I lied to you about Anton. I lied to the whole world about Anton, didn’t I? We hurt each other; it went both ways, that’s the truth. Before I came to therapy, it was me who hurt him. But last Friday, before our session, it was Anton who hit me. It was him who did it. He punched me in the face and that was actually the first time he ever physically laid hands on me. By doing it, he actually turned my lies to truth.

And because of my book, I got trapped in a web of lies about what happened between us. Much of that book was made up; it was partially fiction, after all, but everyone thought it was a precise account of our relationship and hailed me as a domestic abuse survivor, when the truth was a lot more nuanced and rather more boring.

So I let everyone believe that I left Anton in the end, that he attacked me and left me in fear of my life. I adopted the persona of the brave but downtrodden abuse victim because I just couldn’t bear the truth that sat beneath the surface of my skin like a never-ending itch, impossible to escape. It’s what I told you, even. I realized that I had to leave to survive, I’d say, smug as fuck. I lied because I was too ashamed to tell the truth, even to you. In the book I preached about self-love and the need to protect the flame burning inside myself when I had no fucking concept of either of those things. I still don’t. But they sounded good, and they were what people wanted to hear.

Who would want to read a story about a cold marriage from which the main protagonist actually doesn’t want to leave, where she deep down welcomes constant rejection and cruel ridicule because they are the only things that confirm what she believes to be true about herself? People want happy endings, stories of strong women who overcome abuse and build shiny, wholesome lives.