The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P

Something he’d learned with Elisa: it was not always unpleasant to deal with a hysterical woman. One feels so thoroughly righteous in comparison.

The story that followed dated back to childhood. Aurit’s mother, in this telling, had long nursed an idea of herself as very sensible and self-sacrificing and unfrivolous. She propped up her self-image by constantly invoking a comparison between herself and these other women, “who’ve never had a job, who never, ever cook—they hire caterers whenever more than two people come over—who shop all the time, who resent their daughters’ youth, who never read. As a kid, I bought the whole thing. It’s only over time that I started to wonder where all these vapid, lazy, superficial women are. I’ve never encountered anyone quite so bad, let alone an army of such women, except maybe on Dallas. Then I realized the only place they exist is in her head, where they play a very important role. She can justify almost anything she does because she truly, deep-down believes she’s more than entitled to have her ‘modest’ wishes granted, given the extreme and almost unparalleled excellence of her character, relative to other women.”

anything to avoid the truth: that over time he had come to see her as overprivileged and underinteresting.