Disappointment

Passages

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

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

  I can only conclude that joint custody as a legal presumption for all children is a misguided policy. Although our legal system is mandated to protect the best interest of children, it often makes life harder for them. The emphasis on finding policies that suit all children is unrealistic and detrimental to the individuality of children and their family situations. We need to develop procedures that allow children to discuss their needs and wishes before visiting arrangements are made—and we need to make provisions for monitoring these arrangements through time. Each arrangement should be tailored to individual circumstances. Repeating the PastA WEEK AFTER talking to Racer, I met Paula to discuss what I’d learned. The child was obviously frustrated. I couldn’t help wondering, shouldn’t his mother, who was so unhappy as a child of divorce, have a huge amount of empathy for her son’s predicament and take steps to protect him? I asked Paula if she could do more to accommodate to Racer’s concern that his interests would get no support from either parent. Her face contorted. “I’ve done all the accommodating so far,” she said. “If Brad will back off and come to me, then maybe we can talk. But I’ll be damned if I’m always the one who explains things to Racer, the one who makes the sacrifices. Racer will have to live with who Brad is and who I am—and he’ll have to make the best of it!” I was troubled at her angry response, which had blotted out her genuine concern for her son. But I had seen this before. I decided to try again: “Paula, is there anything you learned from your own experience as a child of divorce that would make it easier for Racer? He’s having a hard time and trying very hard not to show it.” She sat glumly for a moment and then relented. “Maybe during the baseball season, which doesn’t last forever, Brad and I can figure out another custody arrangement that would work better for him. Maybe I should call my ex-mother-in-law.”

