Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Many people believe that children learn to dislike their fathers because mothers say bad things about them, but that has not been my experience. The children that I have talked with make their own observations and draw their own conclusions. They ask, Has he been a faithful father? Is he a loser in love and marriage? Can he be trusted? Only eight men and women in the entire group said they would seek their father’s advice about any aspect of a personal relationship or a family problem. A large national study reports that young adults in divorced families, very much in accord with my findings here, are angry at their fathers and are unlikely to be helpful to them as they grow old. This is a very serious issue for the future, considering how long people are living and how much they will need to turn to their children for loving care and support in their old age.4 ALMOST ALL THE young adults from divorced families in our group knew their father’s address at the twenty-five-year mark, but unlike Gary and his dad, most were not close friends. Their relationship was very different from those in the good intact families where fathers and adult sons grew closer and both valued the relationship more as the father aged. Few divorced fathers were good friends with their adult children. Fathers and sons did keep in touch and come together for important family events, such as the birth of new children, birthdays, holidays, and sometimes regular visits with grandchildren. A few fathers and sons played golf or tennis regularly. Over the years, fathers who had disappointed their children were observed from afar for any sign of increased interest in their adult children. “I think he’s beginning to mellow,” they reported. The way that adult sons were able to hold on to their hope and compassion was very moving. Some went in search of fathers they had seen only rarely and tried hard to find points in common. One thirty-year-old man remembered the airplane models that he and his dad had built together when he was a little boy. He purchased several model sets and invited his father to join him in model building in the hope that they could go back and retrieve their old ties. Sam, a thirty-one-year-old photographer, said, “I keep in touch with him. He’s getting older now and maybe more reliable. He abandoned me, I know that. But there’s no point getting sad or pissed off. People do what they have to do.”

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Billy sagged with defeat . “What does your mom say about things like that?” I wondered if Billy felt supported by his mother in any way. “That’s the whole problem!” he burst out. “She always backs him up. She never takes my side. If I tell her I don’t think he’s being fair, she just says she’ll talk it over with Tom. Then she comes back to me and tries to explain why Tom did what he did or said what he said. Or they both come in and tell me why I’m wrong. It’s like they’re both against me. I’m sick and tired of it.” I left the interview with a sense of déjà vu. It seemed to me that Billy’s family relationships had progressed very little in the five years since our last meeting. It was still just as hard for Billy to adjust to the new family circumstances and it appeared that he still was hoping that his stepfather would disappear. As before, he assessed his parents’ divorce as a tragedy that might have been averted if only they had been more mature or willing to try to work out their difficulties. I was impressed by Billy’s awareness that stealing and drug-taking were his way of retaliating for the unhappiness he felt his parents had imposed upon him. (Most adolescents who become delinquent after divorce do not make the connection between anger at their parents and their acting out. Unfortunately, many parents don’t make this connection, either. If they did, they might reach out to their children who are often lonely and depressed like Billy.) But I was troubled and somewhat mystified by Billy’s attitude toward his stepfather, Tom. From all accounts except Billy’s, Tom, a former Peace Corps volunteer and English teacher, had made consistent efforts to be an available, interested, and involved parent to Billy. After nearly five years, Billy respected Tom but still resented him and certainly didn’t seem to feel close to him. I knew from talking to Billy’s mother that she felt happier. She was very active in her younger son’s preschool, played her cello at community events and convalescent homes, and was very involved with Tom in several charitable organizations. Billy’s loyalty to his own father seemed as strong as ever, even as the real-life ties grew weaker. The father had gotten more deeply involved in his work and seemed to have little time for anyone outside the spheres of sports and restaurants. Later he told me that Billy’s stepbrother, Dave, was a “great guy” and that he hoped Billy would turn out more like Dave . The Stepfather O UR LATEST NATIONAL reports say that 25 percent of all children will spend part of their childhood in a stepfamily.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I was scared, confused, angry, and heartbroken. I’d blame large businesses for closing up shop and moving overseas, and then I’d wonder if I might have done the same thing. I’d curse our government for not helping enough, and then I’d wonder if, in its attempts to help, it actually made the problem worse. Mamaw could spew venom like a Marine Corps drill instructor, but what she saw in our community didn’t just piss her off. It broke her heart. Behind the drugs, and the fighting matches, and the financial struggles, these were people with serious problems, and they were hurting. Our neighbors had a kind of desperate sadness in their lives. You’d see it in how the mother would grin but never really smile, or in the jokes that the teenage girl told about her mother “smacking the shit out of her.” I knew what awkward humor like this was meant to conceal because