in The Fourth Trimester author Kimberly Ann Johnson argues that what gets diagnosed as postpartum depression is often just the emotional fallout from women having zero social and spousal support at an unbelievably demanding time. i can confirm from the POV of the man that we do expect to be able to be children forever and that we never want to get bored or make hard choices; if I didn't have a huge mental shift in my twenties I'd be there still. I've read so many books like The Dry Heart this year alone and I think it's because women, without having experienced the galactic selfishness that is being a man, are horrified to realize just how empty their husbands and lovers are and put it into lit. so if Ginzburg’s novel is of a kind with Woman at Point Zero or Days of Abandonment it is because they are the literary counterpoint of the one million novels like Stoner that are about men feeling kind of sad and having affairs. two groups working through the same issue, one with surprise and dread, one with wilful obliviousness to their own evil.