Each of them would give these men something—a story, a weekend away, their attention, their advice, their time, a sexual adventure, an actual adventure—then they’d be forced to pass him along to the next relationship. These men would emerge at some point, full of all the love and care and confidence that had been bestowed upon them over the years,

She was so desperate to love someone. It seemed like such a simple, singular thing to ask from this life.

We talked—openly and intensely—we laughed, we listened, we got drunk, we were spontaneous and filthy and domestic and peaceful.

A diagnosis of chronic mentionitis—that another human has bought a permanent property on a road that goes right through the middle of your soul—means that you are truly, irreversibly, horrifically in love.

“I’m fiscally conservative but socially liberal,” he said within the first two minutes of me asking him about his job. I wouldn’t be surprised if right-leaning thirty-somethings received a script in the post to prepare them for social situations. “I’m not sure if I believe that really exists,” I replied. “I know what you’re trying to say. But ‘I

I jerked my head away and looked out at the passing city. Lola squeezed my hand. I smiled at her and squeezed it back. I’d never felt more grateful for her friendship than since Max’s disappearance.

stomach. I had never known a feeling as unbearable—as sour, wrenching and unshakeably sad—as pity for a parent.

then haunted me with a sinister sense that there were important things I couldn’t remember and never would. Hundreds of black holes in who I was, as bottomless as a night spent drinking tequila.

Why was a sprinkling of the patriarchy so good when it came to dating? I resented it.