Fleishman Is in Trouble

Toby Fleishman awoke one morning inside the city he d lived in all his adult life and which was suddenly somehow now crawling with women who wanted him. Not just any women, but women who were self-actualized and independent and knew what they wanted. Women who weren t needy or insecure or self-doubting, like the long-ago prospects of his long-gone youth meaning the women he had thought of as prospects but who had never given him even a first glance. No, these were women who were motivated and available and interesting and interested and exciting and excited. These were women who would not so much wait for you to call them one or two or three socially acceptable days after you met them as much as send you pictures of their genitals the day before. Women who were open-minded and up for anything and vocal about their desires and needs and who used phrases like put my cards on the table and no strings attached and I need to be done in ten because I have to pick up Bella from ballet. Women who would fuck you like they owed you money, was how our friend Seth put it.

Yes, who could have predicted that Toby Fleishman, at the age of forty-one, would find that his phone was aglow from sunup to sundown (in the night the glow was extra bright) with texts that contained G-string and ass cleavage and underboob and sideboob and just straight-up boob and all the parts of a woman he never dared dream he would encounter in a person who was three- dimensional meaning literally three-dimensional, as in a person who wasn t on a page or a computer screen. All this, after a youth full of romantic rejection! All this, after putting a lifetime bet on one woman! Who could have predicted this? Who could have predicted that there was such life in him yet? 

Still, he told me, it was jarring. Rachel was gone now, and her goneness was so incongruous to what had been his plan. It wasn t that he still wanted her he absolutely did not want her. He absolutely did not wish she were

Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. She has also written for GQ, ESPN the Magazine, and many other publications. Fleishman Is in Trouble is her first novel.

Believe the hype. Fleishman Is in Trouble is even better than we were promised. . . . A feminist jeremiad nested inside a brilliant comic novel a book that makes you laugh so hard you don t notice till later that your eyebrows have been singed off. The Washington Post

Brodesser-Akner . . . writes with a thrilling swagger. . . . She does not so much craft prose as notate brainwaves. The New Yorker

Everybody I know loves reading Taffy Brodesser-Akner. . . . A maddening, unsettling masterpiece NPR

Whip-smart, gleefully scatological . . . [Brodesser-Akner] aims a perfect gimlet eye at the city s relentless self-regard . . . transforming a fizzy comedy of manners into something genuinely, unexpectedly profound. Entertainment Weekly

Enthralling . . . A cutting sociological dissection of the way we live. Rolling Stone

The Taffy Brodesser-Akner trick, the thing that makes her profiles so clear-eyed and important, the thing that lifts her divorce novel head and shoulders above so many others in its genre: She is always willing to extend her empathy to people we are trained to believe are not worthy of our consideration. She is always willing to treat them as real people. Vox

This glorious debut has the humor of Maria Semple, the heart of Meg Wolitzer, the lustiness of Philip Roth, and a voice that is pure. How does one's favorite journalist become one's new favorite novelist? With this book. Emma Straub

Brodesser-Akner s debut is a referendum on marriage, friendship, and how we live (and love) right now. People

In her witty and well-observed debut, Taffy Brodesser-Akner updates the miserable-matrimony novel, dropping it squarely in our times. . . . Brodesser-Akner has written a potent, upsetting and satisfying novel, illustrating how the marital pledge build our life together overlooks a key fact: There are two lives. The New York Times Book Review

Electric .