I asked Claude to Write as Dorothy Parker Imitating Philip Roth

A Small Complaint, Delivered at Length

My mother believed that a man who skipped breakfast was a man who had given up on the future. I skipped breakfast on the morning I turned thirty-four, and by noon I was sitting in Dr. Feldstein’s waiting room in a suit I could not afford, reading a magazine on the subject of lawns, trying to determine exactly when in my life I had become a person who sat in rooms like this one, thinking about her.

I don’t mean my mother. I mean the girl in the elevator, the one with the ankles, who looked at me with such perfect, merciful indifference that I wanted to confess everything: the lies, the lusts, the unreturned library books. She said “Going up?” and I, a grown man with a graduate degree and a pulse, said “Historically, yes.” She laughed, and the laugh lasted exactly as long as a courtesy and not one second more. I have been in analysis for six years, and I tell you that laugh cost me forty minutes of billable hours.

Feldstein says I use my wit as a screen door: it keeps out the flies and lets in the dread. I told him that was very good and he should write it down. He did not. Everyone is a critic, and no one is a patron.

Here is what I know about love: it is a fire that begins in the loins and ends in the Tupperware. Here is what I know about guilt: it is the only thing my family never let go to waste.

I went home. I called my mother. She asked if I’d eaten.

I said I was too busy suffering.

“Suffer after,” she said. “Eat first.”

I have never heard better advice, and I have spent my entire life ignoring it.