In the summer of 1999, when I was 16 years old, I remember walking to a train station in West London from a babysitting job when a 40-something man in a Range Rover pulled up, told me he was on television, and then announced to his young son (also in the car) that I was “Daddy’s new girlfriend.” I don’t know who the man was; I didn’t get in the car, not because I was afraid but because I’d just bought Californication for my minidisc player and wanted to listen to the album on the way home. But what he did wasn’t abnormal for the time. This was two years before the 35-year-old TV presenter and radio host Chris Evans (not the actor) married the 18-year-old pop star Billie Piper in Las Vegas, after a months-long relationship that started when he gave the teenager—so young, she hadn’t yet learned to drive—a Ferrari filled with roses. A year later, in 2002, the BBC Radio 1 host Chris Moyles offered, live on air, to take the singer Charlotte Church’s virginity on her 16th birthday, claiming that he could “lead her through the forest of sexuality” now that she was legal.

I’ve often wondered how Millennial women in Britain survived the aughts: not just the incessant fat shaming and the ritualized alcohol abuse, but also the cheerful, open predation that was everywhere in popular culture then. This weekend, the London Times and the TV documentary series Dispatches revealed coordinated allegations that the TV star turned conspiratorial wellness personality Russell Brand had victimized multiple people from 2006 to 2013, including a 16-year-old girl who says he picked her up on the street when he was 30, referred to her as “the child” and cradled her like a baby when he found out she was a virgin, and then later choked her with his penis until she—fearing she would actually suffocate—punched him in the stomach. The dual reports also allege that Brand raped a woman he knew at his home in Los Angeles and attempted to rape another until she screamed so hard that he flew into a rage. (Brand has said he “absolutely refutes” what he describes as “a litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks.”)

Beyond these serious allegations, there’s also recorded evidence, documented on TV comedy specials and on Brand’s own radio show during the 2000s, that Brand relentlessly harassed women he worked with, sexualizing and dehumanizing them on air, and then belittling them to the public when they objected. This was the particular insidiousness of aughts-era misogyny, which people like Brand propagated but absolutely didn’t invent: the idea that if girls, or young women, complained about how they were being treated, they were joyless scolds, too uncool to get the joke and too ugly to be concerned about anyway.

[Read: Why were we so cruel to Britney Spears?]

The trap was that women were expected to cheerfully participate in their own objectification or risk being not just exploited but also vilified. It was an ethos informed by porn and disseminated by a new stable of men’s magazines. In 1999, when I was trying to decide where to go to college, a naked image of the children’s-television presenter Gail Porter was projected onto the Houses of Parliament without Porter’s knowledge or consent in a stunt by the magazine FHM, inadvertently saying volumes about what kind of status girls my age could actually hope for. Why bother investing in an education or a career when the dominant cultural paradigm was interested only in sexual power? And the messaging worked. By 2006, according to Natasha Walter’s book Living Dolls, more than half of British girls polled in one survey said they would consider nude modeling. The previous year, female students at Pembroke College, Cambridge, posed topless for their student magazine. Out of 11 female cast members from the 2006 season of the hit British reality show Big Brother, four posed topless after leaving the show, to capitalize on their new notoriety.

It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Russell Brand had his own Big Brother connection, hosting a spin-off talk-show series about the British franchise, or that the toxic influencer Andrew Tate—currently charged in Romania with rape and sex trafficking, charges that Tate denies—also appeared on the show. Reality television from its conception relied on two things: provocation and exposure. People watched to see who would fight, who would hook up, who would crack under the pressure. The medium demanded ratings, and ratings came from finding not average people to sequester in a TV goldfish bowl, but extreme personalities who craved their own 24-hour soapbox and the promise of instant notoriety. Sex has always been the subtext of the series—I vividly remember the tabloid press’s frame-by-frame analysis in 2004 when two Big Brother contestants supposedly became the first people to have intercourse on the show. (By way of encouragement, and to emphasize how invested people were in this new television frontier, Playboy TV offered a £50,000 prize at the time to anyone bold enough to do so.)

