Because the way people treat you when they think you are worthless is the only honest measure of their character, uncontaminated by self-interest.

Anyone can be warm toward a director married to a titan.

I wanted to know how they treated the daughter they believed was a failure in a cubicle.

Their answer, poured down my dress in front of three hundred people, was the truest thing they ever told me.

And I had needed to hear it, unmistakably, before I could let them go.

Chapter 4 — Table 21