Embarrassment

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 Folding Star (1994)

  This one's for you," he said, a finger on the secretary's hold button. "Who is it?" "Some guy from Ostend." "What's he want?" "You're an American college-boy, okay, he just needs talking off." I ducked away puzzled. "Come on, he's paying good money. His dick's in his hand. Just tell him how sexy you are." Matt held the receiver out to me, and I gestured wanly at my cheeseburger, already cooling after its journey from the Bishop's Palace. "Eat while you work," he said. I sat down. "But I'm not American . . . " There was no help for it. "Hello?" I said in a suspicious growl. "Oh hi! Is that Ed, right?" The man was speaking in a heavy American accent himself, but with homely Flemish vowels. "Yep." I settled myself and turned my head so that I couldn't see Matt. The scope for confusion was so great that I found myself taking it quickly and self-mockingly, like something done as a dare. I'd never rung a sex-talk line—I didn't know what the conventions were. "So, where are you from, Ed?" the man from Ostend asked with patient excitement. "Oregon," I said, wondering if it sounded as wrong to him as it did to me. I remembered doing Our Town as the school play, only Dawn being able to sustain the accent amid a medley of Yogi Bear and something oddly like Yorkshire. "Oh great. That's the Rocky Mountains, right?" "We have the Rockies." Though doubts immediately formed. "And lumberjacks, don't tell me, that's really wild." "Uh-huh. Though I'm a student, remember." "Right! That's very sexy. But you must know one or two lumberjacks?" "Well, one or two, I guess." And I heard myself give a guilty laugh, as if I really were confessing to some rough weekends in the Oregon woods. I reached for my burger, and balanced it up in my hand so as not to shed the loose onion-rings and swell of ketchup. "That's great. So what do you major in?" I'd no idea there was so much background in phone-sex. I heard a little catch in his breath and wondered if that was what he got off on. "Oh, let's not talk about boring old work!" I said, beginning to feel more at home in my accent, which had swerved irresponsibly southwards and seemed to have settled on hunky Bobby in Dallas for its model. There was a pause, in which I could hear faint rustling sounds. I took a bite of tepid beef and bread. "Well, Ed," and the voice was slower and more serious. "Aren't you gonna tell me what you look like, and you know, what you're doing to yourself?" I chewed frantically. "Sure, sure. Well, what shall I start with?" "You're blond, I think your friend said?" "I'm blond. Very blond as a matter of fact. And I'm pretty muscular, like, I work out a lot, swim a lot, all that shit."

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  The truth was that I had no idea what I wanted to do and no idea what field of law I expected to practice in. I wasn’t even sure what my questions about “firm culture” and “work-life balance” meant. The whole process was little more than a dog and pony show. But I didn’t seem like an asshole, so I was coasting. Then I hit a wall. The last interviewer asked me a question I was unprepared to answer: Why did I want to work for a law firm? It was a softball, but I’d gotten so used to talking about my budding interest in antitrust litigation (an interest that was at least a little fabricated) that I was laughably unprepared. I should have said something about learning from the best or working on high-stakes litigation. I should have said anything other than what came from my mouth: “I don’t really know, but the pay isn’t bad! Ha ha!” The interviewer looked at me like I had three eyes, and the conversation never recovered. I was certain I was toast. I had flubbed the interview in the worst way. But behind the scenes, one of my recommenders was already working the phones. She told the hiring partner that I was a smart, good kid and would make an excellent lawyer. “She raved about you,” I later heard. So when the recruiters called to schedule the next round of interviews, I made the cut. I eventually got the job, despite failing miserably at what I perceived was the most important part of the recruiting process. The old adage says that it’s better to be lucky than good. Apparently having the right network is better than both. At Yale, networking power is like the air we breathe—so pervasive that it’s easy to miss. Toward the end of our first year, most of us were studying for The Yale Law Journal writing competition. The Journal publishes lengthy pieces of legal analysis, mostly for an academic audience. The articles read like radiator manuals—dry, formulaic, and partially written in another language. (A sampling: “Despite grading’s great promise, we show that the regulatory design, implementation, and practice suffer from serious flaws: jurisdictions fudge more than nudge.”) Kidding aside, Journal membership is serious business. It is the single most significant extracurricular activity for legal employers, some of whom hire only from the publication’s editorial board. Some kids came to the law school with a plan for admission to The Yale Law Journal . The writing competition kicked off in April. By March, some people were weeks into preparation. On the advice of recent graduates (who were also close friends), a good friend had begun studying before Christmas. The alumni of elite consulting firms gathered together to grill each other on editorial techniques. One second-year student helped his old Harvard roommate (a first-year student) design a study strategy for the final month before the test.