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.

A year-long challenge is seeing a London 14-year-old create flags of the world using Rubik’s Cubes.

Like most politicians, former President Donald Trump marked the occasion of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, by passing along holiday greetings to American Jews. Unlike most politicians, Trump used the opportunity to threaten them.

On Sunday evening, just as Rosh Hashanah was coming to a close, Trump posted a meme on his social-media platform, Truth Social, excoriating “liberal Jews” who had “voted to destroy America.” (Majorities of American Jews have voted for Democrats since before World War II.) “Let’s hope you learned from your mistake,” the caption continued, “and make better choices going forward!”

Trump’s Rosh Hashanah broadside was far from the first time that he had shared objectionable sentiments about Jewish people. But it was particularly ugly in the way it deliberately singled out a specific constituency during that constituency’s holiest season. As the conservative writer Philip Klein wrote in National Review, “Color me skeptical that Trump’s defenders would be so understanding if Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer were to post a Merry Christmas message … blaming Christian conservatives for destroying America because they didn’t vote for Democrats.”

[Read: Why Trump can’t answer questions about anti-Semitism]

But while Trump’s message may be offensive, it is also instructive, because it reflects the way that many people think about Jews. Some anti-Semites treat Jewish people as a menacing monolith that suborns society to its sinister ends. But others divide the community into “good Jews,” who warrant respect and provisional protection, and “bad Jews,” who can be subjected to all manner of abuse. In this construction, the righteous Jews are those who affirm the bigot and support his worldview, while the unworthy ones are those who stubbornly refuse to get with the program. Like other minorities, the Jewish minority is expected to conform to the preferences of a dominant majority culture—whether that is political or religious—and those who dissent become fair game for denunciation and discrimination.

Sometimes, as in Trump’s case, this distinction between good Jews and bad ones is made along partisan lines. In other instances, bigots draw the line geographically between the Jews in Israel and those outside it, with one community venerated and the other denigrated. This is why former Republican Congressman Steve King pointed to his support for Israel when criticized over his sympathy for the white nationalists who assail Jews in North America. For the same reason, Ken Livingstone, the socialist former mayor of London and inveterate critic of the Jewish state, infamously insisted that “a real anti-Semite doesn’t just hate the Jews in Israel.” For a certain type of bigot, the fact that they deprecate only the right kind of Jews means they cannot be a bigot.

This Semitic sorting never ends well, because justifications for abusing Jews have a way of metastasizing. Permission structures for anti-Semitism are rarely restricted to their original target. Once a society starts accepting attacks on entire swaths of Jews—for being too liberal, too religious, too secular, too pro-Israel, too anti-Israel, too whatever—that acceptance will grow. And when Jewish existence becomes conditional on staying in the good graces of a non-Jewish actor or movement, it becomes an impoverished existence—provisional and precarious, forever looking over its shoulder.

[James Kirchick: Leave Jews out of it]

This is why true friends of the Jewish people don’t pick which half of the world’s Jews are the good ones and which half are the bad ones, like some sort of anti-Semitic Santa Claus. They do not paint millions of Jewish people with Manichaean moral strokes, but rather grant them the dignity of their diversity and judge individuals as individuals, not as avatars for their group. Those who, like Trump and King, make lists of bad Jews or suggest that Jews aren’t proper Jews if they don’t adopt a certain ideology are not allies of the Jews. They’re the people laying the groundwork for persecution.

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.