Fleishman Is in Trouble

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

There was not a number at which anyone said, “I have a good life. I’d like to see if I can help someone else have a good life.”

These were criminals—yes, most of them were real, live criminals. Not always with jailable offenses, but certainly morally abhorrent ones: They had offshore accounts or they underpaid their assistants or they didn’t pay taxes on their housekeepers or they were NRA members.

But Toby wanted to be a doctor to cure illness, and he didn’t know any dermatologist who made his money on true illness and not plastics. “But you could go to Africa or Asia or wherever over the summer and fix cleft palates,” she said. “I don’t want to live a month of my life in apology for the thing I do the rest of the year,” he said. “I want to live a good life every day.”

A wife isn’t like an ultra-girlfriend or a permanent girlfriend. She’s an entirely new thing. She’s something you made together, with you as an ingredient. She couldn’t be the wife without you. So hating her or turning on her or talking to your friends about the troubles you have with her would be like hating your own finger. It’s like hating your own finger even after it becomes necrotic. You don’t separate yourself from it. You look at your wife and you’re not really looking at someone you hate. You’re looking at someone and seeing your own disabilities and your own disfigurement. You’re hating your creation. You’re hating yourself.

but being born rich, you never really know about burden, or survival, no matter how much you think you feel it. Becoming rich, however, you never forget what it’s like to know how close the bottom is, how easily you could be back there.

I was loved. I was loved by a man who had no questions about me. I saw that even if passivity was Adam’s first response, it was kindness that was his second.

Maybe it was the overwhelming unfairness of what happens to a woman’s status and body and position in the culture once she’s a mother. All those things can drive you crazy if you’re a smart person. If you are a smart woman, you cannot stand by and remain sane once you fully understand, as a smart person does, the constraints of this world on a woman. I couldn’t bear it. I saw it too clearly and so I retreated from it.

would wonder, globally, how you could be so desperately unhappy when you were so essentially happy.