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He tilted out a greedy palmful and stood in the middle of the room, rubbing it into his shortish hair; then handed the bottle back and came in under the jet next to mine. Long drools of suds flooded down his easily muscled back. "Did you have a good swim, sir?" he asked. "Yes, great, thanks. I feel quite tired after it." "That's when it does you most good. What did you do? hundred lengths, sir?" I could have done without all this "sir" business; it made me feel like an old gent in the hands of a keen young hotel porter with his eye on a tip. I only wanted to appear his equal, almost his coeval, and he was calling me "sir" every third word. I wondered for a moment if he had mistaken me for a master at his school. "Not quite that much," I said, "though I'd have liked to have done. My name's Ed—Edward, by the way." He nodded, and jutted his face into the column of falling water. Then he stepped back, breathing in sharply two or three times and at long last toyed with his drawstring and tugged off his little red slip. An odd thirty or forty seconds followed—me with a helpless and untouched hard-on, the boy quite clumsily doing some sort of improvised act, turning and bending under the shower, joining his hands behind his head to show off quick young biceps, sighing like someone simulating pleasure in a film. Thirty or so seconds before I understood. I was out of the shower in a moment, snatching up my towel and going at an angry stride through the changing-room, suddenly alert to my own nakedness, and abruptly shrunken by my sense of stupidity and loss. I had picked a locker in an odd corner, an alcove almost. The fair boy, the skinny lover, was in there now, back turned, a towel over his shoulders. I must have said something—just a swimmer's bark perhaps—and he twisted round with my wallet in his hands. Beside him the locker-door was open, my wet shorts still hanging from the pin of the key, revolving slowly and dripping on to the concrete floor. He threw the wallet on to the bench as if it were distasteful to him, as if he had been tricked into picking it up in the street; and came round me quite fast, tossing his damp hair back off his face. He couldn't have run far in the state he was in, but he might have headed back to the pool, where it would have been harder for a diffident foreigner to make a fuss. I'm sure he would have dodged me in some way, if his friend hadn't come pounding along the alleyway of lockers and hanging coats, grim-faced but with a trace of chancy humour still in the eyebrows, ready in case the situation could be saved with a joke.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  And relatedly, why are so few kids who grow up the way I did—“disadvantaged,” to use the vocabulary of the day—making it to our society’s elite institutions. The book I wrote is an effort to answer that question in in credibly personal ways, and as I often tell people, I was initially uncomfortable with that. Indeed, even the process of finding endorsers—part of which forced me to send the book to strangers—made me want to gag. But I wrote the book the way I did because I thought it would make my argument more compelling—that if people experienced these problems through the perspectives of real people, they might appreciate their complexity. Hillbilly Elegy ’s reception makes me think this was a wise decision. Interestingly, many of the family members I interviewed had an analogous reaction. “I was pretty open with you,” one of them explained, “because I didn’t think anyone would read it. Who’d want to hear our family story?” Judging by the largely positive reception, it turns out that many people did. Admittedly, “largely positive” is not the same as “completely positive,” and my book has its fair share of critics. It’s conventional for people to say they were surprised by criticism, but I wasn’t. I was definitely surprised that many people read the book—our initial print run was ten thousand copies, and we’re approaching two million now—but I knew that if the book was successful, there would eventually be blowback. With a few exceptions, I’ve tried to avoid commenting on those reactions. A respected social scientist once told me that a book is like a baby. Eventually it leaves the house and you can’t control the way people interact with it. But I’ve also found that critics occasionally react to the book in contradictory ways. If I haven’t been surprised by the fact of criticism, I have occasionally been confused by that conflict. I’ve heard, for instance, from someone on the Left that my book is a victim-blaming piece of anti-government libertarianism and then, in the very same week , from someone on the Right that my book’s premises, if accepted, would justify a massive expansion of government welfare programs. Both of these things can’t possibly be true. I tried to lay my cards explicitly on the table in one of the later chapters of the book: I am a conservative, one who doubts that the 1960s approach to welfare has made it easier for our country’s poor children to achieve their dreams. But those of us on the Right are deluding ourselves if we fail to acknowledge that it did accomplish something else: it prevented a lot of suffering, and made it possible for people like Mamaw to access food and medicine when they were too poor, too old, or too sick to buy it themselves. This ain’t nothing.