Recently watched the TV show Fleishman Is in Trouble and absolutely loved the writing. The story follows Toby Fleishman, a hepatologist in his early forties, navigating through his recent divorce. I didn’t expect myself to relate to the story since I’m in my twenties and have never even gotten close of being married. But Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s words about friendship, youth, time, and love really hit me. The second I wrapped up the Hulu show, I picked up the novel of the same name. Here are some of my favorite quotes from the book and my thoughts on them.
He only said her name at the end of sentences now.
Such an interesting observation. I never paid attention to this before but now thinking about it, using one’s name at the end of a sentence does feel more talking at the person, rather than having a conversation with the person.
Is a marriage that ends doomed from the start? Was the marriage over when the problems that would never get solved started or when they finally agreed that the problems couldn’t be solved or when other people finally learned about it?
How miserable is too miserable?
Good question…
It was that he couldn’t bear to be with anyone who didn’t yet truly understand consequences, how the world would have its way with you despite all your careful life planning. There was no way to learn that until you lived it. There was no way for any of us to learn that until we lived it.
Yes, he had big gaping wounds in his stomach and his spleen and he was leaking fluids at an untenable rate.
What a beautiful description of pain.
Sweet, affable Adam tried to make conversation with Rachel about the agency business, and she answered his questions like she was a Miss America pageant contestant, in full sentences, no room for follow — up, and kept rushing the courses.
I was now what was called a stay-at-home mother, a temporary occupation with no prospect of promotion that worked so hard to differentiate itself from job — working that it confined me to semantic house arrest, though certainly I was allowed to carpool and go to the store.
We had to not say those things so that we could tiptoe around all the feelings of inadequacy that we projected onto the stay-at-home mothers; in fact, you couldn’t even ask a woman you suspected of stay-at-homery what she did because there was no not-awkward way to ask.
And in our laughter we heard our youth, and it is not not a dangerous thing to be at the doorstep to middle age and at an impasse in your life and to suddenly be hearing sounds from your youth.
The exact feeling when I reminisce with childhood friends about the time when we had no real responsibilities or worries, just running in the rain.
But marriage is vast and mysterious and private. You could not scientifically compare two marriages for all of the variance of factors, most particularly what two specific people can tolerate.
When I became a professional writer, I tried to write like Archer: that way he had of releasing the valve of his anger slowly, tensely, beautifully so that his vortex of empathy, when sent through the prism of the anger, created a generalized disgust for the state of the world that seemed like the only conclusion a smart, thinking person could come to.
His misery was a fog that obscured slightly but not completely an entirely new land of opportunity. He did not realize that the land of opportunity was obscuring something even more potent.
Such beautiful words.
“Or maybe when we get married we have no ability to know how long forever could possibly be,” he said as he ate an egg-white omelet. “ Think about all the times something feels like it lasts forever. Forever seems like the duration of high school, which is four years but that’s only because we’ve only been alive for sixteen years and so four years of that is a huge chunk of our lifetime — a quarter of it. By the time we make this decision, to hook ourselves to a person for the rest of our lives, we’re what? Twenty-five? Thirty? We’re babies. We don’t even know what we’re dealing with. How could we fathom what it would be like to be on our best behavior for that long? Or know what is funny or charming to us now but intolerable in the future? How will we know what we need?
How would we know what we want when we are so young?
A book should convey your suffering; a book should speak to what is roiling within you.
He was getting good at knowing if this was a nonstarter — the way eyes lost brightness when they were reflecting disappointment; a politeness that was trying to clean up the disappointment; the same wall I put up that first night we met when I realized I couldn’t bear how short he was.
Was this how dating always was? Were there always this many stories? He didn’t remember the telling of stories, but maybe that was because back when he was young, nobody had stories yet; everything interesting was happening right then, not in the past.
There were so many layers of protection between him and the things that could hurt you in this world. But this was nothing he could have prevented. All those safeguards against the outside; this was coming from the inside.
You can feel your body for the first time in a long time, you can feel your skin, then suddenly you can also feel this ring around your finger and the weight of it is suddenly unbearable.
I thought of that time now, how I imagined wanting someone else’s life instead of doing the work of imagining my own.
His request had come not from anger but from the irritation of the hole it bored in you when you were lying to yourself.
Every time I lie to myself, a piece of me dies.
Her seething cauldron of rage and ice and heartlessness had been penetrated to its molten core layer by another.
