Here I did have to bite my tongue. It was just like her to accuse me of narrative monopoly, or ‘monophony,’ as she would call it. Michelle’s the kind of angel you can’t badmouth anyone around: empathy is a sixth sense with her. If she and her colleagues were sharing departmental gossip, and I joined in by griping about someone stealing my lunch from the office fridge, Michelle would instantly pause. ‘Well, we don’t know,’ she would say, thoughtfully. ‘Maybe she had her reasons for raiding the refrigerator.’ She must have been unusually hungry, for one thing. Had I considered that the woman could be pregnant, diabetic, bulimic, broke? ‘Imagine things her way.’ One of our earliest fights as a couple, in fact, had been about this habit of hers. Always willing to advocate for the absent party: offering charitable explanations for their behavior; questioning the objectivity of my caricatures; giving voice to the voiceless. And making me seem inconsiderate and cruel in comparison.

I didn’t understand why Michelle was so quick to defend people she had never met, or why she trusted their version of events over her boyfriend’s. But during that first fight she’d insisted that trust had nothing to do with it. Being a ‘polyphonic storyteller’ was simply the adult thing to do: if I tried to incorporate other people’s perspectives into my own, if I took their motives into consideration and really cultivated a ‘dialogic viewpoint,’ I would come across as fair and reasonable. ‘To your friends, you mean,’ I’d said, childishly. She’d sighed.

Michelle folded her arms across her stomach and eased back into the sofa. ‘You’re not mad?’ she asked. I shook my head. The third and final prong, she promised, would sting less—or less personally—than the first two, for it had nothing to do with me. What bothered her most wasn’t that I’d agreed to tell this story in a public forum—it was the forum itself. ‘We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if it were Judge Judy you were going on. At least there Fredricka would get her say.’ But TAL was by its very nature a monophonic institution. All its stories were one-sided. Fredricka would not be trotted out from backstage to confront me, and Ira would not challenge my version of events. It wasn’t the show’s MO to cross-examine its guests: they were meant to sound like honest, sincere, relatable narrators. This was why all the episodes followed such a rigid formula, according to her. Reporters selected human-interest subjects from the listener demographic—middle-aged, middle-class, usually white—and these ‘regular people’ proceeded to tell their mildly amusing stories, complaining in wry but soul-searching monologues about their despotic bosses, evil exes, and overbearing parents. The audience identified with them automatically, because they were them. And Ira only ever encouraged guests on with his ‘“heartfelt” voice,’ filled with ‘spittle and sympathy’ for the story they were telling. ‘And what better host really, on a show for narrative narcissists,’ Michelle asked, ‘than Glass? He just reflects your own story back to you. Validates your most flattering selfimage.’ Ira was guaranteed to take my caricature of Fredricka for truth; ditto my rectitude in the bookcase debate. It was up to me what to do with that trust. Either I could abuse it, by vilifying Fredricka as usual and making myself out to be the victim/hero; or I could give a more complicated account of the conflict, detail the moral ambiguity of both our roles. If I didn’t speak up for Fredricka, no one would.