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“It was a pleasant enough fantasy. I did well within it, better, in fact, than I had while my office, my clients, my work, had been serious matter, hard-core reality. As is only right in one’s fantasy, I was at ease, relaxed, calm. I won a new account one day, charmed a colleague into peace after months of altercations the next. I worked tirelessly, suspended. Minor annoyances over which I would have fretted in the past—a phone call not returned, a longer than reasonable wait for a client’s decision, a coffee stain on my sleeve half an hour into my day—no longer mattered…The reality of my days was replaced by surface equanimity and a blandness to the core.”

—Elizabeth McNeill, Nine and a Half Weeks