His weakened state, he was susceptible and primed for the acute jealousy of the thing he saw before him.
He just felt foolish, the way quiet, smart people can make you feel dumb just for existing.
Toby loved her so much his heart was permanently on its knees.
One of my favorite description of love.
A walking child never crawled again.
At work, he was able to sit with his patients, knowing that this was not a stepping-stone for his life but life itself. Can you imagine what it’s like to have arrived where you want to be at such a young age? That was what she never understood: that ambition didn’t always run uphill. Sometimes, when you were happy, it jogged in place.
It is so rare to hear ambitious people say that they are satisfied with where they are at now. It feels like there’s always a higher-paying job, a more prestige company, a bigger job title. But sometimes, jogging in place is enough.
He wanted the optimism of a Whole Foods.
Finally, I understood why I’m so drawn to Whole Foods.
Toby didn’t hear anything after that because his blood froze and his inner ear began to bleed and his brain turned to putty and began to leak out his nose and his face melted off his skull and his life would never be the same and he knew right then he’d never understand another thing ever again.
They had sex that night, which was for the best, since he didn’t think his ego could handle an extended period of time in which he wondered if she thought of him as a friend or an actual romantic contender.
The struggle we all know too well.
Or because she was sensitive and took every bit of noninclusion as rejection.
He was overwhelmed by the simplicity of his emotions: gratitude for whatever moments had worked to make this moment happen for him; happiness, yes, just pure plain happiness.
From then on, they would never find themselves side by side, just either facing each other, or back to back.
I cried reading this sentence.
Every family was just like mine: chubby, domineering mother; clueless, servile dad; disgusted child; happy-go-lucky child who just wants to know if the slide is open; sometimes there was a third child if the chubby, domineering mother and the clueless, servile dad had started early enough.
It was not just about owning the city. It was about owning everything beneath and above and behind the city, too.
The best description of NYC finanace bros.
Right before you were pregnant, you were a person. The minute you became an incubator for another life, you got reduced to your parts. The insults were grand, but they were also subtle.
She wants them to look at her and her children like they’re not optional.
That was a favorite, as if people weren’t supposed to evolve and change and make requests of each other to bend and grow and expand.
She felt so bad for anyone who remained allegiant to a life they’d built just because they’d built it.
“Marriage always reminds me of that old saying about democracy,” I told him. “It’s the worst form of government, other than all the other forms of government.”
What these divorces were all about was a lack of forgiveness: She would not forgive him for not being more impressed by her achievements than inhibited by his own sensitivities; he would not forgive her for being a star that shone so brightly that he couldn’t see his own reflection in the mirror anymore. But also, divorce is about forgetfulness — a decision to stop remembering the moment before all the chaos — the moment they fell in love, the moment they knew they were more special together than apart. Marriages live in service to the memory of those moments. Their marriage would not forgive them for getting older, and they would not forgive their marriage for witnessing it.
That these men could be so delicate, that they could lack any inkling of self-examination when it came time to try to figure out why their women didn’t seem to be batshit enthusiastic over another night of bolstering and patting and fellating every insecurity out of them — this was the thing we’d find intolerable.
I got to live in a constant fog of regret and ambivalence.
And it was so nice to never have to explain who I was; it was so nice being a better-than-average manifestation of who they’d expected me to become.
God, I wanted to say, how are you supposed to live like this, knowing you used to answer to no one? How is this the arc we set for ourselves as a successful life?
The world diminished a woman from the moment she stopped being sexually available to it, and there was nothing to do but accept that and grow older.
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 would wonder, globally, how you could be so desperately unhappy when you were so essentially happy.
I would maybe learn to cook. Or take a cake decorating class. I would allow myself to become a little more neutered. I would stop fighting it all so much. What would be so wrong with finally mellowing out? What was I clinging to?
Do we keep flighting or just let it go and accept?
How could you be this far along in life and still so unsettled? How could you know so much and still be this baffled by it all? Was this what enlightenment felt like, an understanding that life is a cancer that metastasizes so slowly you only have a vague and intermittent sense of your dying ? That the dying is happening slowly enough that you get used to it?
Everywhere was hurt and everywhere was sex. Everywhere was love and everywhere was death. You could die of the loneliness, but you could die of the optimism, too; the optimism was just as crushing in the end.
He watched the people move around in his ghost body and he felt that he had room for them all, that they could all stay and he could accommodate them and be their host.
