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 The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Last thing of all before sleep we muttered about the charge against James, though he was shy of my ruse not only to get him off but to bring Colin down. He had pleaded not guilty to the magistrate on the morning after his arrest, and so gained time, the case being deferred. He had a good lawyer, one of his Holland Park patients, who was gay himself and knew how to fight and what such fights could mean if lost. We wondered if it depended on whether the court would accept works of art as evidence; and besides, whether they would accept that Staines’s photographs were works of art. It was a shaky idea, and I fell asleep and dreamed that they confiscated all Staines’s pictures and sent him to gaol instead. When I woke before dawn, parched and aching, I felt lost. I decided that if necessary, and if it might save James, I would testify in court to what I had done with Colin—and so perhaps do something, though distant and symbolic, for Charles, and for Lord B’s other victims. I had that most oppressive of feelings—that some test was looming. James was off to work early, so I walked home through the awakening streets. I moped about in the flat, now furious with Phil, now reproachful, and held a hundred imaginary conversations with him, in which I would often speak out loud—‘What do you mean, you did it out of pity?’, ‘How could you imagine that I wouldn’t find out?’, ‘I’ve never heard anything so absurd in my life …’ and on and on. But when the phone rang I was terrified to answer it and embroil myself in the meanness and misery of arguments. I sat on the bed looking at it and summoning my resolve; but when I did pick up the receiver it was someone I had been at Winchester with—one of those City youngsters—informing me of the memorial service for a not-much-liked don.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  A tongue of white chewing-gum, rough with grit, had welded itself to the rubber and squelched into a curl under the step of the heel. It was surprisingly difficult to detach—and I had a certain revulsion from it, and reluctance to touch it. So with drunken insouciance I remained, leaning on Phil’s bunched shoulder, one flamingo leg drawn up, and spoke quite seriously about the British Museum, outside whose bleak north entrance we were standing. On a huge pillar above our heads a poster advertised the Egyptian galleries, with a number of aproned, broken-nosed pharaohs standing stonily, but rather pathetically, in a row. As I spoke of Charles’s relief of Akhnaten Phil actually started giggling, and only giggled more when I told him to fuck off. ‘If you really cared you’d get this stuff off for me,’ I said. ‘At the one time I need help, you refuse it to me.’ He was not quite sure of the rhetorical conventions now, but muttering ‘Oh, give it here’ grabbed my foot and jerked it upwards, so that I hopped round involuntarily and hung on his neck. I don’t know how slow I was to realise that we were being watched. Certainly my eyes dwelled incuriously on the far pavement for several seconds and though I took in a figure waiting under one of the gently stirring young trees I did so abstractly, and focused all sensation in my hands on Phil’s cropped neck. To the watcher we must have been a well-lit and enigmatic group. I looked away as Phil flung down my foot, but still embraced him while he groped for a handkerchief, a quiver of protective anxiety ruffling my sexy, complacent mood. Two seconds later, the figure had moved. I was slow again to spot him, now further off, under the next tree, and screened to chest height by cars parked at meters along the middle of the street. His act was to be going away, disarming the suspicion he had aroused in me. Or perhaps he did not know he had been seen. He was looking back again now, but still moving, sidling inexpertly under a street-lamp. Then I quickly led Phil away, keeping him turned in towards me, my arm and hand oppressively around his shoulder, so that he was squashed and stumbling against me. But there could be no doubt who it was. It gave me a shock but also the pleasure of a bitter little nodding to myself in recognition of what was afoot. ‘Right!’ I thought, and then, after turning quickly at the corner to look back—but there were other people on the street now, and the distance was all a pattern of shadows—more or less forgot about it for the rest of the night. I was too taken up with the honest but slightly unworthy excitement of coming back to my old haunt with such a luscious piece of goods as Phil.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  they turned to us. In addition to other therapies, we used phone therapy with Bill to help rebuild his confidence. He’s no longer a patient, but he’s become a client.” I wanted to know more about the case, but Candy said everything else was confidential unless Sam decided other wise. “Just remember, Bill’s at a stage where he likes to direct his fantasies. All you have to do is be accepting and giving. He’s a special man, Julia. So relax. Everything will be fine,” she said, as she set me up in the same room where I’d been practicing calls. I settled back in the big armchair with the phone in front of me. From speakers in the ceiling, gentle clas sical music took the edge off the silence. And then a few min utes after Candy shut the door behind her, the phone rang. © “Hello,” I said, croaking out the word. The man on the other end responded with his own hello. “Bill?” I asked, trying to keep my voice from cracking. “Yes. Is this Alice?” And with my eyes shut and the phone in my hand, it was. “Yes, this is Alice.” “So you’re new?” Bill asked. “Uh-huh. How’d you know?” “Candy told me about you. Are you nervous?” His voice was rich and lyrical. I laughed. “Oh boy, am I nervous. Can’t you hear my heart beating over the phone?” “Well, you don’t have to be nervous with me. You know, you have a very gentle voice.” “Thank you.” “My back was to the door when you walked in because I

