It was May, and her book was going nowhere.

Give up, then, Seb said. Edith was visiting them at work. The bookstore’s packed shelves offered little consolation. Write something else. You already planned out your next four books or whatever.

Yeah but I need to do it fast.

’Cause of your fucking deadline? A customer looked up from their Anna Moschovakis book. From the back, Seb’s boss called, Language, Seb. More quietly, Seb continued: You know that’s fake, right. Ask the editor for more time.

You have to set boundaries somewhere. Even if her rent went up, she could scrape by for another six months or so. Even if she sold the book, she wouldn’t have enough to afford rent in Boston. She shouldn’t go back, maybe ever. The September deadline was a test.

Of what, Seb asked, how stubborn you are?

To see if any of it was worth it.

Do you hear yourself? Do you hear her? Seb demanded of the eavesdropping customer. The customer returned to reading Eleanor. What’s “worth it” mean? Are you happy?

I don’t know how to answer that.

Is writing a book going to make you happy?

Not writing a book is going to make me miserable.

She’d been trying to write about the things she loved. The world bounded by her skull. She had to make something so small she might easily fill it with life. Its skin swollen with light and color like one of Cézanne’s apples.

How about you? Working on any articles?

No. Seb busied themself, scanning new books into the register. Sara and I have been playing music together.

Oh my god, you guys started a band?

We’re not a band, we make ambient drone.

You guys are so cute, you’re like Mates of State.

We are not like Mates of State, I’m going to exile you from the store.

Their boss called out, No exiling people, Seb.

Seb gave her a book before she left the store. A woman’s face on the cover filtered poison-green.

You’ve never read Annie Ernaux, right?

Edith flipped through, absorbing little. I started The Years once.

This one’s a diary, you’ll love it. All the sad and yearning girlies do.

This character of V., the editor wrote. I’m not sure I understand what she wants.

Right, I sort of feel like that’s the underlying enigma of the whole thing.

Is it? I thought it was the narrator’s feelings toward her.

That too.

Which I’m not really getting on the page either. I fear you’re not really being honest with yourself.

I thought whatever I wanted to write was okay with you.

Is this really what you want?

Edith wrote paragraphs about homecoming in The Odyssey. The analysis of Into the Woods she’d been mulling over for weeks. She tried to remember why she’d quit therapy.

It’s a matter of being stuck, she wrote, of needing your story to move on so that your life can improve, but the wave eventually crests. The good is undone by the bad. In fact, the good brings the bad. That’s the real genie-logic of wanting.

I keep seeing the problems with what I’m doing and trying to point them out, Edith said. Lampshading flaws so that no one can call me on them. But mostly it means that I keep undermining any credibility I have.

That’s it exactly, the editor said. Your first book did that, too. Undermining itself. Do you have any idea why you do that?

The best image Edith found of a false homecoming was in Gossip Girl. By the end of season four, it’s revealed that Charlie—who we’ve believed to be the estranged cousin of wealthy, glamorous Serena—is in fact an actress named Ivy Dickens, hired by Serena’s aunt to impersonate her daughter and get access to a family trust.

I’m sorry, Bernard said, say that again? That’s like two layers of abstraction too deep for my poor man-brain.

Ivy leaves New York at the end of the fourth season, but comes back in the fifth, abandoning her chef boyfriend Will Gorski in L.A. She slips back into the character of Charlie, bluffing her way through every social situation. It’s the performance of a lifetime—not broken when Serena’s aunt tries to out her, nor when Will Gorski falls in love with Serena.

Wait, so where is Serena’s real cousin? Dead?

No, she’s at Juilliard.

So why—­

There is only one “why” in Gossip Girl: money and power.

That’s two.

It was Edith and Bernard’s first time hanging out in daylight hours. She nestled under his arm, Treats curled on her lap.

Ivy’s life mirrored what it was like to go back to Boston. She returned to New York and had to pretend to be someone else again. A person you were once so good at pretending to be. Edith didn’t know why she daydreamed of moving back; she’d be performing all the time.

On screen, people got ready for a party. Edith checked Tinder for messages from the Climbing Woman. Natalie. The last thing Edith/Harry asked was if she’d been to the Twombly gallery in Houston. Nothing yet. She settled in deeper beside Bernard.

Ivy abandons the ruse. She knows the real Charlie from a play they did together. This is revealed after she’s spent three months taking care of the real Charlie’s grandmother—out of sincere compassion. But, the terms of Gossip Girl being what they are, everyone assumes she’s doing it for money.

Can I ask you a question?

I’ll draw you a family tree, it’s not as complicated as it sounds.

Why do you keep checking your phone?

My brain is broken and if I don’t I’ll literally die.

No, I mean you look at it like a bit of fuzz you’re worried might be a bug.

She sort of wanted to know what would happen if she told the truth. Maybe what she needed was to burn part of her life to the ground, a forest fire making way for new growth.

It’s fine if you’re seeing someone else, obviously.

Oh yeah, you think I’m in high demand? For some reason she thought that would sound flirty.

I’m only saying.

Look at the beautiful girls. Look at the palatial homes and the flowing golden clothes. Here’s a Deborah Eisenberg cameo. Here’s St. Vincent playing a private party. No choice Edith made could have given her such a beautiful and charmed girlhood.

Besides money and power, Gossip Girl is about storytelling. By creating the Gossip Girl blog, Dan makes himself a character in the lives of the Upper East Side elites, naturalizes his place among them. He’s already rich, though, and hot; his father is a washed-up rockstar who marries Serena’s billionaire mother. The only time he fails to fit the Upper East Siders’ narrative frame is when he pretends he does not want what they have. That he’s any different from them.

Ivy is an outsider with no happy ending. She doesn’t get the luxurious childhood other characters do. You can only write your way into stories that you already belong in.