And so Big Brother was a natural forum for Brand. The Dispatches documentary shows him pulling his trousers down while sitting on a female interviewee’s lap, and running down the street after a man in urine-soaked underwear asking for a “cuddle,” among other antics—employing blatant, aggressive sexuality as his defining comedic mode. He was so open about who he was—writing about his heroin addiction and sex addiction in his memoir, flaunting his status as a sex pest on TV, and later in movies—that it’s astonishing now to see how much he actually seems to have gotten away with. Since the Times and Dispatches reporting emerged, attention has focused on internal inquiries from the BBC (where Brand had a radio show from 2005 to 2008) and Channel 4, which hosted Big Brother, to examine whether complaints about Brand were made at the time. But this feels rather beside the point given how much evidence already exists in the public domain. Brand’s raptorial sexuality was his personality, his unique selling point, and for a very long time he was handsomely rewarded for it. If people really want to reckon with the legacy of such strikingly recent cultural misogyny, in other words, it’s best not to comfort themselves too soon with the idea that Brand was in any way an anomaly.

When I first spoke with Alden Whitman, the chief obituary writer for The New York Times from 1964 to 1976, I was stunned to hear him say that he did not expect to live much longer. I didn’t reply, thinking that this 52-year-old man must be kidding—he was being melodramatic or had spent so much time writing about death that the subject was consuming him.

“I’m really not well,” he continued softly. “I’ve recently returned from eight weeks at Knickerbocker Hospital following a major heart attack, and I’m concerned that the next experience could be fatal.”

He was sitting on a sofa across from me in the living room of his apartment on the 12th floor of an old brick building on West 116th Street. We were surrounded by shelves packed with books, and there were even more books stacked below on the floor. He shared the apartment with his third wife, Joan, 16 years his junior. They had met seven years earlier, in 1958, at the Times, where she was an editor in the Style department.

I was interviewing Whitman for Esquire, my first profile in a series on reporters and editors, and part of my long-standing interest in writing about “nobodies.” The term media was not yet such a popular part of the lexicon as it would become later, sparked by Watergate. Editors generally assumed that there was not a great deal of general interest in, nor much of a market for, lengthy stories about journalistic endeavors and personalities. Indeed, journalists were not supposed to have personalities. Who they were, what they thought, how they felt was deemed irrelevant. They were coverers, copyists, and the scriveners of other people’s doings and deeds. Yet, knowing them as I did, I believed that they had personal and professional stories to tell that were as worthy of attention as the stories of the so-called news makers whose names and photographs appeared every day in the paper.

[Read: Click here if you want to be sad]

Before becoming the chief obituary writer, Whitman had been a copy editor for the newspaper. I never talked to him when I worked there in the mid-1950s, but the time I saw him in the cafeteria stuck in my memory. He was a short, stout man who’d walked in smoking a pipe and bearing a serious, if not dour, expression that contrasted with his sprightly attire. He was wearing a red polka-dot bow tie, a yellow pinstriped shirt, and a rakish double-vented tan hacking jacket. After selecting his food at the counter, he walked to an unoccupied corner table and began reading for the next half hour, carefully feeding himself with one hand while holding his newspaper with the other, positioning it within an inch or two of his nose and then squinting at it through his horn-rimmed glasses.

Despite what Whitman had just told me, he did not look like a dying man. He was much as I remembered him from the cafeteria—jaunty in a colorful bow tie, puffing a pipe, no signs of emaciation, weariness, or inattentiveness. He spoke in a strong and clearly modulated tone of voice, and his manner was as casual when discussing his ailments as it had been when he had greeted me earlier and asked if I’d like something to drink.

As I sat across from him, pen in hand, I could hardly believe what was happening. Here I was doing what he usually did, having an antemortem interview with a candidate presumably ready for a funeral. I had heard that Whitman had already written dozens of advance obituaries of noteworthy elderly people, who in some cases he had traveled great distances to meet in person and describe at close range before it was too late—Charlie Chaplin, for example, and Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, Charles Lindbergh, Francisco Franco, and the British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow, who was known to have referred to Whitman as the Times ghoul.

Although he was an isolated member of the reportorial staff, the only one whose published writing did not carry bylines, Whitman nonetheless possessed considerable arbitrary power within the paper. It was primarily up to him to decide who was, and who was not, newsworthy enough to warrant an obituary. In Whitman’s world, the recently deceased was either a “somebody” or a “nobody.”

Growing up in a small town on the Jersey Shore in the late 1940s, I dreamed of someday working for a great newspaper. But I did not necessarily want to write news. News was ephemeral and it accentuated the negative. It was largely concerned with what went wrong yesterday rather than what went right. Much of it was, in Bob Dylan’s words, “good-for-nothing news.” Or it was “gotcha journalism,” in which reporters with tape recorders got public figures to make fools of themselves trying to answer tricky questions.