People under forty had optimism. They had optimism for the future; they didn’t accept that their future was going to resemble their present with alarming specificity. They had velocity. He couldn’t bear velocity just at that moment .
The other lesson? Go with what you want instead of what you are supposed to want.
Sometimes, I’ve been going with what I’m supposed to want for so long that I have no clue what I actually want. I tell myself stories and lies so that it feels like I actually want what I’m supposed to want.
“Be angry at me later,” it went. “I deserve it. But I could use a friend.”
I would definitely use this line in my life.
But I was afraid to stay angry, to leave it all hanging out there with no resolution. I was afraid of seeming too hateful, and so I settled on hating myself for caring too much.
His mother had always told him to look at his neighbors and ask himself if he wanted his children to turn out like them, because they would. Neighbors, she’d said, were a far more powerful force than parents. Neighbors were how you voted for a child’s future.
It’s crazy that the friends you’re fondest of from your youth sometimes resemble people you would cross the street to avoid as an adult.
It truly is crazy how far apart people can grow.
Marriage is for young people who don’t have a concept of time.
He thought about how hard growing up was. There was no way to avoid youth.
She knew that a man’s desire for a particular woman never truly disappeared if the man didn’t get to have the woman; it became a point of contention for the man’s ego in addition to the desire itself.
You have to live as if your life is already in progress.
It always feels like if I move to this city, then my life will start, if I get this job, then my life will start, if I lose 20lb, then my life will start. I’m always waiting for my life start rather than thinking that my life is already in progress.
No matter how many times you whispered your values to them, the thing that spoke louder was what you chose to do with your time and resources.
AGAIN I’LL SAY IT: Life is a process in which you collect people and prune them when they stop working for you. The only exception to that rule is the friends you make in college.
I love the ease and mutual understanding with my college friends. I know that no matter where I go and what I do, these people will always be there for me and support me.
She felt like she was paying a large investment forward if she could be somewhat socially available and also not rely on these women for pathetic favors that would make them dread her.
She didn’t yet realize that children’s love was like parents’ love: It was understanding and enduring and destined to be a little fucked up.
Having a child was signing up for enduring her entire childhood all over again.
She always thought divorce would come from hate, but her anger was never based in hate. It was based in disappointment that someone she loved misunderstood her so deeply.
That hurts so bad.
Time was going to march on anyway. You were not ever going to be young again. You were only at risk for not remembering that this was as good as it would get, in every single moment — that you are right now as young as you’ll ever be again. And now. And now. And now and now and now.
I was terrified of getting old. I was so anxious that I was wasting my youth. But now is as young as I will ever be. Knowing this is comforting. All I have to focus on is now and make the best of the current moment.
How could we not impugn marriage, then? It becomes so intertwined with your quality of life, as one of the only institutions operating constantly throughout every other moment of your existence, that the person you are married to doesn’t stand a chance. You hold hands while you’re walking down the street when you’re happy, you turn away icily to stare out the window as the car goes over the bridge when you’re not, and exactly none of this has anything to do with that person’s behavior. It has to do with how you feel about yourself, and the person closest to you gets mistaken for the circumstance and you think, Maybe if I excised this thing, I’d be me again. But you’re not you anymore. That hasn’t been you in a long time. It’s not his fault. It just happened. It was always going to just happen.
We will all get old, we are all getting old. And that’s ok, even though there’s still a tiny bit of resistance in me.
We fall in love and we decide to marry in this one incredible moment, and what if everything that happens after that is about trying to remember that moment? We watch ourselves and our spouses change, and the work is to constantly recall the reasons you did this in the first place. Why is that honorable, to live in service of a moment you have to constantly work so hard to remember?
Storytelling details
These are the moments when I can see the characters standing in front of me. Beautiful beautiful details.
Hannah snarled at him that he’d chosen the wrong outfit, that the leggings were for tomorrow, and so he held up her tiny red shorts and she swiped them out of his hands with the disgust of a person who was not committed to any consideration of scale when it came to emotional display.
Hannah looked down at his comforter, where she kept tracing the same indistinct design. Hannah finished her tracing loop and then stood up and went back to her room.
But Solly wasn’t having it. He was dragging Toby by the hand to the coffee maker and talking like he’d just done ten lines of cocaine.
They sat on opposite ends of the table, staring at each other while their guests grasped desperately for a neutral subject.
