated. Of course I had always been in here, but so gingerly, like a person never wanting to unpack even though they're obviously going to be staying awhile. Now my brain was spread out over my whole body, not just in my head.

“Remember the Simone de Beauvoir quote,” she said, “ ‘You can’t have everything you want but you can want everything you want.’ ”