Clare considers her childhood. It encompasses the brief period during which her parents were to be regularly found on the same continent and, at times, within the same open-plan loft space, if not the very same room. There might be some sort of symbolism one could use to indicate that, despite their best attempts to sacrifice their child on the altar of their arbitrary decision to couple, the child’s imaginary death and (very) real emotional suffering were not sufficient tribute. Clare imagines the story that a fiction writer named Dev O’Shaughnessy might compose. Dev has lately turned in a tremendous narrative about suburban front yards and what they meant to wicked, soulful tweens of the male persuasion in 1987. It is couched as the report of an imaginary anthropologist. Dev’s tale made a splash and Dev now has an agent and, apparently, a book deal. It happened in two weeks. Dev, if he were Clare or she he, could compose an edgy and prismatic short story about parents who observe their child knocking a cup off the edge of a table. The parents start talking about suicide. The story could be just their dialogue. It would be an allegory for the slow death of the republic, the narcissism of semi-elites. It would be a well-made mirror. It would make D. H. Lawrence’s corpse roll over and shed a tiny tear. Dev would surely garner another book deal from it.

But Dev and Clare are not the same person, and this is why the idea of writing a story by him so fascinates her. As long as she doesn’t care too much, the task amuses. And she will not write about being a child or being a cup on a table. She won’t write about the most obvious subject, as far as she is concerned: the long string of failures to either kill herself or be abruptly destroyed that have made up her triangulation within her mother’s sense of modern love. Clare won’t talk about this, because she doesn’t have to. No one can force her to do it.