Anxiety

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 Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I’d always been an American history buff, and some of the buildings on campus predated the Revolutionary War. Sometimes I’d walk around campus searching for the placards that identified the ages of buildings. The buildings themselves were breathtakingly beautiful—towering masterpieces of neo-Gothic architecture. Inside, intricate stone carvings and wood trim gave the law school an almost medieval feel. You’d even sometimes hear that we went to HLS (Hogwarts Law School). It’s telling that the best way to describe the law school was a reference to a series of fantasy novels. Classes were hard, and sometimes required long nights in the library, but they weren’t that hard. A part of me had thought I’d finally be revealed as an intellectual fraud, that the administration would realize they’d made a terrible mistake and send me back to Middletown with their sincerest apologies. Another part of me thought I’d be able to hack it but only with extraordinary dedication; after all, these were the brightest students in the world, and I did not qualify as such. But that didn’t end up being the case. Though there were rare geniuses walking the halls of the law school, most of my fellow students were smart but not intimidatingly so. In classroom discussions and on tests, I largely held my own. Not everything came easy. I always fancied myself a decent writer, but when I turned in a sloppy writing assignment to a famously stern professor, he handed it back with some extraordinarily critical commentary. “Not good at all,” he scribbled on one page. On another, he circled a large paragraph and wrote in the margin, “This is a vomit of sentences masquerading as a paragraph. Fix.” I heard through the grapevine that this professor thought Yale should accept only students from places like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton: “It’s not our job to do remedial education, and too many of these other kids need it.” That committed me to changing his mind. By the end of the semester, he called my writing “excellent” and admitted that he might have been wrong about state schools. As the first year drew to a close, I felt triumphant—my professors and I got along well, I had earned solid grades, and I had a dream job for the summer—working for the chief counsel for a sitting U.S. senator. Yet, for all of the joy and intrigue, Yale planted a seed of doubt in my mind about whether I belonged. This place was so beyond the pale for what I expected of myself. I knew zero Ivy League graduates back home; I was the first person in my nuclear family to go to college and the first person in my extended family to attend a professional school. When I arrived in August 2010, Yale had educated two of the three most recent Supreme Court justices and two of the six most recent presidents, not to mention the sitting secretary of state (Hillary Clinton).

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

  National studies show that the more transitions there are, the more the child is harmed because the impact of repeated loss is cumulative. 1 The prevalence of this instability in the lives of these children hasn’t been properly weighed or even recognized by most people. While we do have legal records of second, third, and fourth remarriages and divorces, we have no reliable count of how many live-in or long-term lovers a child of divorce will typically encounter. Children observe each of their parents’ courtships with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. For adolescents, the erotic stimulation of seeing their parents with changing partners can be difficult to contain. Several young teenage girls in the study began their own sexual activity when they observed a parent’s involvement in a passionate affair. Children and adolescents watch their parents’ lovers, with everything from love to resentment, hoping for some clue about the future. They participate actively as helper, critic, and audience and are not afraid to intervene. One mother returning home from a date found her school-age children asleep in her bed. Since they’d told her earlier that they didn’t like her boyfriend, she took the hint. Many new lovers are attentive to the children, regularly bringing little gifts. But even the most charming lovers can disappear overnight. Second marriages with children are much more likely to end in divorce than first marriages. Thus the child’s typical experience is not one marriage followed by one divorce, but several or sometimes many relationships for both their mother and father followed by loss or by eventual stability. 2 Karen’s experience is typical of many that I have seen. Her father’s second wife, who was nice to the children, left without warning three years into the marriage. After she was gone, her father had four more girlfriends who caused him a great deal of suffering when they also left. Karen’s mother had three unhappy love affairs prior to her remarriage, which ended after five years. Obviously Karen and her siblings experienced more than “one divorce.” Their childhoods were filled with a history of new attachments followed by losses and consequent distress for both parents. Karen’s brother, at age thirty, told me: “What is marriage? Only a piece of paper and a piece of metal. If you love someone, it breaks your heart.” In this study, only 7 of the original 131 children experienced stable second marriages in which they had good relationships with a stepparent and stepsiblings on both sides of the divorced family.