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are to blame for sexual predators!”
    â€œ What? ”
    â€œNobody even read the review. I don’t know why I mentioned it. I must have early-onset dementia.”
    â€œYou just said it got traction!”
    Everyone had read the review. Everyone.
    â€œSend me the link,” said Frances.
    â€œIt’s not even that bad,” said Alain. “It’s just this prejudice against your genre—”
    â€œSend it!”
    â€œNo,” said Alain. “I won’t. You’ve gone all these years without reading reviews. Don’t fall off the wagon!”
    â€œRight now,” said Frances in her dangerous voice. She used it rarely. When she was getting divorced, for example.
    â€œI’ll send it,” said Alain meekly. “I’m so sorry, Frances. I’m so sorry about this entire phone call.”
    He hung up, and Frances immediately went to her email. There wasn’t much time. As soon as she arrived at Tranquillum House she would need to “hand in” her “device.” It would be a digital detox, along with everything else. She was going “off the grid.”
    SO SORRY! said Alain’s email.
    She clicked on the review.
    It was written by someone called Helen Ihnat. Frances didn’t know the name and there was no picture. She read it fast, with a wry, dignified smile, as if the author was saying these things to her face. It was a terrible review: vicious, sarcastic, and superior, but, interestingly, it didn’t hurt. The words— Formulaic. Trash. Drivel . Trite— slid right off her.
    She was fine! Can’t please everyone. Comes with the territory.
    And then she felt it.
    It was like when you burn yourself on a hot plate and at first you think, Huh, that should have hurt more , and then it does hurt more, and then all of a sudden it hurts like hell.
    A quite extraordinary pain in her chest radiated throughout her entire body. Another fun symptom of menopause? Maybe it was a heart attack. Women had heart attacks. Surely this was more than hurt feelings. This, of course, was why she’d given up reading reviews in the first place. Her skin was too thin. “It was the best decision I ever made,” she’d told the audience at the Romance Writers of AustraliaConference when she gave the keynote address last year. They’d probably all been thinking: Yeah, maybe you should read a review or two, Frances, you old has-been.
    Why did she think it was a good idea to read a bad review directly after she’d just received her first rejection in thirty years?
    And now something else was happening. It appeared and, gosh, this was just so fascinating, but it seemed she was losing her entire sense of self.
    Come on now, Frances, get a grip, you’re too old for an existential crisis.
    But apparently she wasn’t.
    She scrabbled hopelessly after her self-identity, but it was like trying to catch water rushing down a drain. If she was no longer a published writer, who was she? What was the actual point of her? She wasn’t a mother or a wife or a girlfriend. She was a twice-divorced, middle-aged, hot-flushing/-flashing menopausal woman. A punch line. A clich é . Invisible to most—except, of course, to men like Paul Drabble.
    She looked at the gate in front of her that still would not open and her vision blurred with tears and she told herself not to panic, you are not disappearing , Frances, don’t be so melodramatic, this is just a rough trot, a bad patch, and it’s the cold and flu tablets making your heart race, but it felt like she was hovering on a precipice, and on the other side of the precipice was a howling abyss of despair unlike anything she’d ever experienced, even during those times of true grief—and this is not true grief, she reminded herself, this is a career setback combined with the loss of a relationship, a bad back, a cold, and a paper cut; this is not like when Dad died, or Gillian