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was like a memory game. I felt challenged to find something that had changed. I thought Patrick's black trunks perhaps had been taken in. When Matt came back I snogged with him fretfully for a minute downstairs. Where were they, he wanted to know; what was going on? He'd been for a long run down the shore, families were out, there was a small crowd round a van selling frankfurters and frites, beach-balls were a-bounce, and still their little fucking snot-nosed lords and ladyships declined to come out and play. He was cheerily angry, like someone covering up a mischief of his own. I picked up a wodge of Paris Matches and took them upstairs to thumb through, nervously waiting for a possible appointment. We played a desultory game of following the fortunes of actors and models, seen together in a night-club in my copy, married in the later issue Matt was already throwing aside, agreeing a separation in a special exclusive two or three months after that. And who were they with now? Matt lost interest quite quickly and went prowling around. It was voices that alerted me, and I sidled back to the window with abrupt and gloomy excitement. Another fight was going on, with Patrick asking Luc a question, accusing him of something but embarrassed already by possibly being wrong; Luc shook his head in a mime of disbelief and backed away—then turned, slung out a hip and pushed his trousers down to show a strip of blue undershorts. Such a saucy, commonplace little mime it was: I didn't like it. Patrick went back into the house, and Luc hung about for a couple of minutes by himself. I felt he was self-conscious, as if distantly aware of being looked at. I began to pick up on the odd tempo of the voyeur's day, the scattered sightings, the extended lulls, the great patient investment of time, the eerie, more than social intimacy with figures utterly detached and unconscious of you; they were the twitching puppets of their own routines and whims, immune to your muttered urgings, your baffled telepathy, your shielded stare. I'd known it before, once or twice—and half-ashamed—watching a boy next door waste a day, his expanses of day-dreaming, his occasional inscrutable actions. I remembered the texture of the thinnish, slow time in which he existed, the one-sock-on, one-sock- off doldrums of a morning alone. I hated the Donningtons—not for any particular reason, just in that keen, general way one hates one's neighbours, with their boat and their extension—and as I trained the binocs on young Gerry, whose round face was being brusquely thumbed, pinched and generally rethought by the gods of puberty, I felt I was taking a secret revenge. I shut myself in the bathroom and watched and watched. It was like a corrupt privilege granted in a dream or in an ancient public school. "Let's have a look." Matt came up beside me, bored, rather brutal.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Every former clerk raves about the experience, and private-sector employers often shell out tens of thousands in signing bonuses for recent clerks. That’s what I knew about clerkships, and it was completely true. It was also very superficial: The clerkship process is infinitely more complex. First you have to decide what kind of court you want to work for: a court that does a lot of trials or a court that hears appeals from lower courts. Then you have to decide which regions of the country to apply to. If you want to clerk for the Supreme Court, certain “feeder” judges give you a greater chance of doing so. Predictably, those judges hire more competitively, so holding out for a feeder judge carries certain risks—if you win the game, you’re halfway to the chambers of the nation’s highest court; if you lose, you’re stuck without a clerkship. Sprinkled on top of these factors is the reality that you work closely with these judges. And no one wants to waste a year getting berated by an asshole in black robes. There’s no database that spits out this information, no central source that tells you which judges are nice, which judges send people to the Supreme Court, and which type of work—trial or appellate—you want to do. In fact, it’s considered almost unseemly to talk about these things. How do you ask a professor if the judge he’s recommending you to is a nice lady? It’s trickier than it might seem. So to get this information, you have to tap into your social network—student groups, friends who have clerked, and the few