Nevertheless, news continues to be made every day based on the statements and activities of newsworthy people—politicians, bankers, business leaders, artists, entertainers, and athletes. Other people are ignored unless they’ve been involved in a crime or a scandal, or suffered an accidental or violent death. If they have lived lawfully and uneventfully, and died of natural causes, obituary editors do not assign reporters to write about them. They are not newsworthy. They are essentially nobodies. I wanted to specialize in writing about nobodies.

Harold Hayes, the editor of Esquire, liked my pitch for a series of articles on reporters, copy editors, and editors with whom I had worked in the newsroom at The New York Times. In 1965, he offered me a contract to write about my Times people, as well as other subjects of his choosing, while being guaranteed an annual salary of $15,000.

On the downside, however, I had to please Hayes occasionally by interviewing a movie star or other celebrity. When he proposed that I write about Frank Sinatra, I tried to talk him out of it. I reminded him that there had already been several recently published pieces about Sinatra, and I wondered what more could be said about him. I preferred to not write about celebrities because I knew from experience that few of them had much respect for writers, they were often late for interviews (if they showed up at all), and they regularly insisted that their press agents or attorneys sit in on interviews and review the articles prior to publication.

I would never agree to this kind of review, nor would any newspaper or magazine of which I was aware, including Esquire, but Hayes still desired a big piece about Sinatra in his magazine and wanted me to do it. He reasoned that it was only fair that I sometimes try to help him increase newsstand sales with celebrity covers since he was allowing me to publish stories about journalists whom few Esquire readers had ever heard of, like Alden Whitman. We eventually came to an agreement. I would write about Sinatra if he published my story on Whitman first.

From his start as chief obituary writer, Whitman expanded the scope of the assignment beyond the practices of his predecessors. The older Times staffers had produced advance obituaries largely based on information obtained from news clippings; or, if the subject was a very prominent individual, there might be magazine profiles or even biographies and autobiographies upon which to draw.

Whitman convinced the top editors to allow him to travel around the nation and abroad in order to conduct face-to-face interviews that provided closely observed details: For example, after meeting with Pablo Picasso at the artist’s studio in Paris, he wrote that Picasso “was a short, squat man with broad, muscular shoulders and arms. He was most proud of his small hands and feet and of his hairy chest. In old age his body was firm and compact; and his cannonball head, which was almost bald, gleamed like bronze.”

After compiling a list of people he hoped to interview, Whitman would write them flattering letters explaining that the Times wished to update its files on the lives of such distinguished individuals as themselves, seeking their biographical insights and reflections, and therefore a request was being made for a brief personal visit. Although there was no mention of advance obituary or death in these letters, nor was it explained that such interviews were slated for posthumous publication, the letter’s purpose was still fairly obvious to most recipients; and, indeed, after being granted an interview in Missouri with Harry Truman, Alden was greeted by the former president with: “I know why you’re here, and I want to help you all I can.”

Though there were some who turned down the interview request—for example, the writer and literary critic Edmund Wilson, the French minister of culture André Malraux, and Viscount Bernard Law Montgomery, the British World War II general— Whitman himself refused to interview many people who were not sufficiently notable. Who did, and who did not, meet the “notability” standard was largely his decision. The editors and reporters in the news department devoted their days to the coverage of the living, while it was his prerogative to deal as he wished with the dead and the almost dead.

He also made it clear—in a statement published in the monthly trade-news magazine Editor & Publisher—that he was not receptive to any solicitations from public-relations firms or from other influence peddlers, who might have clients desiring an antemortem interview with him. “This is strictly a business where we call you, don’t call us,” he said, adding, “The Times will place its own value on an obit, and I refuse to talk with anyone who calls up to suggest that so-and-so, still living, would make an interesting obit, and I can have an interview … I simply refuse to speak with anybody trying to guarantee immortality before he dies.”

In completing my own interview with Whitman for Esquire, one of my final questions concerned his own termination, especially because during our time together he had emphasized his failing health. As I wrote in the article:

“But what will happen to you, then, after you die, Mr. Whitman?” I asked.

“I have no soul that is going anywhere,” he said. “It is simply a matter of bodily extinction.”

