Bruce was giving me a choice. He was refusing to let me drift along, passively being married, passively being discontented. I would have to choose. It wasn’t enough just to be wanted, I would have to want as well, if I was to stay married.

It didn’t occur to me that he might be chafing a little too.

Everyone at Oberlin was the weirdest person from his or her senior class in high school. Now picture all these weirdos in a cornfield, with no diversions except our own weirdness and our sordid knowledge we hadn’t gotten into Brown.

I wanted something—I wasn’t sure what—to happen to me. In this way I was like so many girls and women in literature: Emma Bovary, duh, but also Chekhov’s three sisters, and the bored cousins in Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love, and Kitty and Lydia Bennet, who were a two-girl machine for making things happen to them. But getting someone to do somethi

The guitarist and I had a funny rapport, the kind of rapport that turns into you-know-what. The L-word.

Each night, after the children were in bed, I drank a water glass full of bourbon, and this too pleased me. These were my acts of desperation: lying in bed, drinking lonely bourbon, picking at my seedy fruit.

Secret 3 A note from a college friend, via Facebook: “Loved the piece. Struck a chord. These days it seems like I want to Do It all the time and [husband’s name redacted] never wants to. I don’t know what to do. Am seriously thinking about having an affair but HOW???? How do you even do that?”

The Basher was in his mid-thirties. Being with an older man made me feel my youth—which, let’s face it, was so often a burden—as a kind of material good. When I was with other people my own age, my youth was invisible. We were all the same; youth is a relative notion. But set against his oldness, my youth itself became a fetish or a beauty mark.

But I do know that I was, as the years went on, going to grow very, very weary of this sexual self, the girl who saw every question as a sex question because that was the only answer she thought she had.