You weren’t even provided, like European girls, with a philosophy of cynicism and practicality. You expected not to desire any other men after marriage. And you expected your husband not to desire any other women. Then the desires came and you were thrown into a panic of self-hatred.

And what about those other longings which marriage stifled? Those longings to hit the open road from time to time, to discover whether you could still live alone inside your own head, to discover whether you could manage to survive in a cabin in the woods without going mad; to discover, in short, whether you were still whole after so many years of being half of something (like the back two legs of a horse outfit on the vaudeville stage).

But a woman is always presumed to be alone as a result of abandonment, not choice.

All what? The solitude of living inside her own soul? The certainty of being herself instead of half of something else?

Until women started writing books there was only one side of the story. Throughout all of history, books were written with sperm, not menstrual blood.

Until one day I woke up with relief in the quiet of our deserted apartment on Riverside Drive, and realized that I hadn’t been able to hear myself think in four years.

It was clear to me that thinking yourself superior was a sure sign of being inferior and that thinking yourself extraordinary was a sure sign of being ordinary.

Unless I could produce some proof of my own honesty in writing, what right had I to rage at his dishonesty?
The virtues of marriage were mostly negative virtues. Being unmarried in a man’s world was such a hassle that anything had to be better. Marriage was better. But not much.

Damned clever, I thought, how men had made life so intolerable for single women that most would gladly embrace even bad marriages instead.

Besides, the older you got, the clearer it became that men were basically terrified of women. Some secretly, some openly.

Any system was a straitjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly. I didn’t believe in systems. Everything human was imperfect and ultimately absurd. What did I believe in then? In humor. In laughing at systems, at people, at one’s self. In laughing even at one’s own need to laugh all the time.