The Society of Shame by Jane Roper

Author:Jane Roper [Roper, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

Day Seventeen

It was midmorning, overcast but mild, and Kathleen sat on a bench by the edge of the river behind the condo complex, drinking from a quickly cooling mug of coffee (But First, Coffee, read the turquoise type on one side), watching Sonny and Cher floating catatonically among the cattails on the opposite bank.

She’d taken a break from her computer—specifically, the responses she’d been writing for an interview with a French women’s magazine—to consciously detach, for just a few moments, from the rest of the world. There was too much Bill in it at the moment, and it was souring her mood. The debate he’d done with Kürt Krÿer, where they sparred over who was more committed to women, had, not surprisingly, led to an uptick in chatter about whether women should vote for him in spite of his infidelity, given that he was, politically speaking, a better ally for women than Kürt Krÿer. Conservatives countered that Krÿer did say menstrual products should be tax free, and wasn’t that what the Yes We Bleed people wanted? To which the Yes We Bleed people and others counter-countered that Krÿer had, in fact, gone on to say that he thought everything should be tax free, which would inevitably result in budget cuts that would hit women, children, elderly, disabled, low-income, and BIPOC individuals hardest. This led to a raging, vitriolic subdebate among liberals over whether BIPOC was a reductive term, followed by the forced resignation of a high school teacher in Florida after she posed the question to her Advanced Placement US History class, in violation of the district’s Don’t Say Race policy.

But overall, people were less focused on the substance of the debate with Kyrgowski and more interested in discussing whether Bill came off as rueful, earnest, and steady or as a pompous, unrepentant prick. Kathleen hadn’t watched the debate but told herself that it must be the latter. It was far less painful to just be angry at him than it was to try to reconcile the way she’d loved him—the way they’d loved each other—with what he’d done. Far easier to decide that all the things she’d admired about him were an illusion.

Her coffee was officially too cool to be enjoyable now. She was just getting up to go back to the condo when her phone buzzed in her jacket pocket. It was a text from Jonathan: I just got off the phone with an extremely powerful and strange literary agent. She wants to know if you’re interested in writing a book about all this. Can you talk to her at 10:30? Call me for details.

Kathleen felt a head-to-toe thrill—a years-later echo of the sensation she’d felt when her old agent had called to offer her representation for The Hecate Chronicles. But she quickly reminded herself that this wasn’t that; this was not someone wanting to represent something she’d labored lovingly on for years. This was someone pouncing on a potentially lucrative opportunity.

It had occurred to Kathleen once or twice that maybe she should write a book about this whole experience.

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