professors who are willing to give brutally honest advice. By this point in my law school experience, I had learned that the only way to take advantage of networking was to ask. So I did. Amy Chua told me that I shouldn’t worry about clerking for a prestigious feeder judge because the credential wouldn’t prove very useful, given my ambitions. But I pushed until she relented and agreed to recommend me to a high-powered federal judge with deep connections to multiple Supreme Court justices. I submitted all the materials—a résumé, a polished writing sample, and a desperate letter of interest. I didn’t know why I was doing it. Maybe, with my Southern drawl and lack of a family pedigree, I felt like I needed proof that I belonged at Yale Law. Or maybe I was just following the herd. Regardless of the reason, I needed to have this credential. A few days after I submitted my materials, Amy called me into her office to let me know that I had made the short list. My heart fluttered. I knew that all I needed was an interview and I’d get the job. And I knew that if she pushed my application hard enough, I’d get the interview. That was when I learned the value of real social capital.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I thought of the proscriptions of Octavius, which had forever stained the memory of Augustus; of the first crimes of Nero, which had been followed by other crimes. I recalled the last years of Domitian, of that merely average man, no worse than another, whom fear had gradually destroyed (his own fear and the fears he caused), dying in his palace like a beast tracked down in the woods. My public life was already getting out of hand: the first line of the inscription bore in letters deeply incised a few words which I could no longer erase. The Senate, that great, weak body, powerful only when persecuted, would never forget that four of its members had been summarily executed by my order; three intriguing scoundrels and a brute would thus live on as martyrs. I notified Attianus at once that he was to meet me at Brundisium to answer for his action. He was awaiting me near the harbor in one of the rooms of that inn facing toward the East where Virgil died long ago. He came limping to receive me on the threshold, for he was suffering from an attack of gout. The moment that I was alone with him, I burst into upbraiding: a reign which I intended to be moderate, and even exemplary, was beginning with four executions, only one of which was indispensable and for all of which too little precaution had been taken in the way of legal formalities. Such abuse of power would be cause for the more reproach to me whenever I strove thereafter to be clement, scrupulous, and just; it would serve as pretext for proving that my so-called virtues were only a series of masks, and for building about me a trite legend of tyranny which would cling to me perhaps to the end of history. I admitted my fear; I felt no more exempt from cruelty than from any other human fault; I accepted the commonplace that crime breeds crime, and the example of the animal which has once tasted blood. An old friend whose loyalty had seemed wholly assured was already taking liberties, profiting by the weaknesses which he thought that he saw in me; under the guise of serving me he had arranged to settle a personal score against Nigrinus and Palma. He was compromising my work of pacification, and was preparing for me a grim return to Rome, indeed. The old man asked leave to sit down, and rested his leg, swathed in flannel, upon a stool. While speaking I arranged the coverlet over his ailing foot. He let me run on, smiling meanwhile like a grammarian who listens to his pupil making his way through a difficult recitation. When I had finished, he asked me calmly what I had planned to do with the enemies of the regime.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  My first assumption was that he was on the telephone, which would have been reasonable enough except that he had said he hated the phone. For a sickening moment I felt that I was being somehow betrayed, and that when I went out he rang people up and carried on some other existence. A plan was afoot of which I was the dupe; he had not killed anybody at all … Then I heard another voice, just odd syllables, high—it sounded like a young girl. I heard Arthur say ‘Yeah, well I expect he’ll be back here soon.’ I made a noise and went into the room. ‘Will, thank God,’ Arthur said, half rising from the sofa, but encumbered by the heavy breadth of my photograph album, which lay open across his lap and across that of a small boy sitting beside him and leaning over it as if it were a table. It was my nephew Rupert. Rupert had had longer than me to work out what to say. Even so, he was clearly unsure of the effect he would have. First of all he wanted it to be a lovely surprise: he stared up at me, mouth slightly open, in a spell of silence, while Arthur, too, looked very uncertain. Again I found myself suddenly responsible for people. ‘This is an unexpected pleasure, Roops,’ I said. ‘Have you been showing Arthur the pictures?’ I thought something might be seriously wrong. ‘Yes,’ he said, a little shamefaced. ‘I’ve decided to run away.’ ‘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.

