Sublime

“Less helpless elderly lady and more bitter old hag territory,” Jack says fondly.

if I weren’t so concerned about, for example, meeting my daily Fitbit goal, I’d realize there’s a six-hundred-year-old milkmaid living in our silverware drawer.

She had the impulse to ask her professor “whether women were somehow always already dead,

perfunctory

much like my sense of self, held together by a golden ratio of chance and protracted effort.

Men Explain Things to Me—and

you’re the kind of person who thinks that putting in expensive hard work for a high-functioning, maximally attractive consumer existence is about as good a way to pass your time on earth as there

Instead, Naomi turned her question into an invitation: “Tell me about the last time you went to the store after 11:00 p.m.” A quiet, unassuming woman who had said little up to that point raised her hand. “I had just smoked a joint and was looking for a ménage à trois—me, Ben, and Jerry,” she said. Insights like that are why people hire Naomi.

And their scattering has an air of deliberate ritual, ancient and necessary.