I’d used it in the past. Grin and bear it, says the adage. If anyone appreciated this, Mamaw did. The problems of our community hit close to home. Mom’s struggles weren’t some isolated incident. They were replicated, replayed, and relived by many of the people who, like us, had moved hundreds of miles in search of a better life. There was no end in sight. Mamaw had thought she escaped the poverty of the hills, but the poverty—emotional, if not financial—had followed her. Something had made her later years eerily similar to her earliest ones. What was happening? What were our neighbor’s teenage daughter’s prospects? Certainly the odds were against her, with a home life like that. This raised the question: What would happen to me? I was unable to answer these questions in a way that didn’t implicate something deep within the place I called home. What I knew is that other people didn’t live like we did. When I visited Uncle Jimmy, I did not wake to the screams of neighbors. In Aunt Wee and Dan’s neighborhood, homes were beautiful and lawns well manicured, and police came around to smile and wave but never to load someone’s mom or dad in the back of their cruiser. So I wondered what was different about us—not just me and my family but our neighborhood and our town and everyone from Jackson to Middletown and beyond. When Mom was arrested a couple of years earlier, the neighborhood’s porches and front yards filled with spectators; there’s no embarrassment like waving to the neighbors right after the cops have carted your mother off. Mom’s exploits were undoubtedly extreme, but all of us had seen the show before with different neighbors. These sorts of things had their own rhythm. A mild screaming match might invite a few cracked shutters or peeking eyes behind the shades. If things escalated a bit, bedrooms would illuminate as people awoke to investigate the commotion.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Though I followed Mamaw’s lead, something inside me broke that morning. I went to school red-eyed from crying and regretful that I’d helped. A few weeks earlier, I had sat with Mom at a Chinese buffet as she tried in vain to shovel food in her mouth. It’s a memory that still makes my blood boil: Mom unable to open her eyes or close her mouth, spooning food in as it fell back on the plate. Other people stared at us, Ken was speechless, and Mom was oblivious. It was a prescription pain pill (or many of them) that had done this to her. I hated her for it and promised myself that if she ever did drugs again, I’d leave the house. The urine episode was the last straw for Mamaw, too. When I came home from school, Mamaw told me that she wanted me to stay with her permanently, with no more moving in between. Mom seemed not to care: She needed a “break,” she said, I supposed from being a mother. She and Ken didn’t last much longer. By the end of sophomore year, she had moved out of his house and I had moved in with Mamaw, never to return to the homes of Mom and her men. At least she passed her piss test. I didn’t even have to pack, because much of what I owned remained at Mamaw’s as I bounced from place to place. She didn’t approve of me taking too many of my belongings to Ken’s house, convinced that he and his kids might steal my socks and shirts. (Neither Ken nor his children ever stole from me.) Though I loved living with her, my new home tested my patience on many levels. I still harbored the insecurity that I was burdening her. More important, she was a hard woman to live with, quick-witted and sharp-tongued. If I didn’t take out the garbage, she told me to “stop being a lazy piece of shit.” When I forgot to do my homework, she called me “shit for brains” and reminded me that unless I studied, I’d amount to nothing. She demanded that I play card games with her—usually gin rummy—and she never lost. “You are the worst fucking cardplayer I’ve ever met,” she’d gloat. (That one didn’t make me feel bad: She said it to everyone she beat, and she beat everyone at gin rummy.) Years later, every single one of my relatives—Aunt Wee, Uncle Jimmy, even Lindsay—repeated some version of “Mamaw was really hard on you. Too hard.” There were three rules in her house: Get good grades, get a job, and “get off your ass and help me.” There was no set chore list; I just had to help her with whatever she was doing. And she never told me what to do—she just yelled at me if she did anything and I wasn’t helping. But we had a lot of fun.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  “I’ve lost him, and you’re not making this any easier!” Mom had always had a temper, though, so I dismissed even this. Mom seemed bothered that anyone but her was grieving. Aunt Wee’s grief was unjustified, because Mom and Papaw had a special bond. So, too, was Mamaw’s, for she didn’t even like Papaw and chose not to live under the same roof. Lindsay and I needed to get over ourselves, for it was Mom’s father, not ours, who had just died. The first indication that our lives were about to change came one morning when I woke and strolled over to Mom’s house, where I knew Lindsay and Mom were sleeping. I went first to Lindsay’s room, but she was asleep in my room instead. I knelt beside her, woke her up, and she hugged me tightly. After a little while, she said earnestly, “We’ll get through this, J.”