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

  The economic plight of young people from divorced families who reach age eighteen and are faced with supporting themselves and their college educations is hardly ever discussed publicly or within the professional community. Among organizations of men and women who promote changes in divorce laws, the issue of financial support for college does not have priority. Women’s groups concentrate on child support for young children. Men’s groups lobby for presumptive joint custody. I’ve found no national statistics on the question of college support and no lobbying groups fighting for reform. But among children of divorce, it ranks near the top of the wish list. Legislators who speak on college campuses around the country get an earful from students on the ways in which their divorced parents are letting them down. I’ve had telephone calls from registrars at exclusive women’s colleges asking me for insights into alumna families—the daughters have applied and are academically prepared but their parents won’t pay and they do not qualify for financial aid. Most universities calculate need based on the income of both parents, but if one, often the father who has more money, is unwilling to contribute, the young person is denied scholarships. Ironically, if the father were deceased, the same young person would be eligible for scholarship aid. Blunting of Father-Child RelationshipsI CAN THINK OF several reasons for the sad state of affairs of college-bound children of divorce. First is the fact that in the vast majority of divorce settlements, college is not discussed and rarely is it covered. Like the whoosh of a falling guillotine, the law states that child support terminates at age eighteen. Except in a small number of states (Massachusetts, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, and New Jersey), a judge cannot order support to continue even if a young person can show in court that her parents have the financial resources to send her to college, that higher education is a core family value, and that the student is serious and diligent. In other states like New Jersey, New York, and New Hampshire, support can be ordered up to age twenty-one if the family meets the criteria just mentioned and can show that, had the parents remained married, the child almost certainly would have had title to an “educational birthright” with full or partial funding of higher education. Pennsylvania used to have a similar law, but it was challenged successfully on constitutional grounds by a wealthy father who argued that he fully planned to pay for his daughter’s college education but objected to being ordered to do so because parents in intact families have no such obligation. The court upheld his plea.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Voyagers discover that the world can never be larger than the person that is in the world; but it is impossible to foresee this, it is impossible to be warned. It is only when time has begun spilling through his fingers like water or sand-carrying away with it, forever, dreams, possibilities, challenges, and hopes-that the young man realizes that he will not be young forever. If he wishes to paint a picture, raise a family, write a book, design a building, start a war-well, he does not have forever in which to do it. He has only a certain amount of time, and half of that time is probably gone already. As long as his aspirations are in the realm of the dream, he is safe; when he must bring them back into the world, he is in danger. Precisely for this reason, Paris was a devastating shock. It was easily recognizable as Paris fr om across the ocean: that was what the letters on the map spelled out. This was not the same thing as finding oneself in a large, inconvenient, indif ferent city. Paris, fr om across the ocean, looked like a refuge from the American madness; now it was a city four thousand miles fr om home. It contained-in those days-no dough nuts, no milk shakes, no Coca-Cola, no dry Martinis; nothing resembling, for people on our economic level, an American toilet; as for toilet paper, it was yesterday's newspaper. The concierge of the hotel did not appear to find your presence in France a reason fi: >r rejoicing; rather, she found your pres ence, and in particular your ability to pay the rent, a matter for the profoundest suspicion. The policemen, with their re volvers, clubs, and (as it turned out) weighted capes, appeared to be convinced of your legality only after the most vindictive scrutiny of your passport; and it became clear very soon that they were not kidding about the three-month period during THE NEW LOST GENERATION 66 5 which every foreigner had to buy a new visa or leave the coun try.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Himes an A for ambition-and a rather awe-stricken gasp for effort-we are forced also to realize that the book's con- 579 ss o OTHER ESSAYS siderable burden never really gets shoulder high. It is written almost as though the author were determined within one book, regardless of style or ultimate effect, to say all of the things he wanted to say about the American republic and the position of the Negro in it. Part of the failure of the book certainly lies in this fact, that far too much is attempted; and the story never really gets under way because of a complete lack of integration. Any one of its clements, perceptively stud ied, would make an impressive novel; and, further, because of the crudity of the story structure, the climax-the murder of a bigoted white man by his Negro stooge, an incident valid in itself and with terrible implications-fails of its effect and seems almost an afterthought; and the resolution-the hold ing aloft of the union banner-leaves one with that same em barrassed rage produced by a reading of Invictus. The book, nevertheless, has flashes of power and insight-the handling of the white girl's relation to Lee, fi>r example, and Lee's sex ual relationship with his wife; and one of the subsidiary char acters, the Uncle Tom named Luther, is handled and seen so accurately that no white man, ever again, should dare to turn his back on any Negro he feels that he has bought and conquered. I ha\'e already indicated that Mr. Himes seems capable of some of the worst writing on this side of the Atlantic, but his integrity has actually the cumulative effect of making him seem tar wiser and more skillful than he is. The value of his book lies in its earnest effort to understand the psychology of oppressed and oppressor and their relationship to each other. It tails to raise his book to the level of A Passalre To India but it docs lend it an historical importance, not unlike that ac corded to Uncle Tom ) s Cabin or, more recently, to Native Son. For, of all the spate of recent novels concerning racial oppression not one has exhibited any genuine understanding of its historical genesis or contemporary necessity or its psy chological toll. One might over-simplifY our racial heritage sufficiently to observe, and not at all flippantly, that its essen tials would seem to be contained in the tableau of a black and white man facing each other and that the root of our trouble is between their legs. More and more it is impossible to dis cuss the Negro in America without also discussing American HISTORY AS NIGHTMARE customs, morals and fears.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Up in the showers afterwards he was standing beside the same person, and the reason for it became clearer. The boy, very brown all over, except for a pink triangle above the crack of his ass, was thin and wiry, though not quite unattractively so, his colour glamorising (as it can do a nondescript Italian or Arab) what would have been a meagre body if pale. There was something strained about him, particularly his gaunt, narrow head, hollow-cheeked and with short dark curls. His sunken eyes were a cold blue, made the more striking by his tan; when he turned round I saw that he had shaved off all his pubic hair, which added a kinky and intenser nakedness to his salient, sideways-curving, pink-headed and very large cock. The conversation was not fluent. The youth would pass some bland comment, and James would try to reply with adequate enthusiasm or insouciance. ‘See you,’ said the youth, abruptly turning off his shower and going off to dry. ‘Yes, see you,’ said James, managing to make it seem a careless possibility, though the smile faded off his face in a way that showed it was not spontaneous. He had effectively been put down, as it is impossible to go padding out after someone in simulated sportsman-like ease when they have just said goodbye to you. I crossed over and took my place beside James. ‘Who’s your friend?’ I enquired. He merely gave me a sceptical look. ‘Why don’t you go after him?’ ‘I don’t think I care for him.’ ‘Oh come on! He looked to me as if he quite cared for you—if Dame Tumescence is anything to go by.’ ‘Another time, perhaps.’ He shampooed his receding hair in a listless fashion. ‘I see Miss Manners is having a ball.’ It was one of James’s almanac of nicknames.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Children can survive without money or security or safety or things: but they are lost if they cannot find a loving example, for only this example can give them a touchstone for their lives. Thus far and no further: this is what the father must say to the child. If the child is not told where the limits are, he will spend the rest of his life trying to discover them. For the child who is not told where the limits are knows, though he may not know he knows it, that no one cares enough about him to prepare him for his journey. This, I think, has something to do with the phenomenon, unprecedented in the world, of the ageless American boy; it has something to do with our desperate adulation of simplicity and youth-how bitterly betrayed one must have been in one's youth to suppose that it is a virtue to remain simple or to remain young!-and it also helps to explicate, to my mind at least, some of the stunning purposes to which Americans have put the imprecise science of psychiatry. I have known people in genuine trouble, who somehow managed to live with their trouble; and I cannot but compare these people ex-junkies and jail- birds, sons of German Nazis, sons of Span ish generals, sons of Southern racists, blues singers and black matrons-with that fluid horde, in my professional and quasi professional contacts, whose only real trouble is inertia, who work at the most disgraceful jobs in order to pay, for the luxury of someone else's attention, twenty-five dollars an hour. To my black and toughened, Puritan conscience, it seems an absolute scandal; and, again, this peculiar self indulgence certainly has a dreadful effect on their children, whom they are quite unable to raise. And they cannot raise them because they have opted for the one commodity which is absolutely beyond human reach: safety.