“If you had died during your heart attack, what, in your opinion, would have been the first thing your wife would have done?”

“She would first have seen to it that my body was disposed of in the way I wanted,” he said. “To be cremated without fuss or fanfare.”

“And then what?”

“Then, after she’d gotten to that, she would have turned her attention to the children.”

“And then?”

“Then, I guess, she would have broken down and had a good cry.”

“Are you sure?”

Whitman paused.

“Yes, I would assume so,” he said finally, puffing on his pipe. “This is the formal outlet for grief under such circumstances.”

Three months after I had finished interviewing him, my article about Whitman appeared in the February 1966 issue of Esquire. Hayes, the editor, liked it and published it under the title “Mr. Bad News,” with the subtitle “Death, as it must to all men, comes to Alden Whitman every day. It’s a living.”

I began the piece by re-creating a scene that Joan had described during our lunch:

“Winston Churchill gave you your heart attack,” the wife of the obituary writer said, but the obituary writer, a short and rather shy man, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and smoking a pipe, shook his head and replied, very softly, “No, it was not Winston Churchill.”

“Then T. S. Eliot gave you your heart attack,” she quickly added, lightly, for they were at a small dinner party in New York and the others seemed amused.

“No,” the obituary writer said, again softly, “it was not T. S. Eliot.”

If he was at all irritated by his wife’s line of questioning, her assertion that writing lengthy obituaries for the New York Times under deadline pressure might be speeding him to his own grave, he did not show it, did not raise his voice; but then he rarely does.

The article drew a favorable reaction from the magazine’s subscribers as well as from some top editors at the Times, and they soon reversed the paper’s anonymity rule for obit writing and began attaching Whitman’s byline to his work. As he continued to produce his well-written and informative memorials, he became a mini celebrity within the journalism profession and subsequently took a bow in front of millions of viewers while discussing his job with Johnny Carson on NBC’s The Tonight Show.

He not only continued to write obituaries for the next 10 years, but he also contributed book reviews and conducted interviews for the paper over lunches with many well-known novelists and poets; he usually showed up wearing a cape. He also had his photograph taken by Jill Krementz, who specialized in shooting literary figures and was the wife of the writer Kurt Vonnegut.

In 1976, he left the Times. Others would inherit his position, of course, although none would be so singularly identified with it. With his retirement, Joan quit her job in the Style department and the two of them moved to Southampton, Long Island, where she hired college students to read books and newspapers daily to her husband. She meanwhile worked as a freelance book editor, co-authored a few books on cooking, and helped edit big best-selling books written by a Times food critic.

[George Packer: I wish my friend could have read her own obituary]

Whitman died of a stroke in 1990. The Times published a 23-paragraph obituary accompanied by his picture and the headline “Alden Whitman Is Dead at 76; Made an Art of Times Obituaries.” It carried no byline.

This article has been adapted from Gay Talese’s book Bartleby and Me: Reflections of an Old Scrivener.

When my 76-year-old dad was a child—he doesn’t remember exactly what age—his mother handed him over to her best friend, a woman he called Aunt Edith, in exchange for $10,000. Some details are murky: He doesn’t know whose idea it was or how long the arrangement was meant to last. He does know he lived with Edith, who had no kids of her own and loved my dad like a son, for a year or two, and that she wholeheartedly endorsed the project because his mother, an alcoholic, couldn’t seem to “keep herself together,” as my dad put it.

Our family has a black-and-white photo of him from one Halloween when he was living with Edith, in the early 1950s; he’s wearing a robot costume she helped him make out of boxes and tin. The costume won him first prize in a local contest—$10, a fortune then for a little boy. When he talks about it now, his voice crests with pleasure. Living with Edith was unequivocally good, even if the notion of exchanging cash for a kid sounds contemptible. I remember her as a very old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s who recognized only one person: my dad.

In Loved and Missed, the seventh novel from the British writer Susie Boyt (it’s her first published in America, where she’s at what I think of as a Tessa Hadley level of fame), a similar swap is made. Ruth, a genteel literature teacher living on a dodgy street in London, sells her only family heirloom—a Walter Sickert sketch—and brings the £4,000 it nets to the christening of her granddaughter, Lily. “I don’t know if I’m good and I don’t know if I’m evil,” she narrates, “But I knew what I wanted.” She hands the envelope full of cash to her daughter, Eleanor, a drug addict who shows up to the church with beer cans tucked into the baby’s pram, and assures her that she’ll take Lily off her hands for a while so she can rest. Eleanor understands what Ruth is offering—a permanent, or at least long-term, pseudo-adoption—and tacitly approves. Unlike my dad, whose mother returned to claim him after a while, Lily is never restored to her mother’s care. Instead, she lives in companionable amity with Ruth, their small lives buoyant with simple pleasure.

