Written by: Charles Ramsay McCrory
The day her summer-long depression lifted, Julie announced that she was writing a novel, a sprawling commentary on our generation to be titled The Way We Live
No one had the heart to tell her Anthony Trollope had beaten her to her title by a margin of 140 years. Unlike the rest of us, who compulsively Googled our own names and the titles of our works-in-progress, Julie didn’t have Internet. She apparently didn’t watch the BBC either. Why tell her? She could always change the title when she discovered her mistake.
This was the happiest we’d ever seen
But as the book neared completion it became apparent that the title was its pulse, its raison d’être, and maybe Julie’s as well. She invoked it as a mantra to wrench herself free whenever the morass threatened to drag her back under. “The way we live now,” she said, laughing, when Tyler told her he was gay but would stay with her because he knew how lonely she
We began to wonder if she were merely typing those five words over and over, filling up reams of paper, in which case originality was hardly the issue . All work and no play… Still, we kept our mouths shut. As Diane pointed out, you don’t make it to thirty without some delusions intact. 