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I now believe that some decidedly human influences were at work upon those voices from below, sometimes to warn me, more often to frighten me. The true condition of one part of the Orient was more clearly explained therein than in the reports of our proconsuls. I took these so-called revelations with calm, since my respect for the invisible world did not go so far as to give credence to such divine claptrap: ten years before, soon after my accession to power, I had ordered the closing of the oracle of Daphne, near Antioch, which had foretold my rule, for fear that it might do the same for the first pretender who should appear. But it is always annoying to hear talk of trouble. After having disturbed us to the best of her ability the prophetess offered her aid: one of those magical sacrifices in which Egyptian sorcerers specialize would suffice to put everything right with destiny. My explorations in Phoenician magic had already shown me that the horror of these forbidden practices lies less in what is revealed to us than in what they hide from our sight; if my abomination of human sacrifice had not been well known this practitioner would probably have advised the immolation of a slave. As it was she contented herself with speaking of some pet animal. Had it been at all possible the sacrificial victim should have belonged to me; it could not be a dog, which is an animal considered unclean in Egyptian superstition; a bird would have done, but I do not travel with an aviary. My young master proposed his falcon. The conditions would be fulfilled thereby; I had given him this beautiful bird after I had myself received it from the king of Osroëne. The boy fed it himself; it was one of the rare possessions to which he was attached. At first I refused; he insisted, gravely; I gathered that he attributed some extraordinary significance to the offer, so I accepted, out of affection. Provided with the most detailed instructions, my courier Menecrates went to fetch the bird from our apartments in the Serapeion. Even at a gallop the errand would take, in all, more than two hours. There was no question of passing the interval in the dirty hole of the magician, and Lucius complained of the dampness aboard the boat. Phlegon found an expedient: we installed ourselves as well as we could in the house of a procuress after the inmates of the place had been disposed of. Lucius decided to sleep; I made use of the time to dictate some dispatches, and Antinous stretched out at my feet. Phlegon's reed pen scratched away under the lamp. The last watch of the night was beginning when Menecrates brought back the bird, the glove, the hood, and the chain. We returned to the house of the magician.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The sudden ebbing of anxiety; and then the wallow as a questing wave of apprehension pushed into the inlet of my heart: perhaps that was what Wordsworth meant in a passage I would be teaching Luc much later on when he spoke of sensations felt along the heart—as if the heart were a sea-beach on which feeling rhythmically broke. I recognised a deep-suppressed cold fear of water and the schooltime echo of our high-raftered swimming-baths. I would have missed the place if I hadn't seen a brisk little family with rolled towels under their arms turn off just ahead of me into a covered alleyway thronged with locked bikes. At the end a guichet and an inexorable turnstile gave admission to a further, darker passage, a region of brown paint and damp-eaten plaster. I hadn't found any swimming-trunks, and so brought an old pair of army surplus shorts with button fly and turn-ups that some fantasy of summer had made me pack in England: they were my mowing the lawn shorts, my lying on the mown lawn with the Sunday papers shorts. They looked hopeless among the kids' darting Speedos and the trim corsetting of the dads. I stepped out gingerly through the lukewarm footbath on to the white noisy poolside. Part of the misery of swimming was that you couldn't do it in glasses; the surrender to cold water followed immediately on the surrender to a world of vague distances and confused identities, and as I stood squinting down the lanes in the dim hope of picking out Matt's dark head I had a moment's foretaste of the fears of the old, as you see them smiling anxiously against imagined threats and half-heard ridicule. Then I jumped in like a child, straight off the side and holding my nose. With my first kick from the edge the pockets of my shorts filled heavily with water. After two or three more captious strokes they were dragging at my hips and I had to dart a hand down to tug them back . . . I felt with my feet and could just stand tiptoe.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  A family friend suggested that I work for him in a medium-sized floor tile distribution business near my hometown. Floor tile is extraordinarily heavy: Each piece weighs anywhere from three to six pounds, and it’s usually packaged in cartons of eight to twelve pieces. My primary duty was to lift the floor tile onto a shipping pallet and prepare that pallet for departure. It wasn’t easy, but it paid thirteen dollars an hour and I needed the money, so I took the job and collected as many overtime shifts and extra hours as I could. The tile business employed about a dozen people, and most employees had worked there for many years. One guy worked two full-time jobs, but not because he had to: His second job at the tile business allowed him to pursue his dream of piloting an airplane. Thirteen dollars an hour was good money for a single guy in our hometown—a decent apartment costs about five hundred dollars a month—and the tile business offered steady raises. Every employee who worked there for a few years earned at least sixteen dollars an hour in a down economy, which provided an annual income of thirty-two thousand—well above the poverty line even for a family. Despite this relatively stable situation, the managers found it impossible to fill my warehouse position with a long-term employee. By the time I left, three guys worked in the warehouse; at twenty-six, I was by far the oldest. One guy, I’ll call him Bob, joined the tile warehouse just a few months before I did. Bob was nineteen with a pregnant girlfriend. The manager kindly offered the girlfriend a clerical position answering phones. Both of them were terrible workers. The girlfriend missed about every third day of work and never gave advance notice. Though warned to change her habits repeatedly, the girlfriend lasted no more than a few months. Bob missed work about once a week, and he was chronically late. On top of that, he often took three or four daily bathroom breaks, each over half an hour. It became so bad that, by the end of my tenure, another employee and I made a game of it: We’d set a timer when he went to the bathroom and shout the major milestones through the warehouse—“Thirty-five minutes!” “Forty-five minutes!” “One hour!” Eventually, Bob, too, was fired. When it happened, he lashed out at his manager: “How could you do this to me? Don’t you know I’ve got a pregnant girlfriend?” And he was not alone: At least two other people, including Bob’s cousin, lost their jobs or quit during my short time at the tile warehouse. You can’t ignore stories like this when you talk about equal opportunity. Nobel-winning economists worry about the decline of the industrial Midwest and the hollowing out of the economic core of working whites. What they mean is that manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and middle-class jobs are harder to come by for people without college degrees.