I thought a minute. “Let’s just say I’d had enough.”

“Enough of what?”

I didn’t want to get into it all—the twice weekly appointments with Dr. Frond, my former psychotherapist; the weekly vitamin drips and injections and biweekly acupuncture tune-ups and constant rotation of therapeutic facials and massages and other stress-reductive health and beauty techniques to holistically treat an angry and disruptive thyroid gland and to try to keep me looking young and hip enough to fit in at the adolescent girls’ magazine I worked for: Sassy. Not to mention all the failed relationships, the requisite panic attacks that went with them (and appropriate psychopharmaceuticals: Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Paxil, BuSpar, Xanax—individually and in combination cocktail recipes), and the overwhelming sense, every minute of every day (especially during editorial meetings, when “story” ideas were batted around: “Teen Skin: Stop Wrinkles Decades Before They Start”; “Will That Cafeteria Lunch Give You Cellulite?”; “What Do You Really Know About the Boy You’re Dating?”) that life was passing me by. With a vengeance. Which was why I had left and decided to go to graduate school (Georgetown) and get a master’s degree in education in order to do something “worthwhile.” So I just said this:

“I had kind of a stressful job.”

“Where?”

“At a magazine.”

“Which one?”

I folded my hands in my lap, a clear signal that this was my final answer:

“A stupid one, okay?”

“Okay.” He seemed surprised by my flash of temper, but not put off by it. Which made me feel ashamed. I hated it when I was nasty and rude for almost no reason (I say almost: the subject of New York and why I left it always made me react as if I’d been provoked to defend my greatest failure, as did facing possible rejection from a man who was a potential date or mate). So I decided to try not to take too much more for granted in this first conversation and be nicer.

“But now I have an easier, more normal life.” Meaning: now that I no longer lived in Manhattan, was in school (technically: I was taking a semester off), and worked from home, I had things I’d never had before as an adult. Like, a bedroom. And a car (a 1998 “pre-owned” five-speed Jetta). And time to take long drives.

“What do you do?”

What did I do, besides worry about money, and the future, and whether I really wanted to be a teacher or if I’d just used going back to school as an excuse to escape from New York?

“I’m a freelance editor.”

Living off the fumes of my ever-dwindling savings account.

“Really,” he said. He sounded rather impressed. “An editor of what?”

“Books.”

“Really,” he said again. “Fiction or nonfiction?”

“Nonfiction, mostly.”

The dregs of it, anyway: beauty, diet, and exercise, all puffed up and masquerading as self-help, self-improvement.

“That must be really interesting.” I knew he was thinking politics. History. Lyndon Johnson.

“It is.”

It wasn’t.

Take the project I was also working on then, for instance: The Working Woman’s Guide to Health and Fitness in the New Millennium , with its rehashed rehash of sample diets, recipes, exercise regimens—none of which, as far as I could tell, had anything to do with any millennium, let alone the new one.