Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

What if you knew that most of her life would be happy, but the last five years would be extremely unhappy? I didn’t get why the extremely unhappy person wasn’t allowed to kill herself before she messed up her average.

And yet, from an early age, I had seen women I was related to, like my aunts and my mother, prostrated by suffering because of men.

Part of the way of the world was that women had a tendency to go crazy. Men could bring out this tendency. But to blame the men was to take sides, to lose logic, to enter the craziness of the women—because the very content of the women’s craziness was, in large part, the blameworthiness of the men.

Previously, I had believed that the sadness came first, and tears were a result, but the reality was clearly more complicated, because once the tears didn’t come, the sadness somehow bottomed out, became shallower. What if the way Zoloft worked was just by dehydrating you?

Wasn’t that what I had earned, by always being different in America: the right to be the same, here?