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Sibylle told me." Well, she would know. "But she says Luc's mother is mad herself, and so does my father." "She's not mad," I said sternly, "she's just very unhappy, and anxious about bringing up her son by herself now Luc's father's run away." "His father is a mauvais sujet," said Marcel, "I suppose that's what Sibylle says too," and I laughed. He didn't deny it. I thought of Maurice that evening at dinner at Paul's, the sense he had given that Luc was as mauvais a sujet as his father. It seemed the masters and the boys mistrusted him, shunned him, for being a bit mental. Later on it cleared and there were stars. It felt like midnight but it was only 8.30. Cars came and went from the forecourt opposite, my heart raced whenever figures appeared in the glass hallway or we heard the dim boom of the heavily sprung front door. I felt our secrecy leach from us as the roadway dried; people walked past and noticed that our head-rest silhouettes shielded two real watchful heads. Luc might already have glanced down from an unlit window and seen his mother's car and wondered what posse had come to claim him back. I was full of envy of the town and its ordinary evening. An Alsatian came alongside, followed by a man in a leather jacket: they crossed in front of the car, went past the flats and slipped through a gap in the fence, the man swinging the leather-handled chain suggestively/threateningly. The dog barked as it ran off over the dark waste ground. It was Marcel's idea that we take it in turns to watch while the other slept, with him to sleep first. He bared his wrist and swivelled and counter-rotated various rings of his shockproof chronometer: they seemed to indicate that it was time to eat, so I sent him off with a few francs and he came back with a cardboard tray of chips, some coffee biscuits and a sickening lilac pop. There was an intent little feast in the car while I smoked a cigarette outside and wandered to the wasteland for a pee, thinking my way casually but grossly through a fantasy about the man with the dog. It was getting cold so we plundered and distributed the rugs and cushions; Marcel lifted a lever and pressed back in his seat till it was fully reclined. For the first time I felt a kind of comfort in having him there: I thought he didn't know what was going on, his attention faltered; but he'd be useful with Sibylle—I'd have to make use of him if the moment came. His breathing slowed as he slept and sounded like widely spaced snorts of vexation. A sort of eternity opened up, like double physics on a school-day afternoon, the palate dry, the hands smelling of rubber and copper . . . My head lolled in yawn after yawn.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was going to be a test of initiative, like one of our mad field-days at school. It still seemed to me somehow beside the point, but I began to catch the mother's agitation, her dread not only of where he was going but of having driven him out. "I don't want him falling into rough hands," she said, glancing narrowly at Cherif as if he were himself a manifestation, a messenger, of the underworld (long ignored, long suspected and feared) that was waiting to receive her son. "I'll do whatever you like," I said. "But first I really must change, I'm soaked to the skin." It was clear she hadn't noticed this till now. She tugged open drawers, and chopped through the clustered hangers on the cupboard rail. I wasn't sure if she was looking for old things that didn't matter or for something good enough and suitable. She didn't know the leather me, only the sports-coat and tie me. She laid out a couple of shirts. "A vest?" I nodded. "Underpants? Well, you can help yourself—thank you, I will. "But can you get into his trousers?" I said I'd try them and see. "The two of you are the same height, but you of course are much fatter." She lifted out some dreary flannels which none the less had a beauty when you imagined them ironised by Luc's long legs. I couldn't really start changing till she'd left; I squatted to untie a shoe, and she watched me interestedly, as if to say it was years since she'd seen a man undress even so much as that. "I'll give you the keys to the car," she said, "and to the Pavillon de l'Aurore." "Thanks very much," I said, thinking of it still as a treat, whose magic might be broken if I protested or asked questions. For the past twelve hours or more life was living itself with a logic and fluency of its own, everyone else was in a state of crisis, but I had become calm, I knew it couldn't be resisted. When she had gone I pushed the door quietly to and dragged off my wet clothes. I still had the sensation of being chilled and hot at once, like a neo-classical description of passion. A pile of heavy unlovely garments grew in the middle of the floor, as if placed by an orderly suicide. I stood in my damp jockey-shorts and slowly dried myself with Luc's face-towel; then wandered about, looking at his pictures, the muddle on his desk. I read some notes on a pad—"W. born at Cockermouth(!)", "Fostered alike by beauty and by fear", various other quotations and "Ask Edward about" followed by nothing. Well, I'd certainly have told him if I could.