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

  I’m wondering if you might be willing to help us. I know you’re not trying to get anybody on death row, but we thought you might at least consider providing some help to identify the real killer. People will be a lot more accepting of Mr. McMillian’s innocence if they know who really committed this crime.” While it was ridiculous to think that Walter’s freedom depended on the arrest of someone else, I had imagined that a successful investigation might get to this—and I couldn’t dispute that even if an ABI investigation cleared Walter, people would still think he’d gotten away with murder until the actual killer was identified. We had long ago concluded that finding the real murderer might be the most effective way to free Walter, but without the power and authority of law enforcement officers, we were limited in what we could discover. We did have a strong theory. Several witnesses had told us that around the time of the crime, a white man had been seen leaving the cleaners. We had learned that before her death, Ronda Morrison had been receiving menacing calls and that there was a man who had been avidly and inappropriately pursuing her—stopping by unannounced at the cleaners, maybe even stalking her. We had not initially been able to identify this strange man. But we did have our suspicions. We had been contacted by a white man who seemed intensely interested in the case. He would call wanting to talk at length about what we were investigating. He would hint at having information that could help us, but he was coy and slow to share anything concrete. He repeatedly told us that he knew that McMillian was innocent and he would help us prove it. Eventually, after several calls and hours of conversation, he claimed to know where the murder weapon, which had never been recovered, might be located. We tried to get as much information out of him as we could. We also checked his background. He told us that he’d had some conflicts with another man in town and that the more he talked the more he blamed this other man for the shooting death of Morrison. When we investigated this theory, we weren’t impressed. The other man didn’t match the eyewitness descriptions of the person seen leaving the cleaners, and he didn’t have our caller’s history of stalking, violence against women, and preoccupation with the Morrison murder. We began to think that our caller could be the person who had murdered Ronda Morrison. We had dozens of phone conversations with him and even met him a couple of times. We were less and less convinced that the man he was accusing of committing the crime was involved.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When he found out that I had decided to go to Yale Law, he asked whether, on my applications, I had “pretended to be black or liberal.” This is how low the cultural expectations of working-class white Americans have fallen. We should hardly be surprised that as attitudes like this one spread, the number of people willing to work for a better life diminishes. The Pew Economic Mobility Project studied how Americans evaluated their chances at economic betterment, and what they found was shocking. There is no group of Americans more pessimistic than working-class whites. Well over half of blacks, Latinos, and college-educated whites expect that their children will fare better economically than they have. Among working-class whites, only 44 percent share that expectation. Even more surprising, 42 percent of working-class whites—by far the highest number in the survey—report that their lives are less economically successful than those of their parents’. In 2010, that just wasn’t my mind-set. I was happy about where I was and overwhelmingly hopeful about the future. For the first time in my life, I felt like an outsider in Middletown. And what turned me into an alien was my optimism. Chapter 12During my first round of law school applications, I didn’t even apply to Yale, Harvard, or Stanford—the mythical “top three” schools. I didn’t think I had a chance at those places. More important, I didn’t think it mattered; all lawyers get good jobs, I assumed. I just needed to get to any law school, and then I’d do fine: a nice salary, a respectable profession, and the American Dream. Then my best friend, Darrell, ran into one of his law school classmates at a popular D.C. restaurant. She was bussing tables, simply because that was the only job available to her. On the next round, I gave Yale and Harvard a try. I didn’t apply to Stanford—one of the very best schools in the country—and to know why is to understand that the lessons I learned as a kid were sometimes counterproductive. Stanford’s law school application wasn’t the standard combination of college transcript, LSAT score, and essays. It required a personal sign-off from the dean of your college: You had to submit a form, completed by the dean, attesting that you weren’t a loser. I didn’t know the dean of my college at Ohio State. It’s a big place. I’m sure she is a lovely person, and the form was clearly little more than a formality. But I just couldn’t ask. I had never met this person, never taken a class with her, and, most of all, didn’t trust her. Whatever virtues she possessed as a person, she was, in the abstract, an outsider. The professors I’d selected to write my letters had gained my trust. I listened to them nearly every day, took their tests, and wrote papers for them.

• 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 Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  And, of course, the social conditions that led to the sexual wellness industry—pharmaceutical deregulation, increasing scientific and popular attention to sex, demographic shifts—didn’t impact only men. Women bore the burden to enjoy sex, and to enjoy their partner’s medically sustained boner, or to work on themselves until they did. The medicalization of low desire and low arousal pathologizes disinterest in sex—a disinterest that is often quite reasonable. Self-help culture, mixed with this cultural imperative to have a very specific kind of sex, has increasingly put pressure on women to achieve orgasm by doing deep solo work to uncover their deepest desires, and if they can’t, “they are also supposed to keep their partners in a state of blissful ignorance (literally) about their truncated or absent pleasure.”4 This pressure to love sex can be enormously overwhelming, and manipulated for profit. This is also true: many people benefit from sex therapy. CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) has been shown to be effective in treating a wide range of sexual issues, including vaginismus, anorgasmia, and erectile dysfunction.5 More specifically, mindfulness-based interventions are effective in improving sexual satisfaction among women.6 Even internet-conducted cognitive behavioral and mindfulness treatments can help women experiencing sexual distress.7 Since I already had a therapist (bombshell!), I decided to see a sex coach, both to learn more about the practice and to better understand my sexual dissatisfaction. There’s a lot of overlap between sex therapy and coaching, but some key differences: certified sex therapists tend to approach issues from a more psychological, mental health– focused perspective, and they must obtain certification from the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT). Sex coaches tend to approach things more practically, offering a wide range of tools and strategies for improving specific sexual problems. Sex coaching was pioneered by Patti Britton, PhD, a clinical sexologist and educator who popularized talk-based treatment, but there are many approaches. Sexual somatic therapy and sexological bodywork practitioners, for example, can stimulate their patients with touch to work through sexual hang-ups (like inability to orgasm or low desire); these more tactile methods have gained global traction but remain illegal in most states, where the sale of erotic touch is criminalized. Sex coaches in general can have a wide range of qualifications, as it’s an unregulated title. This can cause some confusion and trepidation, but it also frees up sex coaches to play with less conventional approaches.

