Since graduating college at age twenty-two, Abel Green worked in a cubicle in the accounting department of the second largest shoe company in North America. At age forty he suffered a midlife crisis. Not a traditional midlife crisis, where mounting and finally intolerable dissatisfaction leads to costly and destructive behaviour—behaviour easily detectable to others—but an untraditional midlife crisis that cost him nothing except ridicule and whose real destructiveness was largely undetectable for the next ten years.
What Abel did, over the course of a single month, was tell two whopping lies, both involving carefully constructed scenarios in which something miraculous happened to him. In the first he was driving on the highway early one the morning when a truck plunged off a bridge and l