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  The two of them shook hands, and Gavin bumbled on about how in that case he must know Ronnie. What puzzled me was how Gavin himself knew Ronnie, and I asked him. ‘You know, some of us lot do have contacts with some of you lot.’ He waggled a finger. ‘You may like to think that you live in a world all of your own, but in fact you live considerably further away from Ronnie Staines than we do. We were together on the committee about the traffic and the one-way system, and a very useful committee member he was too.’ I stood in mock-penitence. ‘I won’t ask how you met him.’ I saw no reason not to say. ‘I met him in a rather less grownup and public-spirited way. Do you know an old boy called Charles Nantwich? He introduced me to him—at Wicks’s, I should add: all madly respectable.’ Gavin raised his eyebrows and nodded several times, then took a sip from his wine glass and allowed a faintly sinister pause to continue. ‘I’d no idea you knew Nantwich,’ he then said briskly. ‘I’ve only got to know him over the last few months. He’s terribly nice—and he’s told me a lot about his past …’ (how far should I go?) Gavin smiled. ‘I’m just surprised that he should want to strike up with one of the Beckwiths.’ ‘Well, you did,’ I reasonably observed. He laughed, overlong, so that I saw his embarrassment and knew I shouldn’t pursue the subject, on which he swallowed further drink and shut up. ‘How is my ugly sister?’ I asked. ‘She’s not here?’ ‘No, it’s not really her tasse de thé , is it? Not that it’s much mine,’ he added cautiously. ‘Roops, though, I imagine, would have loved it. It’s right up his street.’ ‘Roops, as you rightly surmise, was extremely keen to come. When Philippa told him all the reasons he wouldn’t like it he got very excited: but he had to go round to a children’s party at the Salmons’ instead—it’s Siegfried’s sixth birthday, you see. Roops, being a sophisticated child, naturally holds all the members of the Salmon shoal in unqualified contempt—so it’s been a rather difficult afternoon. Apart from that we’re fine!’ ‘You must give them my love.’ Aldo, who had been happily listening in, nodded as though to add his love to mine, and Gavin, good chap that he was, took a nervous gulp of wine and plunged into the unknown waters of male photography: ‘Do you do a lot of modelling?’ ‘No, this is the first time I have done it.’ ‘Really! I wonder how on earth you get started.’ ‘In my case I was very lucky. Mr Staines discovered me.’

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘You know, some of us lot do have contacts with some of you lot.’ He waggled a finger. ‘You may like to think that you live in a world all of your own, but in fact you live considerably further away from Ronnie Staines than we do. We were together on the committee about the traffic and the one-way system, and a very useful committee member he was too.’ I stood in mock-penitence. ‘I won’t ask how you met him.’ I saw no reason not to say. ‘I met him in a rather less grownup and public-spirited way. Do you know an old boy called Charles Nantwich? He introduced me to him—at Wicks’s, I should add: all madly respectable.’ Gavin raised his eyebrows and nodded several times, then took a sip from his wine glass and allowed a faintly sinister pause to continue. ‘I’d no idea you knew Nantwich,’ he then said briskly. ‘I’ve only got to know him over the last few months. He’s terribly nice—and he’s told me a lot about his past …’ (how far should I go?) Gavin smiled. ‘I’m just surprised that he should want to strike up with one of the Beckwiths.’ ‘Well, you did,’ I reasonably observed. He laughed, overlong, so that I saw his embarrassment and knew I shouldn’t pursue the subject, on which he swallowed further drink and shut up. ‘How is my ugly sister?’ I asked. ‘She’s not here?’ ‘No, it’s not really her tasse de thé, is it? Not that it’s much mine,’ he added cautiously. ‘Roops, though, I imagine, would have loved it. It’s right up his street.’ ‘Roops, as you rightly surmise, was extremely keen to come. When Philippa told him all the reasons he wouldn’t like it he got very excited: but he had to go round to a children’s party at the Salmons’ instead—it’s Siegfried’s sixth birthday, you see. Roops, being a sophisticated child, naturally holds all the members of the Salmon shoal in unqualified contempt—so it’s been a rather difficult afternoon. Apart from that we’re fine!’ ‘You must give them my love.’ Aldo, who had been happily listening in, nodded as though to add his love to mine, and Gavin, good chap that he was, took a nervous gulp of wine and plunged into the unknown waters of male photography: ‘Do you do a lot of modelling?’ ‘No, this is the first time I have done it.’ ‘Really! I wonder how on earth you get started.’ ‘In my case I was very lucky. Mr Staines discovered me.’ Aldo looked modestly down at this, giving the impression that some vast show-business career had sprung from that ordinary but fateful encounter. ‘Do you like the art?’ he appealed. ‘Um, some of them are rather striking, aren’t they? I haven’t really had a chance to see … the ones upstairs …’—he craned round—‘some of them are rather strong meat, perhaps, for me!’