• From This Boy's Life: A Memoir (1989)

  the tables and tore off a check from the convenience checkbook. I waited in line for a while, then, snapping my fingers as if I had just remembered something, turned on my heels and walked back outside. At the main branch of the public library I took out a card in the name of Thomas Findon. I chose “Thomas Findon” because I’d worked as a camp counselor with a boy of that name during the summer. He was an Eagle Scout from Portland, a soft-spoken athlete with the body of a man and an easy way with the girls who came to camp to visit their little brothers. We taught swimming together until I got demoted to the archery range, where I almost lost my job altogether for arranging twenty-fivecent matches with the young Scouts I was supposed to be teaching. The library was as simple as the bank. All I had to do was give the librarian my name, and an address I’d copied at random from the telephone book. She typed up the card while I waited. I WALKED THE streets for over an hour, looking at stores, at the people behind the counters. I was searching for someone I could trust. I found her in a corner drugstore in the business section, just up the street from the Swedish Sailors’ Home. For several minutes I walked back and forth and watched her through the drugstore window. Then I went inside and stood by the magazine racks, pretending to read and nervously shifting my overnight bag from shoulder to shoulder. She was gray-haired but her face was smooth, her expression direct and open as a young girl’s. A guileless, lovely face. She wore half-moon glasses that she peered over to look at her customers while she rang up their purchases. Afterward she passed the time with them, mostly listening but sometimes adding a comment of her own. Her laugh was soft and pleasant. She made the store like a home. I picked up copies of The Saturday Evening Post and Reader’s Digest, then prowled the aisle for other adult items. I collected some Old Spice aftershave, brass-plated fingernail clippers, a hairbrush, and a package of pipe tobacco. As I approached the cash register she smiled and asked me how I was today. “Grand,” I said “just grand.” She added up my bill and asked if I wanted anything else. “I believe that will do the trick,” I said. I put my hand in my right rear pocket

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The office wasn't locked, thank god, and I closed the door behind me as if I had just escaped from something vile in a dream. I was telling myself already that it was absurd to have such a phobia of a person—it was the kind of loathing that could creep into your empty corners, a neurotic preoccupation. I switched on the lamp and sat down and stared across at the place where normally Paul would be sitting. I was remonstrating with him silently, how could he have taken on Ronald Strong, how come he had never mentioned him to me? I felt as if I were the Director of the Museum and Paul had gone over my head in some important decision. I took out "Orst and his English Contacts" again and stared at a paragraph of it for five minutes. The truth was I felt a real anxiety about being in the place by myself—not a day I normally came in, Paul "away" but perhaps about to return, no arrangement having been made. And it wasn't as if this was an ordinary office, it was almost part of his house, he might come through the little passage in his dressing-gown, in unsuspecting possession of his morning, to find me there: not exactly an intruder, so surprise and displeasure would be mastered but revealed in later mortifying hints. I'd got the terms of our friendship wrong, it seemed, perhaps it would be better if I didn't come in any more. As it happened, another young Englishman, Rex Stout, was interested in Orst, really very keen, he could be a great help, a trained researcher . . . I got up and looked out of the window. Of course I had no intention, no desire, to go through Paul's desk, but I began to feel a queer conviction of petty criminality. I left everything just as I'd found it, and went out very quietly on to the stairs. The door of the first-floor gallery was closed, but not locked, and I slipped in. A table had been set up where work on the triptych could take place, and some temporary rearrangements had been made. The pictures themselves were still there, the two new parts hooked up in an approximate line with the "Mirror" picture. I stood and tried to focus my attention on them. It was the middle panel that we had not covered in our little seminar—taken straight from a photograph, Paul had said, but was the subject of special importance? An empty street, a bridge, a gothic oriel, a density of old roofs beyond, the tower of St John's evidently, with the black flecks of the jackdaws circling; it was the odd quarter-hour of evening when you find you can't see properly any longer, the details fog, you strain to read grey against charcoal. Or maybe it was just the dirt, which from the side you saw on the surface—it might have been swabbed with muddy water.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Though I didn’t realize it at the time, the trauma at home was clearly affecting my health. “Elementary students may show signs of distress through somatic complaints such as stomachaches, headaches, and pains,” reads one resource for school administrators who deal with children who suffer trauma at home. “These students may have a change in behavior, such as increased irritability, aggression, and anger. Their behaviors may be inconsistent. These students may show a change in school performance and have impaired attention and concentration and more school absences.” I just thought I was constipated or that I really hated my new hometown. Mom and Bob weren’t that abnormal. It would be tough to chronicle all the outbursts and screaming matches I witnessed that had nothing to do with my family. My neighbor friend and I would play in his backyard until we heard screaming from his parents, and then we’d run into the alley and hide. Papaw’s neighbors would yell so loudly that we could hear it from inside his house, and it was so common that he’d always say, “Goddammit, there they go again.” I once saw a young couple’s argument at the local Chinese buffet escalate into a symphony of curse words and insults. Mamaw and I used to open the windows on one side of