Don't Be a Stranger: A Novel

He was one of those people who found it easier to be kind to strangers and who let himself become progressively more irritable and unbending the closer he drew to a person.

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Look. Ansel pointed to an old man and woman holding hands as they passed in the headlights. That’s sweet, he said. Keeping it alive. Ivy winced. Immediately she wondered if the sentimentality was sincere or was he trying to impress her with sensitivity? It relieved her to dismiss him a little. He wasn’t as compelling. And if he wasn’t as compelling

Maira had wanted to introduce her to Ansel Fleming for some time. It was not a setup, Maira said, though frankly Ivy wouldn’t have minded a setup. Just someone to have coffee with, said Maira. Though Ivy didn’t need a new friend, already neglecting many of her friends, since the eclipse made by motherhood. Maira was an expansive person, always want

possibility open and take it day by day. They’d been

Every day is one more day than I thought I’d have, Ansel said. She felt thoroughly frivolous beside this person.

The less said about them the better, the unendurable evenings when solitude is not a warm fire or a yellow light on the page, but instead the shifting and hard-to-endure reminder you are alone. And harder still the evenings when there is someone you long to be with who is choosing, minute after minute, not to be with you. The less said the better a

She used to care that way about her work, but now…now life had more pressing concerns. Art and making offerings to the world had been taken over by life. She had a child. And her marriage had cracked apart. Ansel was still free and she envied he could still live in that intensity. Also, he had youth. She didn’t exactly envy that, but she saw its un