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Professors and classmates seemed genuinely interested in what seemed to me a superficially boring story: I went to a mediocre public high school, my parents didn’t go to college, and I grew up in Ohio. The same was true of nearly everyone I knew. At Yale, these things were true of no one. Even my service in the Marine Corps was pretty common in Ohio, but at Yale, many of my friends had never spent time with a veteran of America’s newest wars. In other words, I was an anomaly. That’s not exactly a bad thing. For much of that first year in law school, I reveled in the fact that I was the only big marine with a Southern twang at my elite law school. But as law school acquaintances became close friends, I became less comfortable with the lies I told about my own past. “My mom is a nurse,” I told them. But of course that wasn’t true anymore. I didn’t really know what my legal father—the one whose name was on my birth certificate—did for a living; he was a total stranger. No one, except my best friends from Middletown whom I asked to read my law school admissions essay, knew about the formative experiences that shaped my life. At Yale, I decided to change that. I’m not sure what motivated this change. Part of it is that I stopped being ashamed: My parents’ mistakes were not my fault, so I had no reason to hide them. But I was concerned most of all that no one understood my grandparents’ outsize role in my life. Few of even my closest friends understood how utterly hopeless my life would have been without Mamaw and Papaw. So maybe I just wanted to give credit where credit is due. Yet there’s something else. As I realized how different I was from my classmates at Yale, I grew to appreciate how similar I was to the people back home. Most important, I became acutely aware of the inner conflict born of my recent success. On one of my first visits home after classes began, I stopped at a gas station not far from Aunt Wee’s house. The woman at the nearest pump began a conversation, and I noticed that she wore a Yale T-shirt. “Did you go to Yale?” I asked. “No,” she replied, “but my nephew does. Do you?” I wasn’t sure what to say. It was stupid—her nephew went to school there, for Christ’s sake—but I was still uncomfortable admitting that I’d become an Ivy Leaguer. The moment she told me her nephew went to Yale, I had to choose: Was I a Yale Law student, or was I a Middletown kid with hillbilly grandparents? If the former, I could exchange pleasantries and talk about New Haven’s beauty; if the latter, she occupied the other side of an invisible divide and could not to be trusted.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He’s terribly nice—and he’s told me a lot about his past …’ (how far should I go?) Gavin smiled. ‘I’m just surprised that he should want to strike up with one of the Beckwiths.’ ‘Well, you did,’ I reasonably observed. He laughed, overlong, so that I saw his embarrassment and knew I shouldn’t pursue the subject, on which he swallowed further drink and shut up. ‘How is my ugly sister?’ I asked. ‘She’s not here?’ ‘No, it’s not really her tasse de thé , is it? Not that it’s much mine,’ he added cautiously. ‘Roops, though, I imagine, would have loved it. It’s right up his street.’ ‘Roops, as you rightly surmise, was extremely keen to come. When Philippa told him all the reasons he wouldn’t like it he got very excited: but he had to go round to a children’s party at the Salmons’ instead—it’s Siegfried’s sixth birthday, you see. Roops, being a sophisticated child, naturally holds all the members of the Salmon shoal in unqualified contempt—so it’s been a rather difficult afternoon. Apart from that we’re fine!’ ‘You must give them my love.’ Aldo, who had been happily listening in, nodded as though to add his love to mine, and Gavin, good chap that he was, took a nervous gulp of wine and plunged into the unknown waters of male photography: ‘Do you do a lot of modelling?’ ‘No, this is the first time I have done it.’ ‘Really! I wonder how on earth you get started.’ ‘In my case I was very lucky. Mr Staines discovered me.’ Aldo looked modestly down at this, giving the impression that some vast show-business career had sprung from that ordinary but fateful encounter. ‘Do you like the art?’ he appealed. ‘Um, some of them are rather striking, aren’t they? I haven’t really had a chance to see … the ones upstairs …’—he craned round—‘some of them are rather strong meat, perhaps , for me!’ Aldo was rather delighted to be given a cue and produced a remark of the kind that pass for jokes among people who can barely speak the same language: ‘Ah yes, you see, I am a butcher.’ Gavin smiled and I explained that Staines had found him while doing some studies of working people in Smithfield. ‘I was carrying half a cow,’ said Aldo, ‘all covered in blood. Ronnie said I looked like bacon.’

