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I started reading Lament for Julia by Susan Taubes, which the New York Review of Books is publishing this summer. It’s a terrifying story about consciousness, free will, womanhood, dark and intense and voyeuristic. It’s made me think, as did Divorcing and the selection of short stories included in the book, about the dark wormy undersides of fairy tale narratives and how bound up they are with linear ideas of femininity. There’s a particular scorn for the blithe naïveté of women who believe in happily ever afters, in a karmic universe that will fulfill all of their dreams and then some. But a belief in fate is actually a deeply fearful and chaotic view of the world. It leads you to an airless and hostile existence subjected to the mercy of external forces or the goodwill of other people. If you think there are guardian angels on your shoulders, as I do when I step out blindly into the streets of New York City every day, then you also run the constant risk of those angels abandoning yo…