—that was her nickname for me—“I promise.” I still have no idea why she slept in my room that night, but I would soon learn what she promised we’d get through. A few days after the funeral, I walked onto Mamaw’s front porch, looked down the street, and saw an incredible commotion. Mom was standing in a bath towel in her front yard, screaming at the only people who truly loved her: to Matt, “You’re a fucking loser nobody”; to Lindsay, “You’re a selfish bitch, he was my dad, not yours, so stop acting like you just lost your father”; to Tammy, her unbelievably kind friend who was secretly gay, “The only reason you act like my friend is because you want to fuck me.” I ran over and begged Mom to calm down, but by then a police cruiser was already on the scene. I arrived on the front porch as a police officer grabbed Mom’s shoulders and she collapsed on the ground, struggling and kicking. Then the officer grabbed Mom and carried her to the cruiser, and she fought the whole way. There was blood on the porch, and someone said that she had tried to cut her wrists. I don’t think the officer arrested her, though I don’t know what happened. Mamaw arrived on the scene and took Lindsay and me with her. I remember thinking that if Papaw were here, he would know what to do. Papaw’s death cast light upon something that had previously lurked in the shadows. Only a kid could have missed the writing on the wall, I suppose. A year earlier, Mom had lost her job at Middletown Hospital after Rollerblading through the emergency room. At the time I saw Mom’s bizarre behavior as the consequence of her divorce from Bob. Similarly, Mamaw’s occasional references to Mom “getting loaded” seemed like random comments of a woman known for her willingness to say anything, not a diagnosis of a deteriorating reality. Not long after Mom lost her job, during my trip to California, I heard from her just once.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  They have less capital to draw on because their earlier absence and the child’s lasting anger stands in the way. The child feels that the parent has not earned the right to lay down rules. “Where were you when I needed you?” becomes a battle cry between them. The child’s anger at the parent for particular past deprivations is reignited by the adolescent’s resentment of parents in general. All teenagers need to separate from their parents and identify with peers, but children of divorce carry out this natural rejection with special intensity. One young woman, who led a wild adolescence, captured the fusing of past and present feelings when she said, “My mother has never been there for me. She reacts to what she thinks is my bad behavior but she just feels bad because she fucked me up. How can I respect what she tells me? Why should I?” In many of the divorced families, girls did not receive the special protection we saw in intact families. Few had curfews or special regulations to report in. If they did, these were honored more in the breach than in the practice. In our comparison group, the boys were rebellious and used nearly as much alcohol and drugs as boys in divorced families. The two groups looked a lot alike with one important difference: boys in the intact families were keenly aware of their parents’ expectations. Their acting out was muted by their plans to attend college and their recognition that they needed their parents’ help. All this placed limits on their misbehavior. Most of their wilder acting out ended by their second year of college. The girls in intact families, in contrast, had a different kind of adolescence than their peers from divorced families. They had strictly enforced curfews that they mostly obeyed. Their weekends were carefully monitored. Right or wrong, parents were much more controlling. Although the parents did not expect their daughters to be virgins at high school graduation, they did insist on knowing their whereabouts and they expected to be kept informed of any changes in plans. Boys and girls were both expected home for dinner every night unless they had been excused by a parent. They were expected to call when late. In brief, there was a structure in these middle-class homes that the young people could butt up against and defy.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  But I was always glad to come home to Mom and my step. He wasn’t as exciting as Dad but we needed something solid after chasing rainbows with Dad all weekend.” Obviously a happy, stable remarriage has enormous economic, social, and psychological advantages for the couple and the children. Children raised in good remarriages and who feel loved and protected are indeed fortunate. But they are not in a majority. National studies find no significant differences between the psychological and learning problems of children raised in single-parent or remarried families. 4 It appears that the advantages of remarriage, including having more economic resources, are counterbalanced by the high potential for conflict and emotional difficulties seen in so many remarried families. Not everyone can achieve harmony in a newly formed quartet. Who Takes Responsibility? W HEN I CALLED Billy’s mother to arrange our ten-year follow-up visit, she told me that Billy had moved out. “I can give you his address and his phone number, but Judy, we haven’t seen him in over a year. He left when he was sixteen to live with his father. Well, that was a disaster. Billy ended up living alone in Fred’s new house in Palo Alto and trying to go to high school. I begged Billy to come back here for his senior year, but it didn’t help that the baby had moved into Billy’s room. After six months Billy moved into an apartment upstairs from the restaurant where he works. He’s lived there ever since. I honestly think he’s rejected us.” National reports tell us that children in remarriages leave home earlier than children in intact families. 5 Many feel unloved, unwanted, and excluded from the new family orbit. Some are very angry at their mothers and stepfathers. One young man said, “I was a hindrance—the leftover from a marriage that died.” The angriest were boys in their teens who were bitter about what they regarded as harsh discipline imposed unfairly by their stepfathers and mothers. I was frankly surprised to find the anger alive among a group of these young men years later. One thirty-year-old man who left home at age sixteen told me, “I was arrested for drunk driving the day after my best friend was killed. It was my first arrest ever. My mom and stepfather came to court like vigilantes and told the judge to throw the book at me. That’s when I moved out.” He said chillingly, “I’ll never forgive her as long as I live.”

