nothing will come close to the early moment in the book where our narrator is at a small dinner party–it is still before her true internality has been reveled, so experiencing her interpersonal uncertainity and self-castigation over offering compliments (“In bourgeois milieus, people rarely compliment each other.”) might shunt us off into a class-and-standing novel, where the crux is an Eliza attempting to fit in with a My Fair Lady crowd. At the conclusion of one of the parlor games, the possibility that her perspective is accurate or even relatable has gone out of the window:

So my husband thinks his best friend is married to a pineapple, while he married a clementine. He lives with a winter fruit, a banal and cheap fruit, a supermarket fruit. A small, ordinary fruit that has none of the indulgence of the orange nor the originality of the grapefruit. A fruit organized into segments, practical and easy to eat, precut, ready for use, proffered in its casing.

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