her house so we could hear the substance of the explosive fights between her neighbor Pattie and Pattie’s boyfriend. Seeing people insult, scream, and sometimes physically fight was just a part of our life. After a while, you didn’t even notice it. I always thought it was how adults spoke to one another. When Lori married Dan, I learned of at least one exception. Mamaw told me that Dan and Aunt Wee never screamed at each other because Dan was different. “He’s a saint,” she’d say. As we got to know Dan’s entire family, I realized that they were just nicer to each other. They didn’t yell at each other in public. I got the distinct impression that they didn’t yell at each other much in private, either. I thought they were frauds. Aunt Wee saw it differently. “I just assumed they were really weird. I knew they were genuine. I just figured they were genuinely odd.” The never-ending conflict took its toll. Even thinking about it today makes me nervous. My heart begins to race, and my stomach leaps into my throat. When I was very young, all I wanted to do was get away from it—to hide from the fighting, go to Mamaw’s, or disappear. I couldn’t hide from it, because it was all around me. Over time, I started to like the drama. Instead of hiding from it, I’d run downstairs or put my ear to the wall to get a better listen. My heart would still race, but in an anticipatory way, like it did when I was about to score in a basketball game.

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

  When a court orders overnight visits in these situations, I doubt very much that many parents are able to cooperate about the details of the child’s feeding or sleeping or what to do about colic. They are very distressed, sometimes distraught people. When I’m consulted on what to do about custody of babies I advocate creating a postdivorce environment that’s as close as possible to life in a good intact home. The baby should have a chance to form his earliest relationships within a stable environment, to have a sense of a solid routine and predictable care. If the parents can work this out, they can surely consider overnights in the two houses and carefully observe the child’s response. Parents often need help in overcoming their fear that the baby will not be safe in the care of the other parent. Babies vary greatly in their capacity to deal with change. As the child grows older, parents can increase the time he spends in each home. The child who is happily attached to one parent is able to deal more happily and easily with the other parent and with other caregivers. Putting the child’s best interests forward and honoring what is best for the child is extremely hard to do in many postdivorce families. It requires parents to stand apart from their raw, hurt, jealous, competetive feelings and take an objective, compassionate look at what life will be like for their child. Not every parent can do that, but surely the job of the court is to give priority to the helpless child over the demands of the parent. How Older Children Cope with Joint Custody WHAT ABOUT THE school-aged child? Can all children handle living in two homes? Can everyone deal with two sets of friends and the need to engage in activities that don’t conflict with their parents’ schedules? Obviously there are differences among children that affect their capacity to deal flexibly with changes in daily life. The chief job of the school-age child is to learn at school and to develop socially. For this reason, the child’s personality and temperament need to be carefully considered in making custody plans. People are born with different levels of reactivity and arousal, a basic difference in neurological “hard wiring” stays with us through our lives. Some children adjust easily to change and transition, indeed, some seek it out and thrive on it. Others have a much harder time accepting change. It stresses their neurological system and it takes them longer to get used to it. Translating these basic differences into the school and social arenas of children, it follows that kids for whom transition is harder need more protection so that transitions don’t interfere with learning and making friends. Some children can spend the weekend with one parent and be dropped off at school Monday morning without missing a beat.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  We had about a ten-minute walk to Phil’s hotel, and an uncomfortable amount of it was spent in silence, with both of us looking about with affected interest at the buildings, the shops, the parked cars. Normally, if I was leaving a pub or nightclub with a pickup, and taking a cab or a tube to his place or mine, we had both of us been drinking, time sped by, and we were openly set upon sex. I had rarely felt as sober as I did on this summer evening walk; each speechless step seemed more fateful than the last; and deeply embarrassing doubts began to occupy me. I was so lucky in general, so blessed, that my pick-ups were virtually instantaneous: the man I fancied took in my body, my cock, my blue eyes at a glance. Misunderstandings were almost unknown. Any uncertainty in a boy I wanted was usually overcome by the simple insistence of my look. But with Phil I had let something dangerous happen, a roundabout, slow insinuation into my feelings. Though I very much wanted to fuck his big, muscly bum—and several times dropped behind a step or two to see it working as he walked—my stronger feeling was more protective and caressing. It was growing so strong that it allowed doubts not entertained in the brief certainties of casual sex. If I had got it all wrong, if going back to his place meant a drink in the bar, a game of chess, a handshake—‘I’ve got an early start tomorrow’—the evening would be agony. Already I dreamt up headaches, queazy tums, excuses for dullness and an early escape; and I was so tense that as I did so I even began to feel the symptoms. In Russell Square I grabbed him by the upper arm (its instant, globed hardness was thrilling) and pushed him from the pavement through the gate into the garden in the middle, half-running beside him, and conducting him not down the path under the gigantic plane trees but close along by the hedge that screens the lawns from the street. ‘Sorry,’ I said, letting go of him, my fingertips trailing for a second down the length of his arm. ‘I just saw someone I wanted to avoid.