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  “We were working together all that day. We both worked at the NAPA auto parts store last November. I remember that Saturday when that girl was killed because ambulances and police started racing up the street. It went on for like thirty minutes. I’d been working in town for a couple of years and had never seen anything like it.” “You were working on the Saturday morning that Ronda Morrison was killed?” “Yes, sir, with Bill Hooks from about eight in the morning till we closed after lunch, after all them ambulances went by our shop. It was probably close to eleven when the sirens started. Bill was working on a car in the shop with me. There ain’t but one way out the store; he never left the entire morning. If he said he drove by the cleaners when that girl was killed, he’s lying.” One of the most frustrating things about reading Walter’s trial record had been that the State’s witnesses—Ralph Myers, Bill Hooks, and Joe Hightower—were so obviously not believable. Their testimony was laughably inconsistent and completely lacking in credibility. Myers’s account of his role in the crime—Walter kidnapping him to drive him to the crime scene and then dropping him off afterward—never made any sense. Hooks, a critical witness against McMillian, wasn’t persuasive or reliable in the transcript—he just repeated the same story he’d given the police about driving by the cleaners at the time of the crime. His response to every line of questioning was to repeat over and over again that he saw Walter McMillian walk out of the store with a bag, get into his “low-rider” truck, and get driven away by a white man. He could not answer any of Chestnut’s questions about what else he saw that day or what he was doing in the area. He just kept repeating that he saw McMillian at the cleaners. But the state needed Hooks’s testimony. My plan had been to immediately appeal Walter’s conviction to the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals. The State had done so little to prove Walter’s guilt that there weren’t a lot of legal issues to appeal, but the evidence against him was so unpersuasive that I was hopeful the court might overturn the conviction simply because it was so unreliable. Once the case was on direct appeal, no new evidence would be considered. The time for filing a motion for a new trial in the trial court—the last chance to introduce new facts before an appeal begins—had already expired. Chestnut and Boynton, Walter’s lawyers for the initial trial, had filed a motion before withdrawing, and Judge Key had quickly denied it. Darnell said he told Walter’s former lawyers what he told me and they had raised it in the motion for a new trial, but no one took it seriously.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them . We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right. Many try to blame the anger and cynicism of working-class whites on misinformation. Admittedly, there is an industry of conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics writing about all manner of idiocy, from Obama’s alleged religious leanings to his ancestry. But every major news organization, even the oft-maligned Fox News, has always told the truth about Obama’s citizenship status and religious views. The people I know are well aware of what the major news organizations have to say about the issue; they simply don’t believe them. Only 6 percent of American voters believe that the media is “very trustworthy.”21 To many of us, the free press—that bulwark of American democracy—is simply full of shit. With little trust in the press, there’s no check on the Internet conspiracy theories that rule the digital world. Barack Obama is a foreign alien actively trying to destroy our country. Everything the media tells us is a lie. Many in the white working class believe the worst about their society. Here’s a small sample of emails or messages I’ve seen from friends or family: From right-wing radio talker Alex Jones on the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, a documentary about the “unanswered question” of the terrorist attacks, suggesting that the U.S. government played a role in the massacre of its own people.From an email chain, a story that the Obamacare legislation requires microchip implantation in new health care patients. This story carries extra bite because of the religious implications: Many believe that the End Times “mark of the beast” foretold in biblical prophecy will be an electronic device.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  In death penalty cases, the U.S. Supreme Court said in 1987 that introducing evidence about the status, character, reputation, or family of a homicide victim was unconstitutional. The prevailing idea for decades had been that “all victims are equal”—that is, the murder of a four-year-old child of a wealthy parent is no more serious an offense than the murder of a child whose parent is in prison or even than the murder of the parent in prison. The Court prohibited jurors from hearing “victim impact” statements because they were too inflammatory and introduced arbitrariness into the capital sentencing process. Many critics argued that such evidence would ultimately disempower poor victims, victims who were racial minorities, and family members who didn’t have the resources to advocate for their deceased loved ones. The Court agreed, striking down this kind of evidence in Booth v. Maryland. The Court’s decision was widely criticized by prosecutors and some politicians, and it seemed to energize the victims’ rights movement. Less than three years later, the Court reversed itself in Payne v. Tennessee and upheld the rights of states to present evidence about the character of the victim in a capital sentencing trial. With the Supreme Court now giving its constitutional blessing to a more visible and protected role for individual victims in the criminal trial process, changes in the American criminal justice process accelerated. Millions of state and federal dollars were authorized to create advocacy groups for crime victims in each state. States found countless ways for individual victims in particular crimes to become decision makers and participants. Victims’ advocates were added to parole boards, and in most states they were given a formal role in state and local prosecutors’ offices. Victim services and outreach became critical components of the prosecutorial function. Some states made executions more accommodating of victims by increasing the number of people from the victim’s family who could watch the execution. State legislatures enacted harsh new punishments for crimes, naming statutes after particular victims. Megan’s Law, for example, which broadened state power to create sex offender registries, was named after Megan Kanka, a seven-year-old girl who was raped and murdered by a man who had previously been convicted of child molestation. Instead of a faceless state or community, crime victims were featured at trial, and criminal cases took on the dynamics of a traditional civil trial, pitting the family of the victim against the offender. Press coverage hyped the personal nature of the conflict between the offender and specific victim. A new formula emerged for criminal prosecution, especially in high-profile cases, in which the emotions, perspectives, and opinions of the victim figured prominently in how criminal cases would be managed.