I am reacquainting myself with my favorite book ever, "Self-Help" by Lorrie Moore.

I think for my birthday, along with everybody getting me a tiki mug from Psycho Suzi's, I want her entire collection of books. All I have is "Self-Help," which is great to read over and over again, but I want more.

Beware, for one of my most beloved people in the world was seduced by a cold man and is currently, painfully, realizing it:

"'Cold men destroy women,' my mother wrote me years later. 'They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes - you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, landing with a loud clunk.'"

How does Lorrie Moore know all of this? And how does she write it so well?

"A week, a month, a year: Tell him you've changed. You no longer like the same music, eat the same food. You dress differently. The two of you are incongruous together. When he tells you that he is changing too, that he loves your records, your teas, your falafel, your shoes, tell him: See, that's the problem. Endeavor to baffle.

Pace around in the kitchen and say that you are unhappy.

But I love you, he will say in his soft, bewildered way, stirring the spaghetti sauce but not you, staring into the pan as if waiting for something, a magic fish, to rise from it and say: That is always enough, why is that not always enough?"

And that's the best way I can explain it.