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I was anxious about his new friends, giants of fourteen or fifteen with fluffy upper lips, waiting at the bus-stop with ties undone and shirts bagging out and a No 6 on the go; like them Mark Lyle was growing his hair in thick dirty bunches swept behind the ears, and this seemed to me both wrong and beautiful. Late one afternoon I saw him walking past our house, and ran out and followed him. I had shorts and sandals on—one didn't go into long trousers till the Sixth Form—and he had his black blazer hooked on a finger over his shoulder. I wasn't close to him, but still as I walked along I found myself in a heady slip-stream of Old Spice. He must have been drenched in it, perhaps he was addicted to it in some way: I knew one of the prefects at school was a keen user, too, and had heard him drop thought-provoking hints about its potency. I trailed Mark Lyle down the hill, having to stop and dawdle from time to time to prevent myself from excitedly catching up with him. He was clearly in no hurry to get home, wherever that might be. I wanted him to do something definite—meet a friend, enter a shop or a house—so that I would have something on him, and could go back home and ponder it in the context of my other, patchy, research. I'd imagined he would turn left into one of the residential roads lined with flowering cherries where some of my schoolfriends lived, but he ambled odorously on until we had come in view of the Flats and I began to get worried. The front range of the Flats was built above a row of shops—a ladies' hairdressers, a newsagent, the dry-cleaners where I took my father's tails, the Indian grocers that stayed open till 8 o'clock—and overlooked a broad oily forecourt, where residents worked sporadically on cars with long-expired tax-discs. But beyond that, it was unknown territory to me. The Sharps and Flats my father called the place, as if we lived in the cloudless naturals of Life. I don't think I was actually forbidden to pass through into the grassy courtyard or even to enter its long white buildings with corroding metal windows. It must have been a self-imposed prohibition, a social fear that was activated again when I understood that Mark Lyle's parents had now been reduced to a council flat. That summer holidays I got serious about Mark Lyle. In my fantasy he became my protector, and introduced me into the thieves' kitchen of the Flats as someone to be respected or they'd have to answer to him.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  In the middle of third grade, we left Middletown and my grandparents to live in Preble County with Bob; at the end of fourth grade, we left Preble County to live in a Middletown duplex on the 200 block of McKinley Street; at the end of fifth grade, we left the 200 block of McKinley Street to move to the 300 block of McKinley Street, and by that time Chip was a regular in our home, though he never lived with us; at the end of sixth grade, we remained on the 300 block of McKinley Street, but Chip had been replaced by Steve (and there were many discussions about moving in with Steve); at the end of seventh grade, Matt had taken Steve’s place, Mom was preparing to move in with Matt, and Mom hoped that I would join her in Dayton; at the end of eighth grade, she demanded that I move to Dayton, and after a brief detour at my dad’s house, I acquiesced; at the end of ninth grade, I moved in with Ken—a complete stranger—and his three kids. On top of all that were the drugs, the domestic violence case, children’s services prying into our lives, and Papaw dying. Today, even remembering that period long enough to write it down invokes an intense, indescribable anxiety in me. Not long ago, I noticed that a Facebook friend (an acquaintance from high school with similarly deep hillbilly roots) was constantly changing boyfriends—going in and out of relationships, posting pictures of one guy one week and another three weeks later, fighting on social media with her new fling until the relationship publicly imploded. She is my age with four children, and when she posted that she had finally found a man who would treat her well (a refrain I’d seen many times before), her thirteen-year-old daughter commented: “Just stop. I just want you and this to stop.” I wish I could hug that little girl, because I know how she feels. For seven long years, I just wanted it to stop. I didn’t care so much about the fighting, the screaming, or even the drugs. I just wanted a home, and I wanted to stay there, and I wanted these goddamned strangers to stay the fuck out. Now consider the sum of my life after I moved in with Mamaw permanently. At the end of tenth grade, I lived with Mamaw, in her house, with no one else. At the end of eleventh grade, I lived with Mamaw, in her house, with no one else. At the end of twelfth grade, I lived with Mamaw, in her house, with no one else. I could say that the peace of Mamaw’s home gave me a safe space to do my homework. I could say that the absence of fighting and instability let me focus on school and my job.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  It’s not just fighting. By almost any measure, American working-class families experience a level of instability unseen elsewhere in the world. Consider, for instance, Mom’s revolving door of father figures. No other country experiences anything like this. In France, the percentage of children exposed to three or more maternal partners is 0.5 percent—about one in two hundred. The second highest share is 2.6 percent, in Sweden, or about one in forty. In the United States, the figure is a shocking 8.2 percent—about one in twelve—and the figure is even higher in the working class. The most depressing part is that relationship instability, like home chaos, is a vicious cycle. As sociologists Paula Fornby and Andrew Cherlin found, a “growing body of literature suggests that children who experience multiple transitions in family structure may fare worse developmentally than children raised in stable two-parent families and perhaps even than children raised in stable, single-parent families.” For many kids, the first impulse is escape, but people who lurch toward the exit rarely choose the right door. This is how my aunt found herself married at sixteen to an abusive husband. It’s how my mom, the salutatorian of her high school class, had both a baby and a divorce, but not a single college credit under her belt before her teenage years were over. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. Chaos begets chaos. Instability begets instability. Welcome to family life for the American hillbilly. For me, understanding my past and knowing that I wasn’t doomed gave me the hope and fortitude to deal with the demons of my youth. And though it’s cliché, the best medicine was talking about it with the people who understood. I asked Aunt Wee if she had similar relationship experiences, and she answered almost reflexively: “Of course. I was always ready for battle with Dan,” she told me. “Sometimes I’d even brace myself for a big argument—like physically put myself in a fighting position—before he stopped speaking.” I was shocked. Aunt Wee and Dan have the most successful marriage I’ve seen. Even after twenty years, they interact like they started dating last year. Her marriage got even better, she said, only after she realized that she didn’t have to be on guard all the time. Lindsay told me the same. “When I fought with Kevin, I’d insult him and tell him to do what I knew he wanted to do anyway—leave. He’d always ask me, ‘What’s wrong with you? Why do you fight with me like I’m your enemy?’” The answer is that, in our home, it was often difficult to tell friend from foe. Sixteen years later, though, and Lindsay is still married. I thought a lot about myself, about the emotional triggers I’d learned over eighteen years of living at home. I realized that I mistrusted apologies, as they were often used to convince you to lower your guard.