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

  What was the situation with her own son, Racer, and was she able to bring special knowledge from her own childhood in protecting him from being hurt the way she had been hurt? After Paula filed for divorce, Brad shocked her completely by requesting that Racer live with him half the time in joint physical custody. In relating this to me Paula shook her head in disbelief. “If anyone’d told me that Brad would want his kid half-time I’d have said they were completely in left field. His idea of a quiet evening at home is to get loaded, order pizza, watch the sports channel, and fall asleep. When we lived together it’d be me who remembered to give Racer his dinner and put him to bed. Yeah, Brad would play with him when he felt like it. He’d let Racer watch TV with him and he’d explain about baseball and who the players were. But anything having to do with really taking care of Racer—forget it!” Paula snorted and tossed her head. “Then I figured out why Brad wanted Racer half-time. You pay a lot less child support, that’s why. The court counts nights that the child spends in each home and that’s how they figure child support. I guess they think you rent out the room when the kid’s away. They really are a bunch of jerks. Anyway, that’s the law. I was real worried about this half-time custody of Racer, but Brad was adamant. He said he wouldn’t party and would stay home or get a babysitter when Racer was with him. Fat chance!” In California, when divorcing couples are unable to mutually agree on a plan for their children’s living arrangements, they are referred to a court mediator. After hearing each parent’s side, the mediator helps them devise a shared plan. Most parents can do this with the mediator’s help, but if they cannot agree, the case goes to trial, and after ordering evaluations of the mental health and parenting of each of the parents the court decides for them. Brad and Paula could not develop their own plan for custody of Racer so they were assigned a mediator. In many states parents have no alternative and have to go to court. “I couldn’t let it get to trial. Hell, I was on welfare. Trials cost a fortune. Only very rich people can afford snazzy attorneys. I knew we were going to have to agree on something with the mediator. Anyway, I learned a lot.” “What did you learn?” I was curious to hear this from Paula’s perspective, Paula having had a chunk of her own childhood arranged by court-ordered visitation. “Well, the mediator was very pleasant and very professional. She would only see us together. She had about an hour and a half for the whole works. Can you imagine planning for my child’s whole growing up in an hour and a half? Hell.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  She wrinkled her forehead for a second, then laughed. “Yes, I’d be honored to be the last car on your taco train.” She wrig gled out of her tight jeans and then peeled off her black silk panties with a self-conscious look on her face. I eased her onto her back and spread her legs. Her pussy was sweet and clean, with a spicy fragrance that suggested she had dabbed some perfume down there. I took my time, enjoying the feeling of being on my stomach rather than on my back, steadily bringing her closer to orgasm with a newfound confidence in my abilities. When she began to squirm and pant, I concentrated on her clit, sending her over the edge with a final swirling flourish of my tongue. “Wow,” she said simply, a few seconds later. “Practice, practice.” She rolled onto her side, raised her head on her hand. “Let me ask you, have you had any ... relief tonight?” “Nope. With me it’s all give and no take. I just give and give and then give some more.” She giggled. “Would you like some take, for a change?” she asked shyly. “God yes.” “Okay, you just lie still and let me take care of you.” I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling in happy exhaus tion as Amira unzipped my jeans and delicately extracted my cock. She crouched over me, her dark hair shielding her face as if by modesty. Her tongue was warm and soft, her motions tentative and unpracticed. She held my cock gently inside her mouth, like she was afraid of damaging it, and moved her head up and down in a slow and steady rhythm. In the state I was in, it was enough. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to drift along patiently with the sensation. “Here it comes,” I said. Amira lifted her head and took over with her hand, stroking my slippery cock with a firm grip. I groaned and spilled out my load in a prolonged spasm of pleasure. When it was over, the room seemed to be spinning in lazy circles, and I felt drugged. I lay there limply while Amira cleaned me with a towel and zipped me up. “You’re an angel,” I said. She smiled. “If my mother could see me right now, she wouldn’t think so.” The next morning I was hung over, sore, and vaguely de pressed. Instead of leaving me fulfilled, the escapade sent me into a funk that lasted for weeks. I remember thinking that Amira had it right—it was much better to let a fantasy remain a fantasy, and to remain true to your morals. I called up Amira a few days later and asked her out. She

