Later, in one of the Thanksgiving episodes (sometimes they all felt like Thanksgiving episodes), Elliot has moved back in. Ethan visits a friend whose parents are divorced. The dad comes home with a new girlfriend to announce that he won’t be able to make it for the holiday. The mother comes out in a bathrobe, angry that he brought his girlfriend into her house. He reminds the mother that it’s his house, really, and that he can come and go as he pleases, and by the way, it’s a pigsty. Ethan leaves and a few nights later, when he screams from his bedroom because he hears sirens in the distance, Elliot races in to show him that nothing’s wrong, that he’s here and he’s not going to leave again.

Before the episode was over, my husband called me down to dinner. But I couldn’t move. I paused the show, frozen. I touched my face; it was wet. I’d been crying. I can’t even tell you how staggering the pain was right t hen . I had entered into this rewatching because I thought that I was curious about my behavior in my own marriage, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about my parents’ divorce. I was trying to understand what had happened to me, this definitional thing that was an event in my parents’ lives, but a chronic condition for their daughters. I never understood my parents. I barely remember their fights. When I was first watching the show, it was to defend myself from their fate; now that I was watching it, it was to try to understand how that fate came to be.

I’m 43. I am bewildered by the people I know who dredge up their childhoods all the time at our age. But look at me: I was backing into that the whole time. Just then, as my family waited for me downstairs, I knew that I didn’t really get into this — not the book, or the “Thirtysomething” experiment — because of any insight I have about marriage. It was because of the trauma of my parents’ divorce — our divorce, my and my sisters’ divorce, the horrible thing that happened to me and to us that I should be over and somehow I am not. God, how pathetic I am. How broken I am. How pathetic I am.

At dinner, my children asked me what was wrong. I told them I had just watched something sad but that I was O.K. My husband reached across the table, took my hand and kissed it. My sons made kissy noises and my reaction was not jovial or light. I hissed at them, like a snake, something primal and reptilian and disgusted rising up in me. I never saw my parents kiss once. I never saw them hold hands. I don’t remember a moment of sentiment over their daughters or our accomplishments that caused them to look at each other warmly. My children have seen us kiss. They’ve seen us fight, and make up. They have seen me seek my husband’s arms for comfort. Usually my happiness that they don’t have to endure what I did is greater than my jealousy of it. That night it was not. That night the pain of my childhood — the pain that has informed my entire life — was like the flannel Hope loved. That night it was so worn it was about to rip . Three years ago , as I looked into the future and saw the arc of my marriage shaped like a rainbow and not like a lightning bolt, I pulled up a Word document and got to work on the novel.