You Don't Have to Live Like This (36 page)

BENJAMIN MARKOVITS
grew up in Texas, London, Oxford and Berlin. He left an unpromising career as a professional basketball player to study the Romantics—an experience he wrote about in
Playing Days
, a fictional memoir forthcoming from Harper Perennial. He has written essays, stories, and reviews for, among other publications,
The New York Times
,
Granta
,
The Guardian
,
London Review of Books
and
The Paris Review
. The author of six novels, including a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron, he was a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and won a Pushcart Prize in 2009.
Granta
selected him as one of the Best of Young British Novelists in 2013. Markovits lives in London and is married, with a daughter and a son.

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Childish Loves

A Quiet Adjustment

Imposture

Playing Days

Fathers and Daughters

The Syme Papers

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO LIVE LIKE THIS
. Copyright © 2015 by Benjamin Markovits. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

A portion of this novel appeared, in slightly different form, in the Spring 2013 issue of
Granta
.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Markovits, Benjamin.

  You don’t have to live like this : a novel / Benjamin Markovits. —First edition.

      pages ; cm

  “A portion of this novel appeared, in slightly different form, in the Spring 2013 issue of
Granta
.”

  ISBN 978-0-06-237660-2 (hardback) 1. Psychological fiction. I. Title. II. Title: You do not have to live like this.

  PS3613.A7543Y68 2015

  813’.6—dc23

2014042021

EPub Edition July 2015 ISBN 9780062376626

15 16 17 18 19    
OV
/
RRD
   10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1