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

  Americans believe that the university is a necessary step for success in our technologically advanced, competitive society. Many parents in intact families make enormous sacrifices to send their children to college. As men and women of the world who benefited from their own professional training and contacts, they know that without a college education young people are handicapped all through their lives. Thus they save their money for many years ahead. In turn, they expect their kids to work hard as students and in part-time jobs. But they do not expect the children to do it all by themselves. Billy’s experience with higher education is typical of what happened to many of the young people in this study who had college- educated parents. In his case, support was cut off in the middle of his freshman year. For others the cut came later or was aborted from the start. These children worked hard to gain admittance to a public university with high standards and often found part-time jobs to help pay tuition. Their parents promised to foot all or part of the remaining expenses but then broke their promise, with no warning. Checks suddenly failed to arrive. Embarrassed, discouraged, and angry, they opted for a solution that fit their earlier experiences: they dropped out and gave up or they faced years of hard work that they viewed as simply another legacy of their parents’ divorce. Their parents, meanwhile, offered no explanation or apology for their failure to help. Numbers sometimes tell a very dramatic story. The people in our divorce and comparison groups grew up side by side on the same streets, attended the same public high schools, and most of their fathers earned the same good incomes. When I compared everyone’s financial support for college, I was astounded. A little less than 30 percent of the youngsters from divorced families received full or consistently partial support for college compared with almost 90 percent of youngsters in intact families. 6 That’s a whopping difference that speaks volumes about how children of divorce lead an entirely different life compared to their next-door peers in intact families. Their entry into adulthood begins painfully and precipitously—and very differently from their closest friends. The bottom line is that millions of young people, who might have expected and received financial help and encouragement from their families, now hear after divorce: You want a college education? You pay for it. The economic plight of young people from divorced families who reach age eighteen and are faced with supporting themselves and their college educations is hardly ever discussed publicly or within the professional community. Among organizations of men and women who promote changes in divorce laws, the issue of financial support for college does not have priority.

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

  He thought Billy was doing beautifully. “The reason Billy’s okay is that I’ve never told him to do anything,” he said. “I haven’t pushed my ideas or my lifestyle on him. I’d say he’s off and running. I don’t see a problem at all.” “Have you and your ex-wife ever talked about helping Billy if he wants to go to college?” I asked, wondering if “off and running” meant paying one’s own way through school. Billy’s father looked serious. “There was some idea about splitting his college expenses. I’ve given it some thought and I don’t think it’s such a good idea. If Billy chooses to go to college, he’ll value it more if he comes up with a way to do it himself.” Billy’s father looked me straight in the eye. “And he does better when his mother and I don’t coddle him.” I was saddened but not surprised by what had happened to Billy when he attempted college. Like so many of the young people in our study, Billy’s parents were both college educated and both had been given a higher education by their families. I had no doubt at all that if these two had stayed together, they would have sent Billy to college no questions asked. Moreover, their lack of concern for Billy’s future was striking. I was certainly aware that a vulnerable young man like Billy needed a high level of specialized knowledge in order to enter the workplace because his poor health precluded so many jobs. But when I talked to Billy’s mother she seemed politely regretful that her son hadn’t continued in college. Billy’s father told me flatly that he didn’t care one way or another. Neither parent seemed to expect that Billy would achieve to at least their own educational and occupational levels. In fact, neither seemed to have many expectations for Billy at all. When they reach their eighteenth birthday, many young adults in divorced families suddenly feel like second-class citizens. That’s when the last child support check arrives and that’s when they realize how disadvantaged they are compared with their friends in intact families. In California and the great majority of the states, a parent has no obligation to help a child after the age of eighteen or the end of high school. The child’s continued education, including tuition, books, supplies, and living expenses, is all up to him. Many young people consider the cutoff at age eighteen the worst hit of their parents’ divorce. They tell me bitterly, “I paid for my folks’ divorce.” Among middle-class children, a college education is an expected rite of passage.