That’s right, pleasure. Enough to disarm even the most cynical readers. Loved and Missed bottles up those fleeting, blissful moments of child-rearing and spritzes each page liberally with their scent. The happiness Boyt describes is so infectious that you want it to last, for your own sake; it isn’t often that readers of literary fiction float along in such placid waters. Ruth describes her and Lily’s simple habits, such as their cozy evenings dunking biscuits into tea on the couch, or a cheap vacation spent breaststroking in the Balearic Sea, as “the mad celebrations afforded by ordinary time.” “It was like being God or the Queen,” she explains. “The luxurious sensation as I arranged myself next to her in the cool sheets at night, taking care not to wake her, the quiet joy almost inexpressible. I was a professional gambler on a lucky streak. I loved the simple rubbing-along with another person, friendliness, a calm and busy rhythm, lustre and life cheer.”

The two of them amble through their small existence, one filled with homemade cornflower-blue cardigans and shared lemon sorbet. Ruth is a beloved teacher at a girls’ high school, and she vows to bring Lily up with a kind of bountiful rigor: “Lily was not going to have a poultice childhood, a mending service, scrappy and provisional. I wouldn’t step in. She was going to get the most anyone could give.” And so Ruth narrates as Lily grows up in “the thick swoon of it … synchronised breathing, warm tessellated limbs,” followed by childhood birthday parties and the move to secondary school. Heaviness—Eleanor—sits behind a curtain, and Ruth lets us peek at it, but it’s outrageous, really, how engrossing this novel can be even when its two main characters defy narrative convention and bask in their contentment.

The parenting novel is usually a place to let it all out: the drudgery, the indignity, the identity-snatching abasement of sacrificing a life of the mind, of the bar, of the lie-in, for the penal colony of toy-straightening and carrot-steaming. Writers going back at least to Mary Shelley have agonized over the monstrousness of creating a life only to have it devour their own. Works such as Frankenstein and Rosemary’s Baby made their offspring devilish, as if only the most inhuman of children could cause a mother grief. In her 1988 domestic horror novel, The Fifth Child, Doris Lessing describes the loathsome baby Ben as “muscular, yellowish, long,” with “hard cold alien eyes,” to distance him from the other, “real” children. The problems he causes aren’t the work of tantrums or picky eating; he strangles a dog and bends a schoolmate’s arm until it breaks. His own siblings lock their doors from the inside at night, afraid of what he might do.

[Read: The parenting prophecy]

When Rachel Cusk published her memoir A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother in 2001, the tenor of the conversation shifted from monstrous children to the everyday but not less fraught realm of raising any child. Cusk wrote openly—and now famously—about the irreconcilable internal divisions of motherhood. “When she,” meaning any mother, “is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself; and so it is as difficult to leave your children as it is to stay with them. To discover this is to feel that your life has become irretrievably mired in conflict, or caught in some mythic snare in which you will perpetually, vainly struggle.” Struggle became, finally, not just the defining emotion of parenting, but also the most public.

The generation of mommy bloggers and online forums that came next further opened the pressure valve on all the stresses and affronts of contemporary child-rearing. Suddenly, venting was de rigueur, a relief after centuries (perhaps millennia) of tight lips. Fiction and the real world are porous, and novelists were emboldened to chart the daily pitfalls of bringing up baby, especially the need for mothers to Stretch Armstrong themselves into a crossbreed of camp counselor/cruise-ship director/housekeeper/breadwinner/nag of all trades.

As a result, the first two decades of the 21st century have produced a glut of novels obsessed with the stifling banality and identity-effacing nature of parenting, a state of being exacerbated in America by a lack of government help and impossible societal standards. These kinds of novels have kept me company for my own six and a half years so far as a mother: Cusk’s The Bradshaw Variations and Lynn Steger Strong’s Want; Jessica Winter’s The Fourth Child, which reorients Lessing’s novel in 1990s New York; Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble; Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch; Sheila Heti’s Motherhood; Elisa Albert’s After Birth; the resurgence of the Danish author Tove Ditlevsen’s writing; and the forthcoming My Work, by Olga Ravn. Happiness sometimes lunges out of the background of these novels, but struggle and discomfort are their watchwords.