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  But studies have shown that ACEs are far more common in my corner of the demographic world. A report by the Wisconsin Children’s Trust Fund showed that among those with a college degree or more (the non–working class), fewer than half had experienced an ACE. Among the working class, well over half had at least one ACE, while about 40 percent had multiple ACEs. This is really striking—four in every ten working-class people had faced multiple instances of childhood trauma. For the non–working class, that number was 29 percent. I gave a quiz to Aunt Wee, Uncle Dan, Lindsay, and Usha that psychologists use to measure the number of ACEs a person has faced. Aunt Wee scored a seven—higher even than Lindsay and me, who each scored a six. Dan and Usha—the two people whose families seemed nice to the point of oddity—each scored a zero. The weird people were the ones who hadn’t faced any childhood trauma. Children with multiple ACEs are more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression, to suffer from heart disease and obesity, and to contract certain types of cancers. They’re also more likely to underperform in school and suffer from relationship instability as adults. Even excessive shouting can damage a kid’s sense of security and contribute to mental health and behavioral issues down the road. Harvard pediatricians have studied the effect that childhood trauma has on the mind. In addition to later negative health consequences, the doctors found that constant stress can actually change the chemistry of a child’s brain. Stress, after all, is triggered by a physiological reaction. It’s the consequence of adrenaline and other hormones flooding our system, usually in response to some kind of stimulus. This is the classic fight-or-flight response that we learn about in grade school. It sometimes produces incredible feats of strength and bravery from ordinary people. It’s how mothers can lift heavy objects when their children are trapped underneath, and how an unarmed elderly woman can fight off a mountain lion with her bare hands to save her husband. Unfortunately, the fight-or-flight response is a destructive constant companion. As Dr. Nadine Burke Harris put it, the response is great “if you’re in a forest and there’s a bear. The problem is when that bear comes home from the bar every night.” When that happens, the Harvard researchers found, the sector of the brain that deals with highly stressful situations takes over. “Significant stress in early childhood,” they write, “ . . . result[s] in a hyperresponsive or chronically activated physiologic stress response, along with increased potential for fear and anxiety.” For kids like me, the part of the brain that deals with stress and conflict is always activated—the switch flipped indefinitely. We are constantly ready to fight or flee, because there is constant exposure to the bear, whether that bear is an alcoholic dad or an unhinged mom. We become hardwired for conflict. And that wiring remains, even when there’s no more conflict to be had.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  He was holding her against the kitchen counter, and she was flailing and biting at him. When she dropped to the ground, I ran to her lap. When Bob moved closer, I stood up and punched him in the face. He reared back (to return the blow, I figured), and I collapsed on the ground with my arms over my head in anticipation. The blow never came—Bob never was physically abusive—and my intervention somehow ended the fight. He walked over to the couch and sat down silently, staring at the wall; Mom and I meekly walked upstairs to bed. Mom and Bob’s problems were my first introduction to marital conflict resolution. Here were the takeaways: Never speak at a reasonable volume when screaming will do; if the fight gets a little too intense, it’s okay to slap and punch, so long as the man doesn’t hit first; always express your feelings in a way that’s insulting and hurtful to your partner; if all else fails, take the kids and the dog to a local motel, and don’t tell your spouse where to find you—if he or she knows where the children are, he or she won’t worry as much, and your departure won’t be as effective. I began to do poorly in school. Many nights I’d lie in bed, unable to sleep because of the noise—the furniture rocking, heavy stomping, yelling, sometimes glass shattering. The next morning I’d wake up tired and depressed, meandering through the school day, thinking constantly about what awaited at home. I just wanted to retreat to a place where I could sit in silence. I couldn’t tell anyone what was going on, as that was far too embarrassing. And though I hated school, I hated home more. When the teacher announced that we had only a few minutes to clear our desks before the bell rang, my heart sank. I’d stare at the clock as if it were a ticking bomb. Not even Mamaw understood how terrible things had become. My slipping grades were the first indication. Not every day was like that, of course. But even when the house was ostensibly peaceful, our lives were so charged that I was constantly on guard. Mom and Bob never smiled at each other or said nice things to Lindsay and me anymore. You never knew when the wrong word would turn a quiet dinner into a terrible fight, or when a minor childhood transgression would send a plate or book flying across the room. It was like we were living among land mines—one wrong step, and kaboom . Up to that point in my life, I was a perfectly fit and healthy child. I exercised constantly, and though I didn’t exactly watch what I ate, I didn’t have to. But I began to put on weight, and I was positively chubby by the time I started the fifth grade. I often felt sick and would complain of severe stomachaches to the school nurse.