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Not one of these relationships was easy for anyone. The mother’s parenting was often cut into by the very heavy burdens of single parenthood and then by the demands of remarriage and stepchildren. Relationships with fathers were heavily influenced by live-in lovers or stepmothers in second and third marriages. Some second wives were interested in the children while others wanted no part of them. Some fathers were able to maintain their love and interest in their children but few had time for two or sometimes three families. In some families both parents gradually stabilized their lives within happy remarriages or well-functioning, emotionally gratifying single parenthood. But these people were never a majority in any of my work. Meanwhile, children who were able to draw support from school, sports teams, parents, stepparents, grandparents, teachers, or their own inner strengths, interests, and talents did better than those who could not muster such resources. By necessity, many of these so-called resilient children forfeited their own childhoods as they took responsibility for themselves; their troubled, overworked parents; and their siblings. Children who needed more than minimal parenting because they were little or had special vulnerabilities and problems with change were soon overwhelmed with sorrow and anger at their parents. Years later, when contemplating having their own children, most children in this study said hotly, “I never want a child of mine to experience a childhood like I had.” As the children told us, adolescence begins early in divorced homes and, compared with that of youngsters raised in intact families, is more likely to include more early sexual experiences for girls and higher alcohol and drug use for girls and boys. Adolescence is more prolonged in divorced families and extends well into the years of early adulthood. Throughout these years children of divorce worry about following in their parents’ footsteps and struggle with a sinking sense that they, too, will fail in their relationships. But it’s in adulthood that children of divorce suffer the most. The impact of divorce hits them most cruelly as they go in search of love, sexual intimacy, and commitment. Their lack of inner images of a man and a woman in a stable relationship and their memories of their parents’ failure to sustain the marriage badly hobbles their search, leading them to heartbreak and even despair. They cried, “No one taught me.” They complain bitterly that they feel unprepared for adult relationships and that they have never seen a “man and woman on the same beam,” that they have no good models on which to build their hopes. And indeed they have a very hard time formulating even simple ideas about the kind of person they’re looking for.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Sensing my resistance, Mom transitioned. She became apologetic and desperate. She cried and begged. “I promise I’ll do better. I promise.” I had heard it many times before, and I didn’t believe it even a little. Lindsay once told me that, above all, Mom was a survivor. She survived her childhood, she survived the men who came and went. She survived successive brushes with the law. And now she was doing everything she could to survive an encounter with the nursing board. I exploded. I told Mom that if she wanted clean piss, she should stop fucking up her life and get it from her own bladder. I told Mamaw that enabling Mom made it worse and that if she had put her foot down thirty years earlier, then maybe Mom wouldn’t be begging her son for clean piss. I told Mom that she was a shitty mother and I told Mamaw that she was a shitty mother, too. The color drained from Mamaw’s face, and she re fused to even look me in the eye. What I had said had clearly struck a nerve. Though I meant these things, I also knew that my urine might not be clean. Mom collapsed onto the couch, crying quietly, but Mamaw wouldn’t give in so easily, even though I’d wounded her with my criticism. I pulled Mamaw into the bathroom and whispered a confession—that I had smoked Ken’s pot twice in the past few weeks. “I can’t give it to her. If Mom takes my pee, we could both be in trouble.” First, Mamaw assuaged my fears. A couple of hits of pot over three weeks wouldn’t show up on the screen, she told me. “Besides, you probably didn’t know what the hell you were doing. You didn’t inhale, even if you tried.” Then she addressed the morality of it. “I know this isn’t right, honey. But she’s your mother and she’s my daughter. And maybe, if we help her this time, she’ll finally learn her lesson.” It was the eternal hope, the thing to which I couldn’t say no. That hope drove me to voluntarily attend those many N.A. meetings, consume books on addiction, and participate in Mom’s treatment to the fullest extent that I could. It had driven me to get in the car with her when I was twelve, knowing that her emotional state could lead her to do something she’d regret later. Mamaw never lost that hope, after more heartache and more disappointment than I could possibly fathom. Her life was a clinic in how to lose faith in people, but Mamaw always found a way to believe in the people she loved. So I don’t regret relenting. Giving Mom that piss was wrong, but I’ll never regret following Mamaw’s lead. Her hope allowed her to forgive Papaw after the rough years of their marriage. And it convinced her to take me in when I needed her most.