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  423 Scope: Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 2nd Edition Part VI: Literature of the 19th Century T his section of the course introduces 12 major authors—poets, novelists, and playwrights—moving chronologically from Wordsworth in the English Romantic period at the turn of the 18 th century to Thomas Hardy at the turn of the 19 th century. Though the course begins and ends with two English authors, it ranges widely in 19 th-century literature, turning to Russia for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, to France for Stendhal and Flaubert, and to America for Melville, Whitman, and Twain. Although each lecture typically focuses on a single representative work by the author concerned— on Stendhal’s Red and Black, for instance, or Twain’s Huckleberry Finn—it also sketches enough of the author’s life to let the reader see what kind of experiences—personal, intellectual, and literary—the author brought to the work in question. In addition, each lecture aims to set the author and his or her work against the background of major intellectual currents, historical events, literary infl uences, and notable precedents. Wordsworth, for instance, is presented not only as a progenitor of English Romanticism but also as a fi gure deeply in fl uenced by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, which at fi rst inspired him with its promises of liberty, equality, and fraternity but then dismayed him by the ruthlessness of its violence at home and aggression abroad. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen is shown rewriting the plot of the traditional fairytale in the hard, practical terms of socioeconomic realism, which may sometimes compel a young woman to choose between virtual destitution and marriage to anyone who can support her—whether or not she loves him. In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens works major changes in the familiar story of the foundling and what Freud would later call the family romance; when Pip discovers the identity of the benefactor who has plucked him from the grime of the blacksmith shop and fi nanced his transformation into a gentleman, his dream of marriage to Estella—the would-be fairy princess—seems shattered, and he never fully recovers. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman is shown

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  527 But in chapter 3, after hearing a hair-raising sermon on the tortures of the damned, he decides to confess his sins and take communion, thus returning to the order of the Catholic faith. Though this sequence roughly reenacts the pattern of Augustine’s Confessions, Joyce’s novel evokes this pattern only to break it in pieces by creating a new religion of art. Even after repenting and confessing his sins, Stephen declares in chapter 3 that he “will not serve” the Church. Instead, turning Catholic ritual into metaphors for artistic creation, he will become “a priest of eternal imagination,” transforming ordinary experience into lasting art. For instance, at the end of chapter 4, he sees a wading girl as “a strange and beautiful seabird”—a “mortal” version of the Virgin Mary. She provokes in him an “aesthetic” emotion, raised above desire and loathing. When Stephen hears his mythic name “Dedalus” shouted by other young men, he hears it as a prophecy of his artistic career. The mythic Dedalus symbolizes Stephen’s aspiration to soar as an artist. Having begun with a picture of his biological father reading to him, he ends by invoking his mythical father—father of the artistic identity he has discovered within himself. ■ Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , edited by Chester G. Anderson. ———, Ulysses, edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior. Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. Gifford with Seidman, Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’ s Ulysses. Essential Reading Supplementary Reading 528 Lecture 77: James Joyce 1. Do you fi nd Stephen Dedalus consistently likeable? Why or why not? 2. How does the Stephen presented in the fi rst three chapters of Ulysses differ from the Stephen depicted in Portrait? Questions to Consider

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  426 Lecture 61: William Wordsworth William Wordsworth Lecture 61 Coming of age in England at the end of the 18 th century, Wordsworth was inevitably in fl uenced by the Enlightenment, a period of great experiment and discovery in science, philosophy, and political theory. D eeply infl uenced by the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, Wordsworth imbibed its egalitarian ideals as a young man in the early 1790s. But when the violence of the Revolution left him shattered and disillusioned, he tried to make a revolution of his own in the language of his poetry, wherein he aimed to speak “the real language of men,” and in the subject of his poetry, wherein he explored the depths of his own mind and heart and revealed the creative, transforming power of his imagination. This lecture briefl y treats The Prelude, Wordsworth’s autobiographical epic, then moves on to examine at length his fi rst major poem, “Tintern Abbey.” Meditating on the River Wye and on the changes that he has undergone between his fi rst visit to the river and the second, the poet here demonstrates that nature has played a crucial role in shaping his mind, but also that he has been profoundly touched by the “still sad music of humanity.” His year in France in the early 1790s profoundly shaped his life and poetry. He had an affair with a French woman (Annette Vallon), who bore his child. Though he later married another woman, the memory of his passion for Annette survives in the later books of The Prelude, where he tells the story of his passion for the Revolution itself. The violence of the Revolution left Wordsworth shattered but nonetheless determined to make a revolution in poetry. To combat the sense of despair bred by the failure of the Revolution, he aimed to celebrate the restorative power of nature. To reaf fi rm the corresponding power of the human mind, he aimed to explore its depths and to show that it worked in collaboration with nature. Working with Coleridge, Wordsworth developed a theory of poetry as something both imaginative and emotive. Good poetry, the two men agreed,

