“Every adult life could be said to be defined by two great love stories. The first—the story of our quest for sexual love—is well known and well charted. . . . The second—the story of our quest for love from the world—is a more secret and shameful tale. And yet this second love story is no less intense than the first.”
This is a book about an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us, about whether we’re judged a success or a failure, a winner or a…