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, not without excitement, and looking back over his shoulder. ‘Who was it?’ I did not answer, but kept on walking. He had not yet come into view, but when we both looked round again a few moments later, we glimpsed, through the gap of the gateway behind us, the familiar figure of Bill from the Club go past, smartly got up in maroon slacks and a dark green short-sleeved shirt. His burliness made his fast walk seem the more flustered and ungainly. A strange look went over Phil’s face. ‘Oh, it’s Bill,’ he said, with an awkward little laugh. ‘Yes. Did you want to see him?’ A split second after this reasonable-sounding dissimulation I thought that perhaps he did.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘Oh—no. Is he a friend of yours?’ Phil asked. ‘Isuppose he is, yes. I often see him at the Corry. He’s a very decent sort. Very decent.’ I sounded quite unlike myself. ‘You must know him too,’ I added. ‘Oh yes.’ He said this rather weightily, and we walked on, crossing the lawn now that the danger was past. It would have been disastrous for the three of us to have met, but my success in avoiding it was soured by wondering what Bill was doing in Russell Square anyway. No reason whatever that he shouldn’t be there, of course. But he lived in Highgate; and he had been coming from the direction of the Queensberry Hotel. The Russell Square Gardens have three wonderful fountains at their centre. Water, shot upwards in high single jets, falls onto huge concrete discs, raised only a few inches above the surrounding paving, and flees away over their concave surfaces into a narrow channel beneath their rims. They are unusable in any but the stillest weather, for even a light breeze fans the falling water away, drenching the paths and benches. Although it was late for such things, they were still working now, and we stopped to look at them without a word. The westering sun shot through the upper zones of the planes, picking out the flaky pastel trunks and branches amid the motionless green and gilt of the leaves. Below was a dusky gloom through which people moved, breathing the warm, dusty summer smell. And the fountains pounded upwards, as if to cling to the light, and fell with only the slightest wavering of pulse onto the wide grey discs in front of us. Phil must have seen them far more often than I had, but he seemed content to stand and watch. Their mesmerising, impersonal play was a relief. Then first one, and then another, in three downward jumps, was switched off. A painful feeling of emptiness and ordinariness came over me. I turned ruefully to Phil, and looked him up and down for several seconds. As we walked on I wondered if I shouldn’t have used the moment to put an arm around him, even to kiss him. As we crossed the road to the hotel, though we both became more tense, there was a perceptible shift of power: we were entering his territory. ‘We’d better go round the back,’ he said. ‘We’re not supposed to be out front when we’re off duty.’ ‘No, sure,’ I said; then enquired, ‘When are you back on duty again?’ If it was any moment now, it would alter the whole imaginary campaign. ‘Oh, from midnight,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m here. I don’t live here, you see, but when you’re on night duty they give you a room. I’m on nights all this month.’ ‘I see. Where do you live normally?’ I had a hunger to know these facts and to read things into them.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  It’s part of the experience here.” In a place that always seemed a little foreign, Usha’s presence made me feel at home. I went to Yale to earn a law degree. But that first year at Yale taught me most of all that I didn’t know how the world worked. Every August, recruiters from prestigious law firms descend on New Haven, hungry for the next generation of high-quality legal talent. The students call it FIP—short for Fall Interview Program—and it’s a marathon week of dinners, cocktail hours, hospitality suite visits, and interviews. On my first day of FIP, just before second-year classes began, I had six interviews, including one with the firm I most coveted—Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, LLP (Gibson Dunn for short)—which had an elite practice in Washington, D.C. The interview with Gibson Dunn went well and I was invited to their infamous dinner at one of New Haven’s fanciest restaurants. The rumor mill informed me that the dinner was a kind of intermediate interview: We needed to be funny, charming, and engaging, or we’d never be invited to the D.C. or New York offices for final interviews. When I arrived at the restaurant, I thought it a pity that the most expensive meal I’d ever eaten would take place in such a high-stakes environment. Before dinner, we were all corralled into a private banquet room for wine and conversation. Women a decade older than I was carried around wine bottles wrapped in beautiful linens, asking every few minutes whether I wanted a new glass of wine or a refill on the old one. At first I was too nervous to drink. But I finally mustered the courage to answer yes when someone asked whether I’d like some wine and, if so, what kind. “I’ll take white,” I said, which I thought would settle the matter. “Would you like sauvignon blanc or chardonnay?” I thought she was screwing with me. But I used my powers of deduction to determine that those were two separate kinds of white wine. So I ordered a chardonnay, not because I didn’t know what sauvignon blanc was (though I didn’t) but because it was easier to pronounce. I had just dodged my first bullet. The night, however, was young. At these types of events, you have to strike a balance between shy and overbearing. You don’t want to annoy the partners, but you don’t want them to leave without shaking your hand. I tried to be myself; I’ve always considered myself gregarious but not oppressive. But I was so impressed by the environment that “being myself” meant staring slack-jawed at the fineries of the restaurant and wondering how much they cost. The wineglasses look like they’ve been Windexed. That dude did not buy his suit at the three-suits-for-one sale at Jos. A. Bank; it looks like it’s made from silk. The linens on the table look softer than my bedsheets; I need to touch them without being weird about it.

