Long Island Compromise

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Anya didn’t seem to understand that Beamer was willing to consider, like any other writer, that anything he did was a piece of shit, and that he had a threshold of zero for believing that every page should be ripped up or burned.

a composite panic attack whose brain lived in both the unspeakable past and the terrifying future and rarely in a particular current moment unless that moment contained more fear than the past and future put together and therefore deserved his complete attention.

There are few things more validating than to see someone who is like you and love them instead of hate them. That was a surprising thing about fatherhood that Nathan had not anticipated.

God had tortured him, and then God had saved him. God had cursed him, but then He had blessed him. They were even, Zelig decided. But it was best they never spoke again.

pushing the boulder up the mountain of your mother’s approval, only to find that it was your mother herself standing there at the top of the mountain, kicking it back down so that you had to start over and over and over—that

What is it about shame, that a teaspoon of it weighs so much more than a teaspoon of happiness or any other innocuous emotion? What is it about shame that it always feels like the truth?

“What’s her name?” “Noelle.” “Christ.” “No, Noelle. But close.”

There has never been, in the history of all human interaction, a way for a woman to explain effectively that she’s calm when a man has suggested she isn’t.

She spent six hours a day in therapy, and the rest of the time gardening and doing yoga and eating vegetarian meals and sometimes having to have group sex with the former insurance salesman. What could she say? Some people are born to be in a cult.