Taffy Brodesser-Akner

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST * "A feminist jeremiad nested inside a brilliant comic novel--a book that makes you laugh so hard you don't notice till later that your eyebrows have been singed off."--Ron Charles, The Washington Post FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE'S JOHN LEONARD PRIZE FOR BEST FIRST BOOK * NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY AND THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review * Time * The Washington Post * Vanity Fair * Vogue * NPR * Chicago Tribune * GQ * Vox * Refinery29 * Elle * The Guardian * Real Simple * Parade * Good Housekeeping * Marie Claire * Town & Country * Evening Standard * Kirkus Reviews * BookPage * BookRiot * Shelf Awareness A finely observed, timely exploration of marriage, divorce, and the bewildering dynamics of ambition from one of the most exciting writers working today Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return. He had been working so hard to find equilibrium in his single life. The winds of his optimism, long dormant, had finally begun to pick up. Now this. As Toby tries to figure out where Rachel went, all while juggling his patients at the hospital, his never-ending parental duties, and his new app-assisted sexual popularity, his tidy narrative of the spurned husband with the too-ambitious wife is his sole consolation. But if Toby ever wants to truly understand what happened to Rachel and what happened to his marriage, he is going to have to consider that he might not have seen things all that clearly in the first place. A searing, utterly unvarnished debut, Fleishman Is in Trouble is an insightful, unsettling, often hilarious exploration of a culture trying to navigate the fault lines of an institution that has proven to be worthy of our great wariness and our great hope. Alma's Best Jewish Novel of the Year "Blisteringly funny, feverishly smart, heartbreaking, and true, Fleishman Is in Trouble is an essential read for anyone who's wondered how to navigate loving (and hating) the people we choose."--Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, author of The Nest "From its opening pages, Fleishman Is in Trouble is shrewdly observed, brimming with wisdom, and utterly of this moment. Not until its explosive final pages are you fully aware of its cunning ferocity. Taffy Brodesser-Akner's debut is that rare and delicious treat: a page-turner with heft."--Maria Semple

A Novel

Fleishman Is in Trouble

These questions weren't really about him; no, they were questions about how perceptive people were and what they missed and who else was about to announce their divorce and whether the undercurrent of tension in their own marriages would eventually lead to their demise. Did the fight I had with my wife on our actual anniversary that was particularly vicious mean we're going to get divorced? Do we argue too much? Do we have enough sex? Is everyone else having more sex? Can you get divorced within six months of an absentminded hand-kiss at a bat mitzvah? How miserable is too miserable?

He felt a strange call for diplomacy now. School was a battleground state, and it would be so easy to get people over to his side, he knew that. He knew he could allude to Rachel's craziness, her anger, her tantrums, her unwillingness to immerse herself in her children's lives — he could say things like "I mean, I'm sure you noticed that she never came to STEM Night?" — but he didn't want to. He didn't want to undermine Rachel's status at school out of an old sense of protectiveness that he couldnt quite shake. She was a monster, yes, but she had always been a monster, and she was still his monster, for she had not yet been claimed by another, for he was still not legally done with her, for she still haunted him. 

So much time had passed since then, and yet that was Rachel for him. He had spent so many years in the service of trying to relocate that Rachel within the Rachel that she kept proving herself to be. But even now, it was that version of Rachel that was the first that ever came to mind when he thought of her. He felt he would be doing worlds better if it weren't.

That he was still young enough to participate in what he had assigned as a purely youthful endeavor, which was spending a lot of time finding someone to fuck.

Hr, which was what his preferred dating app was called, was now his first-thing-in-the-morning check. It had replaced Facebook, since when he looked at Facebook, he became despondent and overwhelmed by the number of people he hadn't yet told about his divorce. 

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.

Before and after his hookups, there was something like a conversation. He quickly learned that that conversation had the potential to make him feel like he wanted to die. 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 stories he heard from divorced women were all the same — not the details, but the themes: This thing I thought was just a whim was actually an important part of mny spouse's identity, and still l'm surprised. This thing they had always been doing they kept doing and still I'm surprised. Here is how innocent I was and here is how cruel my spouse was.

Here is the problem: You can only desire something you don't have—that's how desire works. And we had each other. Resolutely.

In recent years, only their hatred had true intimacy, meaning that when they fought, they were able to say the most specifically cruel things they'd mined from years of experience with each other. He trod hard on her extraordinary maternal inconsistency; she went for his masculinity like it was an artery.

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