It’s just that this one has somehow never felt like home. It has a castle vibe, and not in a luxe, royal way—there’s something very haunted fairy tale about it. Lulu’s mom moved in after the divorce and turned the place into a princess palace, with fresh flowers in the bedrooms and clusters of candles on every side table. Lulu and her elementary school friends loved to hold séances here during sleepovers.

It sometimes feels like they succeeded in bringing down bad luck on the place, or else they sensed that it was destined for a pall of sadness—because ten years later, Lulu’s mom is still here, and single, waking up in a canopy bed and cursing her lonely princess fate. A row of her headshots hangs in the hallway where a different type of mother might have family photos.

Her mom’s asleep now, and she probably will be for another hour. Lulu has the kitchen to herself as she rifles through the cabinets, trying to find something to eat that isn’t some kind of nut or seed. Usually she doesn’t mind being on whatever weird diet her mother’s gotten obsessed with while she’s here, but just now Lulu really, really wants toast with butter on it, or at least real coffee. Fuck.

Instead she makes green tea that smells like old moss; there’s some dubious-looking gluten-free “bread” in the fridge that, toasted, tastes like warm cardboard. Lulu nibbles it very miserably. With her free hand, she fumbles for her phone and searches for the podcast Mr. Winters mentioned. She scrolls back to the first episode and presses PLAY, the volume on low.

A woman’s voice issues from her phone’s speakers. “Every woman owns her own beauty,” she intones. “And yet somehow, when it is put up for sale, it is almost always men who see the bulk of the profit. Artist and muse, studio head and actress, prostitute and pimp: All of these relationships function with varying degrees of consent and autonomy. But they all also uphold the same underlying economic structure, which holds that a literal middleman should be the person presenting a woman to the world—and taking a hefty cut of the profits in the process.

“If a man paints or photographs a woman, it’s art; if a woman paints or photographs herself, it’s an act of narcissistic self-indulgence. Women are assumed to be artless until they are put in someone’s art; it’s only the approval of someone else’s eye that makes them worthy of serious consideration.