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

  And I have things I really want to do on weekends, like baseball, and I miss important stuff.” “Could you be on a baseball team in San Jose, where your dad lives?” Racer looked at me as if I’d taken leave of my senses. “That wouldn’t solve anything.” His tone was a mixture of condescension and irritation. “It’d just make everything worse. Then I’d have two teams that I couldn’t make it to the games for and two coaches who’d be mad at me.” “Of course; I see exactly what you mean.” I hastened to regain lost ground. “It’s a problem.” “A big problem,” Racer emphasized. “Their houses are too far apart. I wish they would get together.” As Racer walked out the door, I thought to myself that this was certainly a mixed review of joint custody by the young expert I had consulted. He complained of fatigue, which is unusual among children his age. Could Racer be describing the strain he’s under as fatigue? Was he having trouble sleeping? He was very open in describing the trip between his two homes as “a long, long, long bus ride” and how hard he found it to maintain playmates and playdates because of his constant comings and goings. He’s an outsider in both communities. How many children can comfortably maintain two sets of friends going back and forth? Racer was worried about being allowed to pitch if his coach was not assured of his attendance. Obviously coaches want a winning team and players they can count on. The same is true of school play directors or Cub Scout leaders. Racer is appropriately worried about losing out in important events because of his spotty attendance. He also told me poignantly that he misses his mom when he’s at Dad’s house and misses his dad at bedtime in his mom’s house. I hear this sad complaint from almost every young child in joint custody. At the same time, many children adjust to their new circumstances reasonably well and are firmly attached to both parents. Their self-esteem is good and their anxiety is not out of control. But is Racer trying to tell us something we don’t want to hear? He doesn’t seem so happy about the joint custody script and the transitions he’s required to make. He doesn’t describe a happy, protected childhood. He has serious complaints. But he provides a very good picture of a competent little boy—the kind we call resilient—who understands the high price of keeping up with two parents after divorce. He’s doing his best. He’s managing.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘That’s jolly exciting,’ I said, going over to the sofa, and lifting up the photograph album. ‘Have you told Mummy where you’ve gone?’ I held the heavy, embossed leather book in my arms, and looked down at him. Arthur caught my eye, frowned and expelled a little puff of air. ‘Blimy, Will,’ he said confidentially. Rupert was then six years old. From his father he had inherited an intense, practical intelligence, and from his mother, my sister, vanity, self-possession, and the pink and gold Beckwith colouring that Ronald Staines had so admired in me. I had always liked Gavin, a busy, abstracted man, whose mind, even at a dinner party, was still absorbed in the details of Romano-British archaeology, which was his passion and career, and who would have had nothing to do with the way his son now appeared, in knickerbockers and an embroidered jerkin, with a Millais-esque lather of curls, as if about to go bowling a hoop in Kensington Gardens. Philippa had a picturesque and romantic attitude to her children (there was also a little girl, Polly, aged three), and Gavin allowed her a free hand, concentrating his affection for them in sudden bursts of generosity, unannounced treats and impulsive outings which disrupted the life of the picture-book nursery at Ladbroke Grove, and were rightly popular. ‘I left a note,’ Rupert explained, standing up and beginning to walk around the room. ‘I told Mummy not to worry. I’m sure she’ll see that it’s all for the best.’ ‘I don’t know, old chap,’ I demurred. ‘I mean, Mummy’s jolly sensible, but it is quite late, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she were getting a bit worried about you. Did you tell her where you were going?’ ‘No, of course not. It was a secret. I didn’t even tell Polly. It had to be very very carefully planned.’ He picked up a Harrods carrier-bag. ‘I’ve brought some food,’ he said, tipping out on to the sofa a couple of apples, a pack of six Penguin biscuits and a roughly sawn-off chuck of cold, cooked pork. ‘And I’ve got a map.’ From inside his jerkin he tugged out an A-Z, on the shiny cover of which he had written ‘Rupert Croft-Parker’ with a blue biro in heavy round writing. I went into the bedroom and rang Philippa. A maid, Spanish by the sound of her, answered the phone; they had a fast turnover of staff, and if I had been Philippa I would have been led by now to ponder why. Almost immediately she came through from another extension. ‘Hello, who is this?’ ‘Philippa, it’s me, I’ve got Roops here.’ ‘Will, what the hell do you think you’re playing at? Can’t you imagine how worried I’ve been?’ ‘I thought you would be—that’s really why I’m phoning …’ ‘Is he all right? What’s been going on?’ ‘I gather he ran away. Didn’t you see his message?’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The phone was ringing. Phil, I knew, would never answer it, though it was at the bedside, and when I came in he was sprawled over the sheets, pale, bleary and tumescent. ‘Leave us out with the phone,’ he groaned. I half sat on him and picked up the receiver. ‘Darling, it’s James. You couldn’t come over, could you?’ ‘Sweetest, I’ve got a pretty frightful head and it’s only seven o’clock. Can’t it wait?’ ‘A bit, I suppose. I’m in a terrible mess. I’ve been arrested.’ 10As I came up he was dithering on the doorstep and had a look, not uncommon with him, of bitten-back anxiety and determined self-control. He gripped my arm and said, ‘God, this is intolerable. I’ve just had a call.’ ‘Don’t worry, old girl, I’ll wait for you.’ I patted him on the shoulder and smiled with a quiet confidence that I didn’t altogether feel after this traumatic night. A gorgeous summer day was unfolding and as James went off flapping his car keys I stood at the gate and let it sink in. The steady rumble of far-off traffic, the thinning haze, the suited people hurrying past, all seemed invitations to some wearying and majestic happening. I almost seemed to see, above the houses across the street, an immense golden athlete stretching into the sky like the drop-curtain of a ballet or a gigantic banner at a Soviet rally, full of appalling promise. It was a relief to go indoors. James’s flat was quite nice—clean and roomy and safely sandwiched half-way up a house of geriatrics and absentee Greeks. The little cosmopolis of Notting Hill, its littered streets, its record exchanges, its international newsagents, late-night cinemas, late-night delis, was to hand. The elegant vacancy of the Park was admirably near; you could walk to the museums, to Knightsbridge even, and a little later in the year, to the Proms. And at the back, a block away, you were in Carnival country. Even so, the very convenience and accessibility of James’s house gave it a bleak and transitory feel. The shelf in the hallway was always stacked with post addressed to former tenants whom nobody knew—bills, circulars, mailing-shots aimed with desolate regularity at a population of migrants. In the small carpeted lift (which this morning I allowed myself to take) one would meet strangers who were just polite, incredibly well dressed, sometimes carrying tiny fancy dogs.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I haven't worked so hard in years." "Are you not enjoying it?" "I can't quite decide. The first day's bound to be a little anxious, perhaps." I grinned at Helene, who smiled capably back, and then looked down. "Do you want to go out for a drink?" It was the sort of offer she didn't regularly get, and she showed a shy person's brave readiness to take it up. She was holding a bag that contained the day's slim takings and I waited while she ran upstairs to the safe with it. In the corners of the hall, and in the shuttered room of family portraits beyond, the red spots of the alarm-beams blinked on and off with vigilant intermittence. When Helene came down she activated them from a panel in a cupboard, and we had thirty seconds to get out, which gave us a suspiciously hasty look. "Do you know somewhere round here?" I said, not keen on a long walk before my drink. She frowned at me humorously. "There's nowhere here," she said. "But if it's urgent, I've got a car." I weighed it up quickly and chose the Golden Calf. She drove us there in a yawing 2CV which had various things wrong with it. I chatted in the forced informal way of a passenger in a virtual stranger's car, whilst she frowned through the windscreen and stamped on the pedals alternately. She seemed disconcerted by the bar, by its high brown gloom and inartistic decor, which were wonderful to me and a relief from everything else. We sat down beside a pair of arthritic domino-players, and when the old waiter came I ordered a large beer and she asked—with a certain polite democratic negligence—for a coffee and a glass of sparkling water. I watched her watch the waiter's retreat, the impatient haste with which he denied or overrode some deformity of his foot. "Is this where you normally come?" "I come here from time to time, as a change from the other bar I go to, where I know a lot of people, who would be a distraction from talking to you, which is what I wanted to do. At the Cassette there's a juke-box, and great scrums of young people shouting their heads off. Here there's no music and everyone's over ninety and they don't talk to you or even quite approve of you and it's all rather restful." "Yes, I've been to the Cassette," she said. "Jan, my fiancé, has got several gay friends, who used to go there all the time." "I see." "It's quite good fun, isn't it, but there are so many handsome young men and I know the last thing they are interested in is me! But perhaps, as you say, that is rather restful." And she blushed at the sudden shift of level and the mimicking airiness with which she brought out the last words. "Did you know I was gay the first time we met?"

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  “Mom just hasn’t gone shopping yet” or “Dad’s waiting for a big paycheck at the end of the year, and then he’ll get a ton of stuff.” These excuses were meant to mask what everyone knew: All of us were poor, and no amount of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles memorabilia would change that. No matter our financial position, our family somehow managed to spend just more than we had on holiday shopping. We didn’t qualify for credit cards, but there were many ways to spend money you didn’t have. You could write a future date on a check (a practice called “post-dating”) so the recipient couldn’t cash it until you had money in the bank. You could draw a short-term loan from a payday lender. If all else failed, you could borrow money from the grandparents. Indeed, I recall many winter conversations in which Mom pleaded with Mamaw and Papaw to lend her money to ensure that their grandchildren had a nice Christmas. They’d always protest Mom’s understanding of what made Christmas nice, but they’d still give in. It might be the day before Christmas, but our tree would be piled high with the trendiest gifts even as our family savings dwindled from very little to nothing, then from nothing to something less than that. When I was a baby, Mom and Lindsay frantically searched for a Teddy Ruxpin doll, a toy so popular that every store in town sold out. It was expensive and, as I was only two, unnecessary. But Lindsay still remembers the day wasted searching for the toy. Mom somehow received a tip about a stranger who was willing to part with one of his Ruxpins at a significant markup. Mom and Lindsay traveled to his house to fetch the trinket that stood between a child who could barely walk and the Christmas of his dreams. The only thing I remember of old Teddy is finding him in a box years later, his sweater tattered and his face covered in crusted snot. It was the holiday season that taught me about tax refunds, which I gathered were free bits of money sent to the poor in the new year to save them from the financial indiscretions of the old one. Income tax refunds were the ultimate backstops. “We can definitely afford this; we’ll just pay for it with the refund check” became a Christmas mantra. But the government was fickle. There were few moments more anxious than the one when Mom came home from the tax preparer in early January. Sometimes the refund exceeded expectations. But when Mom learned that Uncle Sam couldn’t cover the Christmas splurge because her “credits” weren’t as high as she had hoped, that could ruin your whole month. Ohio Januaries are depressing enough as it is. I assumed that rich people celebrated Christmas just like us, perhaps with fewer financial worries and even cooler presents.