2.

If you’ve heard episode 529 of This American Life, you’ve heard my voice. I’m Act 3, ‘Partially Furnished.’ The guy who fought his landlady for a cheap bookcase. I had been telling this story for years before I was invited to tell it on TAL. My ex-girlfriend, Michelle, always hated this story.

Her problem, I’d assumed, was simply that she’d heard it too often. The bookcase in question, which had come with me when I moved into her apartment, remained a showpiece in our living room: a six-by-four monument of white particleboard taking up the entire front wall, where the thrift-store eyesore of it—better suited for a dorm than a home—clashed with the rest of her furniture. Whenever friends took a special interest in my books, surveying the spines along its shelves, I liked to share the anecdote. ‘I ever tell you how…?’ During the time that we were together, Michelle must have endured dozens of performances of this monologue. In the first couple of years she would listen graciously, pretending to laugh along with the guests. But eventually I would catch her rolling her eyes when I began, subtly excusing herself to use the bathroom. ‘They only have to hear the story,’ she told me once. ‘I have to live with it.’ Finally one night, as we were lying in bed after a party, she started to recite my monologue back to me. I had told it so frequently in the past five years, she claimed, that nothing in the narrative was fluid or improvisatory. Each detail, each transition, and each beat had long since ossified into its final form, a script that she could deliver herself if she had to: ‘This was the summer after college’; ‘All it lacked was a bookcase.’ In the dark of our bedroom, I felt my face growing hot with self-consciousness, though she wasn’t being spiteful or unfair. It really was my favorite story.

Then, one morning last year, the call came from Chicago. An intern explained that an old acquaintance of ours, Carleen, was now working at WBEZ, where she happened to be present when TAL producers were pitching ideas for the upcoming ‘Over My Dead Body’ episode. Carleen had mentioned my bookcase story, and Ira had just loved it. He would be in town the following weekend and wanted to meet to record a quick segment. Flustered, and flattered, I agreed. The intern would email the details.

When I told Michelle the news, she didn’t even attempt a smile. ‘And you’re going to do it?’ she asked. ‘You’re going to appear on the show?’ I said of course, and she said that was great. But she said it in that flat, trapped voice hostages have, when someone with a gun at their back is telling them to say everything’s great. So it came as no surprise that afternoon when she suggested we have a talk.

After dinner she walked me through her misgivings regarding the interview. We were sitting in the living room. She’d taken her place, cross-legged, on the sofa; I was on the ottoman opposite, with the bookcase behind me. Her misgivings involved three ‘prongs,’ she explained, mischievously. She was using the word to needle me, I knew: academic rhetoric she’d picked up presenting conference papers. She asked me not to interrupt, not until she’d finished with all three of them, then reassured me that this was nothing serious, just something she needed to get off her mind. On the glass-topped coffee table between us she’d set down two tumblers of whiskey, a ritual she’d developed for alleviating difficult discussions.