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

  First, don’t act impulsively. A visit to an attorney will give you very important information about finances, your legal rights and other aspects of the law, and court or mediation practice. This is vital information but only a small part of what you will need. Think realistically about what your life will be like after divorce. If you need to go back to school, think about doing it before you divorce. Add up the pros and cons carefully. Keep in mind that you will need to spend far more time with your children, giving them extra support and encouragement after the divorce, and that your presence may be even more needed during their adolescence. This means you won’t have time to look for the new lover you may have dreamed about or to begin a new marriage right away, especially if your new partner has children. Your children may well be more demanding, more symptomatic, angrier, and harder to handle than ever before. No matter what custody arrangement you work out, you will still be a single parent in decision making, in responsibility, and in guiding your child. So be prepared for a lonely, hectic time. Yes, it can be done. Yes, it’s much harder than you think. At least one parent, you or your ex-spouse, must be willing to give the children priority. The time that you invest in comforting your children, in being available to them in the evenings, is the most important investment you can make in your future relationship with them. Try your best not to delegate parenting tasks to your eldest or most competent child. If you do, then be sure to make the job temporary. As I said in earlier chapters, you need to maintain household structure and routines in childhood as well as during adolescence. And what has emerged clearly from this work is that your children will continue to need your help in entering young adulthood and during their early twenties. If a very young child has enjoyed having one parent at home part-or full-time, you should consider finding ways to maintain this arrangement for at least a year after the breakup. Little children who lose both parents because daddy moves out and mommy goes to work full-time suffer terribly. These children pathetically search for their lost parents everywhere. The youngsters in our study, who had so little capacity to understand the changes in their lives or to provide for their own care, remained vulnerable throughout their growing up years and had more trouble in adulthood than children who were older at the breakup. Just as postponing the sale of the home can be built into the divorce agreement, I recommend that parents delay the mother’s reentry into full-time work until the youngest child has had time to adjust.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against prin cipalities. After the abortion I started going to a holistic therapist named Donna, a cute woman with shiny brown shoulder- length hair and a chipper smile. She was older than I but still not very old. These are some of the things I never told her about: Steven my fear of being locked in public restrooms trapped alive Anya my terror of falling asleep of turtleneck sweaters of pot lucks of salt shakers and sugar jars in restau rants of people on drugs of catching their highs and what if my hands took on a will of their own. My elevator phobia: I would arrive fifteen minutes early, trudge up the six flights to her of fice, dawdle in the hall until I quit panting. “You look so exotic in those blue earrings,” she’d coo. “What adventures has life brought you this week?” “Oh nothing in particular.” “Noth ing?” Deeper and deeper did I hunch into the white wicker armchair with its cheerful floral cushion, tainted and abject, my lips a trembling wall of nondisclosure. My eyes traced the arabesques of the Oriental rug on the floor. Donna stared at me, her face pleasant and blank until I finally blurted out, “I throw up.” “Throw up?” “Yes.” “I’m all ears,” she chirped. I babbled on about how I was vomiting at least twice a day and it had been over a year—the weight loss was great, I felt intense and sexy, like Joan Jett—but I read about all these women with rotting teeth. She listened, therapeutically silent, then cocked her head and said, “What sign are you?” “Aquarius.” Her head shot erect, shiny brown hair jiggling against the lace collar of her blouse: “Yes.” Some planet was imminently moving into some house. “So you see,” she chimed, “when you’re ready to give it up, your bulimia will drop away.” We decided to focus on something positive. Donna hypnotized me and we found a safe spot on my thigh that I could touch whenever I felt afraid.