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Immediately, the woman began asking why I would scream at my mother and storm off, why I didn’t recognize that she was my mother and that I had to live with her by law. The therapist chronicled “outbursts” that I’d allegedly had, some going back to a time I couldn’t remember—the time I threw a tantrum in a department store as a five-year-old, my fight with another child in school (the school bully, whom I didn’t want to punch but did so at Mamaw’s encouragement), the times I’d run from home to my grandparents’ house because of Mom’s “discipline.” Clearly this woman had developed an impression of me based solely on what Mom had told her. If I didn’t have an anger problem before, I did now. “Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?” I asked. At fourteen, I knew at least a little about professional ethics. “Aren’t you supposed to ask me what I think about things and not just criticize me?” I launched into an hour-long summary of my life to that point. I didn’t tell the whole story, since I knew I had to choose my words carefully: During Mom’s domestic violence case a couple of years earlier, Lindsay and I had let slip some unsavory details about Mom’s parenting, and because it counted as a new revelation of abuse, the family counselor was required to report it to child services. So I didn’t miss the irony of lying to a therapist (to protect Mom) lest I ignite another intervention by the county children’s services. I explained the situation well enough: After an hour, she said simply, “Perhaps we should meet alone.” I saw this woman as an obstacle to overcome—an obstacle placed by Mom—not as someone who might help. I explained only half of my feelings: that I had no interest in putting a forty-five-minute barrier between me and everyone I had ever depended on so I could replant myself with a man I knew would be sent packing. The therapist obviously understood. What I didn’t tell her is that for the first time in my life, I felt trapped. There was no Papaw, and Mamaw—a longtime smoker with the emphysema to prove it—seemed too frail and exhausted to care for a fourteen-year-old boy. My aunt and uncle had two young kids. Lindsay was newly married and had a child of her own. I had nowhere to go. I’d seen chaos and fighting, violence, drugs, and a great deal of instability. But I’d never felt like I had no way out. When the therapist asked me what I’d do, I replied that I would probably go live with my dad. She said that this sounded like a good idea. When I walked out of her office, I thanked her for her time and knew that I’d never see her again. Mom had a massive blind spot in the way that she perceived the world.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I was undoubtedly on an upward trajectory, but even toward the end of high school, C’s in easy classes revealed a kid unprepared for the rigors of advanced education. In Mamaw’s house, I was healing, yet as we combed through those financial aid papers, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had a long way to go. Everything about the unstructured college experience terrified me—from feeding myself healthy food to paying my own bills. I’d never done any of those things. But I knew that I wanted more out of my life. I knew that I wanted to excel in college, get a good job, and give my family the things I’d never had. I just wasn’t ready to start that journey. That’s when my cousin Rachael—a Marine Corps veteran—advised that I consider the Corps: “They’ll whip your ass into shape.” Rachael was Uncle Jimmy’s oldest daughter, and thus the dean of our generation of grandchildren. All of us, even Lindsay, looked up to Rachael, so her advice carried enormous weight. The 9/11 attacks had occurred only a year earlier, during my junior year of high school; like any self-respecting hillbilly, I considered heading to the Middle East to kill terrorists. But the prospect of military service—the screaming drill instructors, the constant exercise, the separation from my family—frightened me. Until Rachael told me to talk to a recruiter—implicitly arguing that she thought I could handle it—joining the Marines seemed as plausible as flying to Mars. Now, just weeks before I owed a tuition deposit to Ohio State, I could think of nothing but the Marine Corps. So one Saturday in late March, I walked into a military recruiter’s office and asked him about the Marine Corps. He didn’t try to sell me on anything. He told me I’d make very little money and I might even go to war. “But they’ll teach you about leadership, and they’ll turn you into a disciplined young man.” This piqued my interest, but the notion of J.D. the U.S. Marine still inspired disbelief. I was a pudgy, longhaired kid. When our gym teacher told us to run a mile, I’d walk at least half. I had never woken up before six A.M. And here was this organization promising that I’d rise regularly at five A.M. and run multiple miles per day. I went home and considered my options. I reminded myself that my country needed me, and that I’d always regret not participating in America’s newest war. I thought about the GI Bill and how it would help me trade indebtedness for financial freedom. I knew that, most of all, I had no other choice. There was college, or nothing, or the Marines, and I didn’t like either of the first two options. Four years in the Marines, I told myself, would help me become the person I wanted to be. But I didn’t want to leave home.

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

  But as much as divorced couples may want to wipe the slate clean as parents, they cannot. Children are a permanent legacy of the marriage. If anything, a parent’s responsibility for them is greater than before. The children have a right to know why their parents decided to divorce and what changes the divorce will set in motion. This is what they will take with them as they grow up, working and reworking every nuance of every message you send. At each developmental stage children of divorce reassess their understanding of the divorce. They rehash it when they’re grown and have children of their own and face their own crises. Conversations done fully and well will protect your child, just as Gary’s father protected his son. If these discussions are done poorly or don’t happen at all, the child is left to figure everything out on his own. Being left in the dark with a problem that is too big to understand increases a child’s anxiety profoundly. In my many years of working with divorced families, I’m sorry to say that few parents have such conversations with their children. Most youngsters are told essentially nothing about the parents’ struggle and reasons to decide on divorce—no explanations of the inner struggle, no mention of the reluctance, sorrow, and inability to tolerate any more. It’s as if the divorce came out of the blue. No one says a word. This means that the child, especially the preschool child, often learns about the divorce in the most traumatic way possible when she wakes up one morning to find that her father and his belongings have vanished into thin air.