Fleishman Is in Trouble

Toby Fleishman is forty-one and newly separated from his wife of almost fifteen years. He works as a hepatologist at a Manhattan hospital. Rachel, his wife, is a talent agent whose income and ambition long outpaced his own. Now Toby is discovering what it means to be a man alone in New York, with a phone full of dating apps.

Then Rachel drops their two children, eleven-year-old Hannah and nine-year-old Solly, at his apartment one morning and stops answering her phone. Weeks pass with no word from her. Toby covers hospital shifts, gets the kids to camp, and fields a stream of matches on his phone.

All the while he turns over the story he has told himself about the marriage: an ambitious wife who left an ordinary man behind. Looking for Rachel becomes looking for what actually happened between them. He starts to wonder whether his account of it was ever the whole one.

The book is narrated by Libby, an old college friend of Toby's who gave up magazine writing for a quieter life in the suburbs. Telling his story pulls her back into her own disappointments. Through her, the marriage's unraveling becomes an account of what marriage asks of women, in a comic, often unsparing portrait of a New York divorce.