All Fours: A Novel

Without a child I could dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it. A latent bias, internalized by both of us, suddenly leapt forth in parenthood. It was now obvious that Harris was openly rewarded for each thing he did while I was quietly shamed for the same things. There was no way to fight back

Harris and I are more formal, like two diplomats who aren’t sure if the other one has poisoned our drink. Forever thirsty but forever wanting the other one to take the first sip.

My friends are always obliging me with ephemera like this—screenshots of sexts, emails to their mothers—because I’m forever wanting to know what it feels like to be other people. What were we all doing? What the hell was going on here on Earth? Of course none of these artifacts really amounted to anything; it was like trying to grab smoke by its ha

Nobody knows what’s going on. We are thrown across our lives by winds that started blowing millions of years ago.

“The initial reaction isn’t the eternal reaction.” This was a thing from a Jungian self-help book that we often told each other when our partners fucking hated us.

Sorry to trouble you was how the note began, which is such a great opener. Please, trouble me! Trouble me! I’ve been waiting my whole life to be troubled by a note like this.

“Maybe we shouldn’t do that,” Jordi said. “Flatten ourselves like that. Erratic doesn’t have to mean crazy or irresponsible. Shouldn’t we be normalizing change?”

One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.

I was so good at knowing what I wanted and then choosing something else at the very last second.

And now in this lifetime we only felt right when we were saving a life together, fixing a flat tire by the side of the highway; we only became us against insurmountable odds. The rest of the time we respectfully forgave each other for utterly failing to be what we felt we deserved and then some of the time we were fucking furious about this and it