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  535 a chill of disappointment—something like the chill of death. Lucy shares her disappointment. This little episode reveals the sense of death that shadows Clarissa on this day. The fact that she is very pale, has gray hair, suffers from a heart condition, and sleeps apart from her husband may help to explain why the pain of missing out on a lunch party makes her feel “suddenly shrivelled.” Though this novel follows the life of a gracious, lively woman on a bright June day in London, it will end by presenting her response to the news of the death of a young man irretrievably traumatized by the war. Virginia Woolf presents the mind of Clarissa as something through which a stream of memories fl ows continuously. In the mind of Clarissa, memories can be just as vivid as anything that happens to Clarissa in time present. On the very fi rst page of the novel, she remembers the morning air at her parents’ country house when she was a girl. She also remembers Peter Walsh, a young man who once passionately loved her and will actually come to see her on this very day. Though characters created by such writers as Dickens and Proust have powerful memories at certain privileged moments, Woolf’s characters experience memory as a vital part of their everyday lives. Almost every character in the novel has an inner world of thoughts, feelings, and memories that are relayed to us by the omniscient narrator. For instance, just as Clarissa returns to her house, we move inside the head of her servant Lucy. By entering the mind and heart of a servant, Woolf democratizes the novel— even though she represents a socially stratifi ed world. Born to the upper middle class and raised by governesses and her parents, including a highly literary father, Woolf gradually developed her own distinctive way of telling a story. Though periodically attacked by bouts of depression, culminating in her suicide in 1941, she read voraciously, wrote prolifi cally, and lived fully. She enjoyed a circle of highly stimulating friends known as the Bloomsbury Group. They included Leonard Woolf, a writer and politician, whom she married in 1912.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I remembered the disappointment I'd felt as a child when she returned from Kenya and I discovered that she wasn't black, merely tanned and wizened; she had a sharp smell that struck a hugged six-year-old keenly, and wore trousers and smoked yellow cigarettes. I had read Careful, Mary! when I was still too young to know what was wrong with it; it was the one in which she got muddled up and wrote about Bermondsey when she clearly meant Belgravia; the raffish "Bermondsey set" were like figures from Thackeray oddly translated to the era of Victrolas and racing Bentleys. Still, why not? I thought. And then she had ended up in Chislehurst, in eccentric isolation amid some private fantasy of England. I was quite taken by her portrait of the young Duke of Bermondsey and absorbed myself with deliberate enthusiasm in her topsy-turvy world. Then I finished my glass and the pleasure shrivelled. I closed the book and sat back with my head against the wall, drumming my fingers tentatively on the cover, half-smiling to myself with misery that this could have happened again. And with the excitement of a recognised necessity, too. Out in the streets I walked fast but aimlessly around, dry-mouthed and giddy with early-afternoon drunkenness under the glare of thin cloud. Soon I was in my street, I was in my room and closed the door. It felt warm and remote there, like a room left behind when everyone has gone to church: and there were the cold coffee-cups and old papers strewn about for a maid to clear in their absence. Somewhere, now, Luc was . . . doing something. At home, perhaps, over lunch with his mother, eating well amid sparse conversation. She didn't understand how beautiful he was, she censured the sprawl of those long white-jeaned thighs under the table where he and I had sat for our hour. He was in the starry dream-orbit of his youth and she was trying to ground him with her worries and precautions. Or perhaps he had gone to a cafe with his two friends, they had got a bit drunk and excited on a bottle of red. The friends must love him and more or less openly desire him. I lay spreadeagled on the jangling bed to think, the back of a hand across my eyes. I heard St Narcissus strike three.