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  But it’s hard to miss a freight train barreling down on you, so I noticed soon enough. Like Papaw, Mamaw wanted a visitation in Middletown so that all of her friends from Ohio could gather and pay their respects. Like Papaw, she wanted a second visitation and funeral back home in Jackson, at Deaton’s. After her funeral, the convoy departed for Keck, a holler not far from where Mamaw was born that housed our family’s cemetery. In family lore, Keck held an even higher place of honor than Mamaw’s birthplace. Her own mother—our beloved Mamaw Blanton—was born in Keck, and Mamaw Blanton’s younger sister—Aunt Bonnie, nearly ninety herself—owned a beautiful log cabin on the same property. A short hike up the mountain from that log cabin is a relatively flat plot of land that serves as the final resting place for Papaw and Mamaw Blanton and a host of relatives, some born in the nineteenth century. That’s where our convoy was headed, through the narrow mountain roads, to deliver Mamaw to the family who’d crossed over before her. I’ve made that drive with a funeral convoy probably half a dozen times, and every turn reveals a landscape that inspires some memory of fonder times. It’s impossible to sit in the car for the twenty-minute trip and not trade stories about the departed, all of which start out “Do you remember that time . . . ?” But after Mamaw’s funeral, we didn’t recall a series of fond memories about Mamaw and Papaw and Uncle Red and Teaberry and that time Uncle David drove off the side of the mountain, rolled a hundred yards down the hill, and walked away without a scratch. Lindsay and I instead listened to Mom tell us that we were too sad , that we loved Mamaw too much , and that Mom had the greater right to grief because, in her words, “She was my mom, not yours!” I have never felt angrier at anyone for anything. For years, I had made excuses for Mom. I had tried to help manage her drug problem, read those stupid books about addiction, and accompanied her to N.A. meetings. I had endured, never complaining, a parade of father figures, all of whom left me feeling empty and mistrustful of men. I had agreed to ride in that car with her on the day she threatened to kill me, and then I had stood before a judge and lied to him to keep her out of jail. I had moved in with her and Matt, and then her and Ken, because I wanted her to get better and thought that if I played along, there was a chance she would. For years, Lindsay called me the “forgiving child”—the one who found the best in Mom, the one who made excuses, the one who believed. I opened my mouth to spew pure vitriol in Mom’s direction, but Lindsay spoke first: “No, Mom.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  The prevailing divorce nostrum in this country—don’t fight—does not, as so many lawyers, judges, and mental health professionals hope it will, protect children from experiencing the same sorts of difficulties in adulthood as we’ve seen in those raised in less cooperative families. Lisa represents a very large number of children in America’s divorce culture. Her experience is instructive for us all. Conflict and Suffering in the Midst of Cooperation I FIRST MET Lisa when she was in nursery school—a charming four-year-old girl decked out in a raspberry red pantsuit with bright yellow ribbons in her hair. Her parents were successful professionals— her mom a lawyer at the National Resources Defense Counsel office in Los Angeles and her dad a journalist who later went into public relations for several Silicon Valley corporations in Menlo Park. I asked Lisa what was going on in her family. She explained soberly, in a very grown-up way, “Daddy does not like Mommy so he’s living in the city and Mommy likes Daddy and wants him back.” “That’s an awful lot of changes,” I said, with soberness to match hers. “What do you think is going to happen?” Lisa shook her head silently and refused to say any more. But her play revealed all that she couldn’t express in words. It had two acts. Each vividly portrayed her inner world. In the first episode, she placed the father, the mother, and the children dolls in the dollhouse living room where they all sat in a row watching television. Then they all lay in one big bed, hugging one another like puppies in a basket. Next they were all squashed together in the bathtub. Finally, they were perched precariously on the steep roof, holding on to each other to keep from falling. The togetherness wrought by little Lisa was overpowering. In the second act, the tiger, crocodile, giraffe, and bear all went mad with aggression, wildly biting each other. They snarled and leapt at one another’s throats. Finally, carried away by her powerful feelings, Lisa bit the giraffe savagely and pummeled the tiger with her tiny fists. The message was clear. Lisa wanted desperately for her family to stay together but knew that it was coming apart. Underneath her composed, ladylike manner, fierce angers threatened to explode. My records show that this was one of the few occasions—if not the only time—when Lisa allowed herself to express rage at the breakup of her family. She carefully hid her feelings for years.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I rummaged in the locker, grateful at least that I had caught the offender and that that above all could be saved. But it was still there, rolled in my sock in the toe of a shoe. I turned round almost panting at the waves of pain and apprehension these kids were so wantonly inflicting on me. At the same time I was aware of not speaking in my own voice, of being betrayed by anger into routine threats and dead formulae. The skinny boy muttered "Mark", but Mark stared at him and then slowly sat down; and there was something about that slowed pressing together of the slatted pine bench and the boy's naked bottom, maybe something calculated, maybe not, the momentary heightening of his nakedness by contact with the inanimate, hard world, the fore-image too of the faintly flushed stripes the slats would leave when he stood, as if after some delicate accurate thrashing, that tilted the balance for him. I sat down in turn and so after a moment did the other boy, opposite us and wary. He shivered slightly and hunched the towel around him. Mark looked me straight in the eyes and reddened as he said, "I'll do anything you like, Edward." Telling Matt the story as we hurried in the early hours from the bar towards his flat, I had trouble conveying the keenness of the dilemma, this particular boy sitting naked beside me, breathing through his mouth into my face, his wet hair releasing sudden trickles down his neck, and making fabulous proposals that I had grumpily to reject. "You should have brought him back here," said Matt. "We could have taken turns with him." He gave his short nagging laugh, that always sounded bitter or unmeant. "Yeah, we could have fucked him at the same time. You ever do that?" "Oh yes," I said, "but not since I was a kid myself . . . " He looked at me admiringly in the street-lamp's masking glow. "You're really wild," he said. "Everybody's wild if they're given the chance," I announced, too pissed to care if I was right. "There's this place I used to go to when I was about, well, twenty or so, it was like a sauna, but just in someone's house—You'd never have known it was there, it didn't have a name or anything: people who went there called it Mr Croy's. though I must say there was never any sign of Mr Croy himself." The thought of those wild afternoons had me catching my breath to find I already had such epochs in me, and that I could look back through the drizzle of wasted time to arcadian clearings, remote and full of light and life. I stopped and called Matt back. "Just come down here a moment with me. I want to look at something." "Come on, man, it's fucking half past one."

