This is a book about dissolution, in all the senses of the word. Lawyers call a divorce a "dissolution," and there's a divorce in here, although a rather anticlimactic one. And some people say you're "dissolute" if they think that you're morally not quite up to par, and, well, there's a lot of that in here too, mostly with me at its center. But "dissolution" is the noun form of the verb "dissolve." Moviemakers use a "dissolve" to transition from one scene to the next, so that they can jump all around their story, sometimes to things that seem irrelevant at the time but that start to make more sense as the movie progresses. And physicists mean "dissolve" to mean the softening of edges, the loss of boundaries, the point where the lump of sugar becomes smaller and smaller, and then the sugar is liquid, and then the water is sweet. And that's really what this book is about: dissolving, dissolution, solution. Edges softening, edges disappearing, edges so far gone that you realize they never existed and that you're standing like Wile E Coyote in midair.

Don't worry, you'll only fall if you think too much about how you got there in the first place.