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

  Then, as Carol chatted on, sounding for all the world like an enamored twenty-three-year-old instead of a forty-year-old who’d slept with over fifty men, my newly optimistic mood took a nosedive. “The thing is that he’s married and he has two children. His family lives in New York and he’s waiting for a good time to break up with his wife. Their marriage hasn’t been good for years and he’d have left long ago if she hadn’t had a second child. I do appreciate how careful Tom’s being. He wants to make sure no one’s hurt or left hanging. I know that when we do get married he’ll be faithful to me. It will be such a relief to live together openly instead of having to keep our relationship secret and feel like we’re sneaking around.” I struggled to keep the dismay I felt from showing. What Carol was describing so blithely was, of course, the oldest story in the book. A man with full family commitments making empty promises that he’d never keep. As long as Carol believed him and tolerated their arrangement, he’d stay. When or if she got too insistent or too unhappy and demanding, he’d probably leave her. The scenario was ancient and obvious. The trouble was, Carol didn’t seem to have a clue. “When did you learn that he was married?” “You know, that’s one of the few things we disagree about,” she replied, still in the same upbeat, chatty tone, as if we’d been discussing shopping for shoes. “He says he told me right away, four years ago when we first met, that he was married with a little boy and a baby girl. But I don’t remember that at all. It wasn’t until two years later when we were so involved with each other that I first suspected, but I didn’t want to ask. He made such an effort to spend all his free time with me and we were so happy, so I told myself that he couldn’t have a wife or a family to go home to. Finally I did ask if he was married and I remember he told me ‘kinda, sorta.’ Well, I probably wouldn’t have allowed myself to get so much involved had I known, but by then we were hopelessly in love, so what could I do?”

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  pended in Jell-O. Depending upon their colors, they were called “Life,” “Soul,” “Etheric,” or “Serenity.” He also made mobiles, the same blobby shapes cut from cardboard boxes, painted with Day-Glo acrylic and hung from twisted coat hangers—the air flowing between the forms, he said, was Spirit directing their movements. For our second date he picked me up at five a.m. in his cab and we drove to the Bay to watch the sun rise. Steven shuddered, remembering the rats in Viet Nam, rats as big as cats we were souls inhabiting human bodies, we told each other, with enough spiritual discipline we could breaks the bonds of this plane, visit the wisdom temples, the white deserts of Venus my heart, like the horizon, turned golden, pink, extravagant. I had a master’s degree, but I was still a child, I’d had sex maybe twenty times with fifteen men, but never a boyfriend. When, after a couple of months, Steven announced he no longer wanted to fuck me, I started crying. I’d always been willing, I even kind of liked it why why why why why why . . . “Steven,” I pleaded, “what did I do wrong?” “Nothing, Carla, you did nothing, it’s just that after Anya, Earth women just don’t do it for me, or not for long, that’s all.” Anya, Anya, Anya! Long ago she’d moved to Berlin, Anya didn’t even send him postcards anymore but he would never move on to me, how bland I must seem how nothing beside Anya’s Venusian tantra, her extraterrestrial tricks. I sniveled, my lower lip trembling like the San Andreas fault. He pulled a hanky from his pocket and handed it to me, it was large and white and so soft. “Steven!” I wailed. “Don’t worry,” he said, taking me in his arms, “there’s no reason we still can’t sleep together, we just won’t fuck, and I’ll wear my Jockeys.” And that’s just what we did, sort of. I hated those Jockeys, standing between me and his creamy flesh vile cotton like Tristan and Isolde’s sword. I

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  The days always took place in a perspective of failure, we never expected to get an interview with a submarine captain, and we were often stranded as evening fell at some inconvenient spot requiring to be rescued by the harassed masters in their station-wagons. Getting home turned out to be the real test of initiative, and we failed it. We waited at a shelterless bus-stop just like this, as the rain came on, playing basic games of chance with tossed coins. I remembered that once I was with a couple of others, including the palely introverted German boy Peter Rott (Tommy as he was known) who grew his nails into buckled claws and disguised the length of his hair by not rinsing out the shampoo: as the rain fell on his matted pine-scented head he began to bubble gently, and suds ran down his face like sleepy tears. My father didn't have a few more months, he had just over a year; he died in that month of shadowed insouciance that precedes the arrival of the A-level results. I was relieved that it wasn't in term, that I hadn't been called out of school to be told, that it hadn't messed up my exams; but later on I mildly regretted the loss of the acclaim and respect that should have been due to me. By the following term, when I abruptly began to grieve, it no longer merited my schoolfriends' puzzled consideration. His ashes were strewn on the common, because he had loved it, but the idea seemed so gruesome to me that I stayed alone in the house while my mother and Charlie and my Uncle Wilfred set off up the hill, uncertain whether they were a procession or if they should go a bit faster, like a family out for a walk. They had chosen an ordinary workday morning, quite early, when no one much would be around to wonder what they were doing, or have to avert their eyes in sudden understanding and dismay. I hadn't wanted to see the urn—more like my mother's rosewood sewing-box than the samovar I had imagined—and found it hard to accept that my father, the same size, more or less, as I was when he died, could have been reduced to this neatly portable and disposable quantity.

