Here is a list of things that I am including in this book. Please send me my seven-figure advance.

• affluent family lives in suburb. The husband (who is a professor but also a novelist) is cheating on his wife, but he thinks it falls into a moral gray area because he is a Great Man

• they expected that their lives would be different than they are, and this makes them snap at each other with words that cut deep and carry a history, which they did not used to do when they were young and in love and the world held out its hand to them and said “COME!”

• wry aside

• several paragraphs to show that the author has read Proust or Kierkegaard

• much younger student somehow really wants to sleep with this professor novelist guy. That’s cool, great, she is the aggressor in this scenario

• sex scene containing one bizarre detail that makes you worry a little bit about the author, not in a judgy way, just in a does-he-actually-think-this-is-how-that-works?-how-has-he-been-married-for-six-years? way