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Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Literary fiction

Fleishman Is in Trouble

Debut

We love supporting debut authors. Congrats, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, on your first book!

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

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Quick take

A good, hard look at marriage, relationships, and self-worth. Think: New York satire on top of a midlife crisis.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Feminist

    Feminist

  • Illustrated icon, Nonlinear_Timeline

    Nonlinear timeline

  • Illustrated icon, Snarky

    Snarky

  • Illustrated icon, Marriage_Issues

    Marriage issues

Synopsis

Recently separated Toby Fleishman is suddenly, somehow—and at age forty-one, short as ever—surrounded by women who want him: women who are self-actualized, women who are smart and interesting, women who don't mind his height, women who are eager to take him for a test drive with just the swipe of an app. Toby doesn't mind being used in this way; it's a welcome change from the thirteen years he spent as a married man, the thirteen years of emotional neglect and contempt he's just endured. Anthropologically speaking, it's like nothing he ever experienced before, particularly back in the 1990s, when he first began dating and became used to swimming in the murky waters of rejection.

But Toby's new life—liver specialist by day, kids every other weekend, rabid somewhat anonymous sex at night—is interrupted when his ex-wife suddenly disappears. Either on a vision quest or a nervous breakdown, Toby doesn't know—she won't answer his texts or calls.

Is Toby's ex just angry, like always? Is she punishing him, yet again, for not being the bread winner she was? As he desperately searches for her while juggling his job and parenting their two unraveling children, Toby is forced to reckon with the real reasons his marriage fell apart, and to ask if the story he has been telling himself all this time is true.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of Fleishman Is in Trouble.

Fleishman Is in Trouble

Part One

Fleishman Is in Trouble

Toby Fleishman awoke one morning inside the city he’d lived in all his adult life and which was suddenly somehow now crawling with women who wanted him. Not just any women, but women who were self-actualized and independent and knew what they wanted. Women who weren’t needy or insecure or self-doubting, like the long-ago prospects of his long-gone youth—meaning the women he had thought of as prospects but who had never given him even a first glance. No, these were women who were motivated and available and interesting and interested and exciting and excited. These were women who would not so much wait for you to call them one or two or three socially acceptable days after you met them as much as send you pictures of their genitals the day before. Women who were open-minded and up for anything and vocal about their desires and needs and who used phrases like “put my cards on the table” and “no strings attached” and “I need to be done in ten because I have to pick up Bella from ballet.” Women who would fuck you like they owed you money, was how our friend Seth put it.

Yes, who could have predicted that Toby Fleishman, at the age of forty-one, would find that his phone was aglow from sunup to sundown (in the night the glow was extra bright) with texts that contained G-string and ass cleavage and underboob and sideboob and just straight-up boob and all the parts of a woman he never dared dream he would encounter in a person who was three-dimensional—meaning literally three-dimensional, as in a person who wasn’t on a page or a computer screen. All this, after a youth full of romantic rejection! All this, after putting a lifetime bet on one woman! Who could have predicted this? Who could have predicted that there was such life in him yet?

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Why I love it

The adage “there are always three sides to a story: yours, theirs, and the truth” certainly applies to the once-happy marriage of Rachel and Toby Fleishman. After working through the messy business of dividing up their Upper East Side assets and settling on a co-parenting schedule for their kids, the good Dr. Fleishman finds himself resentful and alone. Just when he thinks things can’t get any worse, his wife, from whom he is recently separated, goes missing.

Weeks pass and there is still no sign of Rachel. What kind of mother just drops off her kids, ends all contact, and never comes back?? As Toby struggles to balance work and childcare, Rachel’s version of what went wrong in their marriage begins to come to light. Is Rachel the distant and cruel wife Toby has depicted her to be? Or is she simply an ambitious, career-driven woman striving to be more than just a mother and a wife?

This is one of those stories where you think you see the ending coming and you just don’t. As I learned more of their shared past, I oscillated between feelings of frustration on Toby’s behalf and sympathy with Rachel’s struggle to define herself beyond the domestic duties the world wants her to shoulder. Fiery and sly at the same time, Fleishman Is in Trouble is an utterly thought-provoking examination of modern marriage.

Member ratings (1,338)

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Literary fiction
View all
Intermezzo
The Book of George
Real Americans
Wellness
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
The God of the Woods
Same As It Ever Was
Annie Bot
Bear
Mercury
True Biz
Family Happiness
The Husbands
The Lady Waiting
The Other Valley
Hard by a Great Forest
Good Material
The Bullet Swallower
Happy All the Time
Alice Sadie Celine
Let Us Descend
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Shark Heart
Transcendent Kingdom
Hello Beautiful
Dominicana
What's Mine and Yours
The Unsettled
Ask Again, Yes
Vladimir
Infinite Country
The Prophets
Normal People
The Verifiers
Salvage the Bones
The Many Daughters of Afong Moy
I Have Some Questions for You
Black Buck
The History of Love
Age of Vice
Paper Names
The Light Pirate
The Secret History
The Kite Runner
Memorial
The Half Moon
Happiness Falls
The Gifted School
The Death of Vivek Oji
The Knockout Queen
Little Monsters
Yerba Buena
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Free Food for Millionaires
A Burning
The Mothers
The Water Dancer
Small Country
The Sympathizer
Fleishman Is in Trouble
Lot
An American Marriage
The Animators
The Mars Room
Exit West
White Fur
Woman No. 17
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Eat Only When You're Hungry
Rainbirds
A Ladder to the Sky
Golden Child
The Goldfinch
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P
& Sons
The Association of Small Bombs
Lolly Willowes
All Grown Up
Marlena
Signal Fires
Someday, Maybe
Woman of Light
Marrying the Ketchups
The Shards