A fiction-within-a-fiction My Life as a Man centres on the fraught marriage of Peter a gifted young writer and Maureen Tarnopol the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead becomes his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and powered by moral blackmail. And yet the the couples relationship is so perversely durable that long after Maureens death Peter is still trying - and failing - to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and scorching truths acts of weakness and shocking cruelty Philip Roth creates a fierce tragedy about a fatal impasse between a man and a woman.