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  But it’s hard to miss a freight train barreling down on you, so I noticed soon enough. Like Papaw, Mamaw wanted a visitation in Middletown so that all of her friends from Ohio could gather and pay their respects. Like Papaw, she wanted a second visitation and funeral back home in Jackson, at Deaton’s. After her funeral, the convoy departed for Keck, a holler not far from where Mamaw was born that housed our family’s cemetery. In family lore, Keck held an even higher place of honor than Mamaw’s birthplace. Her own mother—our beloved Mamaw Blanton—was born in Keck, and Mamaw Blanton’s younger sister—Aunt Bonnie, nearly ninety herself—owned a beautiful log cabin on the same property. A short hike up the mountain from that log cabin is a relatively flat plot of land that serves as the final resting place for Papaw and Mamaw Blanton and a host of relatives, some born in the nineteenth century. That’s where our convoy was headed, through the narrow mountain roads, to deliver Mamaw to the family who’d crossed over before her. I’ve made that drive with a funeral convoy probably half a dozen times, and every turn reveals a landscape that inspires some memory of fonder times. It’s impossible to sit in the car for the twenty-minute trip and not trade stories about the departed, all of which start out “Do you remember that time . . . ?” But after Mamaw’s funeral, we didn’t recall a series of fond memories about Mamaw and Papaw and Uncle Red and Teaberry and that time Uncle David drove off the side of the mountain, rolled a hundred yards down the hill, and walked away without a scratch. Lindsay and I instead listened to Mom tell us that we were too sad , that we loved Mamaw too much , and that Mom had the greater right to grief because, in her words, “She was my mom, not yours!” I have never felt angrier at anyone for anything. For years, I had made excuses for Mom. I had tried to help manage her drug problem, read those stupid books about addiction, and accompanied her to N.A. meetings. I had endured, never complaining, a parade of father figures, all of whom left me feeling empty and mistrustful of men. I had agreed to ride in that car with her on the day she threatened to kill me, and then I had stood before a judge and lied to him to keep her out of jail. I had moved in with her and Matt, and then her and Ken, because I wanted her to get better and thought that if I played along, there was a chance she would. For years, Lindsay called me the “forgiving child”—the one who found the best in Mom, the one who made excuses, the one who believed. I opened my mouth to spew pure vitriol in Mom’s direction, but Lindsay spoke first: “No, Mom.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I found the corner by the service lift and the steep flight of stairs up to Phil’s attic. It was a drab, cheapjack little area, unambiguously removed from the public, and yet I had come to love it in a way I never could the rest of the monstrous edifice. The little room—and above it the lonely roof—were nothing really, but like the lovers’ cottage in ‘Tea for Two’ they had been wonderfully sufficient for our romance. I knew there was no chance of finding him in—he would be well off on his laddish booze by now—but it would be comforting to sit there for a bit with the window open and surrounded by his empty clothes. When I put my key in the lock, though, there was a muffled call of surprise, I thought, from within. Phil and Bill were kneeling face to face on the bed. Bill’s hand rested on Phil’s shoulder, and it looked like some College jerk-off job. Their tilting dicks, alert as orgiasts’ on a Greek vase, withered astonishingly under my expressionless stare. Not for them the witless priapism of Gabriel; but there was enough defiance in their confusion for them not to blabber excuses—not to say anything at all. And I couldn’t think of anything much to say. I know I swallowed and coloured and took in, as if I needed to satisfy myself, the circumstantial details. Certainly there were no signs of passionate haste. Bill’s trousers were neatly folded and his vast smalls were spread like an antimacassar across the back of the chair. I nodded repeatedly and slowly withdrew, closing the door as if not to disturb a sleeper. Before I had reached the top of the stairs I heard a gasped ‘Oh my God’ and a loud frightened laugh. And so to James’s. By the time I got there my anger, hurt, care were welling up under the frigid discipline I had instinctively assumed. I smeared away stupid tears. Thank heavens at least no crass, unforgettable words had been spoken. ‘Darling, whisky’ was my own first utterance—and I thought, none of your namby-pamby Caribbean aphrodisiac nonsense. James was eating scrambled eggs standing up and listening to some fathomlessly gloomy music. ‘Bad day, dear?’ he enquired maritally. ‘The last twenty-four hours have actually been quite extraordinarily hideously awful.’ ‘Oh, darling.’ ‘I thought I was just about managing it until half an hour ago, when I went up to Phil’s room at the hotel—I don’t know why, just on some sentimental whim, I thought I’d put on some of his clothes and lie there for a bit and just be him, you know—he having arranged to go off drinking with some of his appalling friends. Well, they may not be appalling, I’ve never met them. I say, we couldn’t possibly take this music off? It’s driving me insane.’ ‘It’s Shostakovich’s viola sonata,’ said James pettishly.