Loved and Missed inverts that ratio. This is a novel about happiness as the predominant mode. From the start, Lily is a pink-cheeked wonder, the kind of baby who is described as “her usual irreproachable self” at seven months old. She grows up angelic, a sensible child who falls asleep to radio broadcasts about “low-level domestic disasters: how to get red wine out of pale carpets and upholstry, how to make your ageing grouting gleam” and applies herself dutifully to her studies. Ruth never so much as hints about Lily slamming a door or giving cheek.

Eleanor, we learn, started off much like Lily, alone with a single mother and “very nurturing to me when she was little,” Ruth recounts, “looking out for me when I was really struggling, taking the temperature of my days. She was so dutiful.” She goes on, “I should have stopped it.” The implication—one that must follow every parent—is that Ruth can’t know how much of Eleanor’s potholed life path is the result of her own shortcomings as a mother, her inability to recognize when she was asking too much of her child. Eleanor is now a specter. She comes round every few months, thin and shabby in holey sweaters, her arms pinpricked and scabbed from her addiction. She refuses contact unless it’s on her terms, dismisses pats on the shoulder, and leaves Ruth with the feeling that her efforts are repellent: “I had the wrong kind of patience, the wrong kind of sentimentality as far as Eleanor was concerned.” Ruth initially rejects the idea that “having Lily compensated me in various ways for losing Eleanor,” but as time shakes on, she can’t quite determine whether her second go at raising a child is a form of atonement. “I couldn’t keep on trying to balance the equations all the time,” she resolves to herself, “that my care had equalled what she was living.” Because if her careful love still resulted in Eleanor, she seems to wonder, could it also sour Lily? Hidden underneath is a desperate question about parenthood: What if our best efforts are ultimately meaningless?

[Read: The gravitational pull of supervising kids all the time]

Regret, then, might actually be what keeps Ruth angling toward bliss. Loved and Missed slips out of time like memory really does; Ruth’s disheartening recollections about Eleanor emerge in the midst of dishwashing or teatime. She relates the story of the first time Eleanor stayed out all night, how a few weeks after she turned 13, “she swung her love away from me.” But the melancholy is threaded into a pattern with joy. Ruth recalls the second time she visited Eleanor during a short stint in prison: “She had filled out a bit. She had these little cheeks. Sunlight ran over our table and onto the floor of the visitors’ centre. I could sit here like this for the rest of my life, I thought.” When Ruth stood to leave, Eleanor dismissed her: “I’ll just see you on the out now, Mum.”  

Ruth and Lily’s relationship is perhaps given extra sheen by Ruth’s boastful narration; until the last quarter of the novel, we are left to speculate whether she is sugarcoating their bliss for her own peace of mind. And there is a general air of suspicion these days that anyone’s happiness is a delusion or a cover-up. (Ruth too is dismissive of another mother’s alleged “peace” when her own addicted child dies: “I wanted to hit her,” she thinks. “She was inhuman.”) But in the final bit of the novel, Ruth grows ill, and suddenly, unexpectedly, the narration shifts to Lily’s point of view. When Ruth isn’t nearby, Lily is still sensible and charming, gracious and generous—if a little more human than Ruth ever colors her. She revels in the snacks that Ruth’s friend Jean offers her, “macaroons and shortbread, Cadbury’s chocolate fingers, tins of Coke, cucumber and carrot sticks,” as if the world is a place of marvels. And she proves that Ruth’s efforts to raise her right have worked: By nature or nurture, Lily has turned out gorgeously. Joy is spread out there too, like luminous, well-buttered toast.

Perhaps this isn’t what we need out of every book that depicts parents, a hit of rapture so potent that we might overdose. But Boyt, who has probably experienced her own share of family drama—she’s the daughter of the painter Lucian Freud, one of his 14 acknowledged children from at least six women—doesn’t subscribe to the notion that it all comes out in the wash. Regret and joy are an indivisible duo for any mother or father, and Boyt wisely mixes them into a beautifully humane chronicle. With this exquisite devotional of a novel, she has turned the ability to find contentment in the muck of parenthood into a courageous art form.