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

  We ended up taking the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and we ultimately won a favorable ruling. Walter’s civil case would also go to the U.S. Supreme Court. We sued almost a dozen state and local officials and agencies. As expected, the defendants all claimed immunity for the conduct that had resulted in Walter’s wrongful conviction. The immunity from civil liability given to prosecutors and judges is even greater than the protections provided to law enforcement officers. So even though it was clear that Ted Pearson, the prosecutor who had tried the case against Walter, had illegally withheld evidence that directly resulted in Walter’s wrongful conviction, we would likely not succeed in a civil action against him. As he was the person most in charge of Walter’s wrongful prosecution and conviction, it was hard to reconcile his immunity with his culpability in the whole affair, but there was little we could do. State and federal courts have persistently insulated prosecutors from accountability for egregious misconduct that results in innocent people being sent to death row. In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court again reinforced the protections that shield prosecutors from accountability. A month before an inmate named John Thompson was scheduled to be executed in Louisiana, a crime lab report was uncovered that contradicted the State’s case against him for a robbery-murder that had taken place fourteen years earlier. State courts overturned his conviction and death sentence, and he was subsequently acquitted of all charges and released. He filed a civil suit, and a New Orleans jury awarded Thompson $14 million. The jury found that the district attorney, Harry Connick Sr., had illegally suppressed evidence of Thompson’s innocence and had allowed him to spend fourteen years in prison for a crime he had not committed. Connick appealed the judgment, and the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the award in a bitterly divided 5–4 decision. As a result of immunity law, the Court held that a prosecutor cannot be held liable for misconduct in a criminal case, even if he intentionally and illegally withheld evidence of innocence. The Court’s decision was strongly criticized by scholars and Court observers, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a compelling dissent, but Thompson did not get any money. We faced similar obstacles in Walter’s case. After a year of depositions, hearings, and pretrial litigation, we eventually reached a settlement with most of the defendants that would provide Walter with a few hundred thousand dollars. Walter’s claim against Monroe County for Sheriff Tate’s misconduct could not be settled, so we appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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

  Worse, a few have been demonstrably inaccurate. We could do without any more news coverage of the “big-time reporter comes to hick town” genre. Even before the piece was broadcast, the local media seemed to be urging the community to distrust anything they heard reported about the case. In “CBS Examines Murder Case,” a local reporter for the Monroe Journal wrote, “Monroe County District Attorney Tommy Chapman said he believes researchers for the CBS television news-magazine program 60 Minutes had their minds made up before ever coming here.” Chapman had taken to using a photo of Walter obtained at the time of his arrest that showed him with long bushy hair and a beard, which Chapman thought made it clear that he was a dangerous criminal. “The person they interviewed at Holman prison is not the same person arrested by Sheriff Tate for this murder,” Chapman explained. The Journal added that Chapman offered CBS the photograph of the “real” McMillian taken at the time of his arrest, but they were “not interested.” Prisoners in Alabama are required to remain clean-shaven, so of course Walter looked different when interviewed on camera. When the 60 Minutes piece aired months later, local officials were quick to discredit it. The Mobile Press Register headline was “DA: TV Account of McMillian’s Conviction a ‘Disgrace’ ”; the article quoted Chapman: “For them to hold themselves up as a reputable news show is beyond belief, and irresponsible.” The publicity was characterized as further injuring Ronda Morrison’s parents. The local writers complained that the Morrisons had to worry and deal with the stress that new publicity “could lead many people to think McMillian is innocent.” The local media were eager to join the prosecutors in criticizing the 60 Minutes piece because it implicated their coverage, which had largely presented only the prosecution’s theory and characterization of Walter and the crime. But people in the community watched 60 Minutes all the time and generally trusted it. Despite the local media reaction, the CBS coverage gave the community a summary of the evidence we’d presented in court and created questions and doubts about Walter’s guilt. Some influential community leaders also thought it made Monroeville look backward and possibly racist in a way that was not good for the community’s image or efforts at recruiting business, and business leaders started asking tough questions of Chapman and law enforcement about what was going on in the case. People in the black community were thrilled to see honest coverage of the case. They had been whispering about Walter’s wrongful conviction for years. The case had so traumatized the black community that many had become preoccupied with each court development and ruling. We frequently got calls from people simply seeking an update. Some callers sought clarification of a particular point in the case that had been the subject of serious debate in a barbershop or at a social gathering.