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He looked round and I saw that he was the jogger from the gardens. My fury halted and trod air for a moment—I saw it like a freeze-framed cloud-mass on the TV weather, dragging northwards over Europe with a payload for London by morning . . . The boy didn't know what tenderness of mine he'd awakened. He came over promptly, very sleeked now, like a peasant in church, his bow-tie crooked, still holding the half-formed lily of a napkin in large hands. He stood by me and I absurdly savoured having him at my command; my look was knowing, but drew no sign of recognition from him. "Sir?" (Or was there a hint of irony there, at the drunkish foreigner who travelled with a schoolboy: his disdain for the celebrated Flemish fare, his scruffy, slept-in clothes?) I smiled. "I wonder if you could kindly turn the music off?" He didn't sense the danger in my courtesy, though the request itself clearly struck him as malign and uncultured, quite possibly a threat to the principles of the hotel and the probity of the management. "I'm sorry, sir, the music plays in all the public rooms." "I'm aware of that. What I'm suggesting is that it should stop doing so. It's absolutely unbearable to anyone who cares about music in the slightest." And there my voice had jumped and the storm-cloud twitched nearer. I looked across at the scholarship boy for support, but found him studiously involved with his chocolate gâteau. His parents though were alert, and indignant on behalf of the waiter, whom I felt, in the social contraction of those few seconds, taking strength from their ignorance. Then I heard a new tune vilely segued into, all the brighter in the new silence of the restaurant. It took me two or three insensing seconds to realise what it was. "Do you know what this music is?" I barked. "Madam?" The mother quivered and flushed and firmed up her chin, and the father, not easily nettled, I suspected, but trapped on an old-fashioned point of honour, exclaimed, "Really, young man . . ." "I'll tell you then. It's an aria by Mozart, from The Magic Flute, 'Dies Bildnis ist bezallbernd schön', in fact."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I imagined a good deal of crap was about to be talked, and a lot of conning extenuation produced to block my path to a proper complaint or report. But my dark young decoy didn't have to claim a part in this, he could have played ignorant, and when he came marching to his friend's aid, his strong little cock bobbing, I was obscurely touched and confused in the midst of my anger. "Has he taken anything, sir?" he asked, a hand on my shoulder, looking at the rifled locker. The "sir" had a different sarcasm now, like a policeman's. I stepped forward and snatched up the unbuttoned bill-fold. There had been little enough in it, anyway. "I haven't got any money, you stupid bastard," I blurted out. "You've really picked the wrong person." I knew I'd come out with a few hundred francs for drinks and perhaps a sandwich or a pickled egg. There was nothing there now. "I didn't take anything," said the thief, with a brief insulted smile. I stared in silence, my hand stuck out. "It was like that when I came along." His friend moved close to him as if to whisper something through his hair, slid two fingers into his waistband and tweaked out the money, the two shiny leaves with their High Renaissance portrait, my survival-kit. "What the fuck are you doing?" the boy said, bewildered, thinking himself betrayed. But I had a hunch that the other was a better criminal than his accomplice, who had taken so long and been so miserably caught. "Here's the money, Edward," he said. "Listen, I'm really sorry about this." I fumbled with my towel and fixed it round me like a skirt. I was more wounded by my own idiocy than by the tawdry little crime, and raised my voice to cover my shame. "That's all very well," I said. "I'm afraid I shall have to report this. You just can't . . ." "Hold on, Edward," said the boy, looking around him to assess the damage my outburst might be doing and perhaps to make sure that he had no audiences for the rest of his act. Again the hand on the shoulder, and this time the side of his body pressed lightly against mine. "Sit down a minute, you know . . ." "There's no point in sitting down," I snapped. And then, "Oh shit, where's my watch?"—my dear father's gold watch with the stop-hand that had slyly timed many a Messiah and Gerontius . . .

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  My senator opposed the bill (one of the few senators to do so), and though he never explained why, I liked to think that maybe he and I had something in common. The senators and policy staff debating the bill had little appreciation for the role of payday lenders in the shadow economy that people like me occupied. To them, payday lenders were predatory sharks, charging high interest rates on loans and exorbitant fees for cashed checks. The sooner they were snuffed out, the better. To me, payday lenders could solve important financial problems. My credit was awful, thanks to a host of terrible financial decisions (some of which weren’t my fault, many of which were), so credit cards weren’t a possibility. If I wanted to take a girl out to dinner or needed a book for school and didn’t have money in the bank, I didn’t have many options. (I probably could have asked my aunt or uncle, but I desperately wanted to do things on my own.) One Friday morning I dropped off my rent check, knowing that if I waited another day, the fifty-dollar late fee would kick in. I didn’t have enough money to cover the check, but I’d get paid that day and would be able to deposit the money after work. However, after a long day at the senate, I forgot to grab my paycheck before I left. By the time I realized the mistake, I was already home, and the Statehouse staff had left for the weekend. On that day, a three-day payday loan, with a few dollars of interest, enabled me to avoid a significant overdraft fee. The legislators debating the merits of payday lending didn’t mention situations like that. The lesson? Powerful people sometimes do things to help people like me without really understanding people like me. My second year of college started pretty much as my first year had, with a beautiful day and a lot of excitement. With the new job, I was a bit busier, but I didn’t mind the work. What I did mind was the gnawing feeling that, at twenty-four, I was a little too old to be a second-year college student. But with four years in the Marine Corps behind me, more separated me from the other students than age. During an undergraduate seminar in foreign policy, I listened as a nineteen-year-old classmate with a hideous beard spouted off about the Iraq war. He explained that those fighting the war were typically less intelligent than those (like him) who immediately went to college. It showed, he argued, in the wanton way soldiers butchered and disrespected Iraqi civilians. It was an objectively terrible opinion—my friends from the Marine Corps spanned the political spectrum and held nearly every conceivable opinion about the war. Many of my Marine Corps friends were staunch liberals who had no love for our commander in chief—then George W. Bush—and felt that we had sacrificed too much for too little gain.