Where does all this business about love come from? I’m kind of appalled at what comes out of me sometimes. Not so much “how dare this privileged asshole get away with this” as “why does my subconscious manufacture a character who is this desperate and awful?” I’m clearly more needy than I want to think. And all this transaction, as if love can be defined through economic terms. What am I working through? Well, I am working through a lifetime of reading happily-ever-after fairy tales, as well as marriage plots from nineteenth-century novels and every rom-com ever, is what. The kind of story we women have long been fed. And that for a long time I fell for. Here is this Russell Boyt, a figment of my imagination, a wealthy t**t who thinks he can blame his behaviour on the war or on madness, an
