“I’m getting out of a marriage to a woman who wouldn’t let me pee standing up. I have some healing to do”. The eminently quotable Toby Fleishman is a 41-year-old successful hepatologist in a Manhattan hospital, father of two, ginormous disappointment to his ex-wife Rachel, and a newly-single dating app junkie.
The novel of the same name, an extraordinary debut by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, was published in 2019 and it translates superbly to screen. Jesse Eisenberg is well cast as Toby, delivering the erudite, witty and carefully considered dialogue in his dork-charm style. The screenplay is amped up by the cast which also includes Claire Danes, Adam Brody and Lizzy Caplan, who plays his old friend Libby – also the narrator.
Toby Fleishman is our damaged, yet ever so slightly superior hero. The chasm between ‘poor Toby’ and ‘evil Rachel’ seems initially reflected in their children– sweet, sensitive, kind Solly, and Hannah, whose cutting looks clearly mean “You f***ing idiot”.
The first time we see Rachel is when she gets a last-minute slot on a yoga retreat and so wakes the children up at 4am, drives them to their father’s house, lets herself in and puts them to bed there. In the morning she calls him to say that the children are in the house, by the way. He’s livid, they are exhausted. We are on his side. And yet that side is unashamedly flawed.
Toby’s ode to the liver says it all: “You have to love the liver. Show me a more life-affirming organ. Look what it can recover from. We should all be more like the liver. The liver behaves in some erratic ways... but it is unique in the way it heals. It is full of forgiveness. It understands that you have a few chances before you get your life right. It doesn’t just forgive you. It practically forgets.” It’s unclear at first whether “liver” should be replaced with “Toby”, “Rachel”, or any combination of them, their lives, their relationship.
The dialogue flits between this style of almost-soliloquy, which is slightly at odds with the more realistic, sometimes awkward conversations between Libby, Toby and Seth, old college pals rekindling their very believable friendship which was only cast aside because of… you guessed it… Rachel.
It’s clear that years ago, Toby completely abandoned his old life in order to fit into Rachel’s – which he then cannot stand. It’s unclear why they were ever together in the first place. When he calls his old friend Libby, a magazine writer turned housewife in New Jersey, to say that his therapist suggested it would be healing for him to reach out to the people who he hadn’t seen since his marriage started falling apart , she wastes no time in pulling him up for not turning up to her wedding 12 years ago – and not even calling her to cancel. “I’m sorry. It was so hard… It was a nightmare. We would fight in public… I’m so sorry… I couldn’t.”
The story is overwhelmingly tragic: “I miss my children so much I might die”. On the other hand, Toby is happy to be free. He leaps into online dating, absolutely blown away by finding himself deeply desirable to women for the first time in his life.
As it flits between his old and new lives, the pacy, acerbic style makes it a joy to watch, even when it is deeply uncomfortable. My favourite line in the first episode – and there is a lot of competition – comes from Toby as he describes the moment his and Rachel’s couples therapist said that their marriage contained three of the four horsemen of the “marital apocalypse”: contempt, defensiveness, shutting down… “And being a total fucking bitch?”, Libby asks.
Subtle, this series is not. We are delivered sweeping generalisations, and cutting observations. Sometimes at the same time. One of the funniest lines weaved through the novel was Toby’s hatred of the sea of ‘Wine mom’ slogan t-shirts he is surrounded by. They make an early appearance here too, partly just in mockery, but mostly to bolster his belief that while he may be poorer than them, and living in what he describes as a “hovel” compared the palace he used to share with Rachel, he is still above them, and their meaningless ‘statements’. “Your workout is my warm-up”. “Nevertheless, she perspired”. “The future is female”.
The narrator points out that he is a successful doctor, and yet still wasn’t good enough for Rachel, as he couldn’t afford her the lifestyle she wanted.
He hated “their” friends (the husbands of Rachel’s school-friend mums are described as a “chronic condition that Toby had to manage”). He hates the life he found himself in. He possibly hates himself. And we will possibly end up hating aspects of ourselves, too. When their ‘friends’ tilt their heads, and ask concerned questions about the divorce, the questions were “never really about the Fleishmans but about their own lives. What did the Fleishman divorce say about their own marriages?”.
This was the essence of the book, and is the essence of the drama. It is a story about a man putting a mirror up to himself, his life, his family, his work, his parenting, his friends, their friends, society, coffee shops and the idiots who populate his world. And in doing so, the author holds up a mirror to us all. In laughing at this, we are also mocking ourselves. It’s what makes it both painful and brilliant.