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It had good bass sound, which my father used to turn up to cover the hiss and crackle the machine exposed on his treasured old records. There it still silently stood, at the beginning of November 1991. And there was Beecham's baton on a stand like a pen-rest; and the ugly canterbury stuffed with music, Bach cantatas, Victorian parlour-songs that were enjoying a kitsch revival when he died; and the shine of the parquet around the subfusc bulk of the sofa and chairs and under the black promontory of the piano. Nothing had been altered, nothing renewed. I felt the sense of return oddly exaggerated, as if my childhood went back further than it did. I sat about my room in my vest and pants, smoked a last cigarette and flicked the stub into the Donningtons' bushes—lilacs that would crowd over the fence in early summer and waft up to my window. Something awful had happened last week: I'd left the dining-room in the middle of Luc's lesson and gone upstairs for a pee, as I always did now, I'd become a reckless addict of the laundry-basket. I had the negatives on me and planned to run on up the further flight to Luc's bedroom, return them to the wallet in the desk and be back at the bathroom again in fifteen or twenty seconds. It was a simple but bold idea, and as the time came on to put it into practice I was less and less able to concentrate on the passage from Milton we were talking about. "A herd of Beeves," said Luc. "I'm not so sure what is a herd of Beeves." "I'll explain it in a minute," I said, springing up with the look of comic distraction that signified "Need to go", and slipping out of the room. I had a feeling there must be a downstairs loo, and I didn't want to give anyone time enough to tell me about it. Up I went, in swift strides, past the bathroom and then on to the further flight, keeping to the inner edges of the talky old treads. The door of Luc's room was ajar, I slid round it and was halfway to the desk before I fully understood that I wasn't alone, that Patrick Dhondt was sprawled on the bed in his black school breeches, reading a book. "How ridiculous!" I said. "I was looking for the bathroom." I felt myself going as red as I have ever been, disastrously compromised. He looked at me with faint surprise. "Hel-lo!" I exclaimed. "How are you?" "Very good," he said, and then smiled. He was unquestionably in possession of the room, of the bed. I backed towards the door, and he looked down to his book, in part to hide a flush and grin of his own. "It's downstairs," he said. I got hot thinking about it now—one of those torturing moments you masochistically recall from time to time for the rest of your life.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I mean, Abdul is black and the others aren’t … but I don’t want any rot about that. Abdul loves doing that sort of thing—and he’s actually jolly good at it. He’s a pure exhibitionist at heart.’ ‘I must say I was rather amazed by the whole affair—you know, seeing half the staff of a famous London Club about to copulate in front of the camera.’ ‘I think you’ll find a good many of them do it—though not always on film, I agree. They’re a close little team, there at Wicks’s, and they like to do what I want. But then I got them all their jobs,’ he added. It was one of those moments when I had the feeling, chilling and flustering at the same time, that Charles was a dangerous man, a fixer and favouritiser. In the world beyond school, though, perhaps one could have what favourites one wanted. ‘Even so …’ I shrugged. ‘Do you have any idea what will happen to the film?’ ‘Well, it’ll have to be edited and everything of course, which is actually frightfully difficult with blue films, the continuity, and putting the close-ups in the right place. We have some contacts—well, friends really, who do all the technical side. We made a few mistakes in the last one we did—filmed over several days so that the boys could come up with the goods, but then you found, if you had an eye for such things, that they’d somehow mysteriously changed their socks in the middle of a fuck or whatever.’ ‘I didn’t realise this was such an established business—I’m astonished.’ ‘This is our third,’ said Charles, with the personal satisfaction of the amateur. ‘Much the best. It should be ready quite soon; and then we’ll put it out to one or two of those little basement cinemas in Soho where there are people we know. I don’t suppose you ever go to such places.’ So now my rather prickly line sprang back and snagged on my own moral woollies. I was embarrassed and laughed. ‘Well, yes, I have sometimes been to them.’ ‘I think they’re jolly good value,’ Charles went on in candid, reasonable tones. ‘I mean, you pay your what is it, fiver, and nine times out of ten you’ll see something that really takes your fancy.’ ‘I confess I go to them more for the off-screen entertainment,’ I archly bragged. ‘Ah yes … well …’ ‘In fact, I first got off with my current friend in a cinema in Frith Street. He was very shy afterwards about admitting that it had been him—in the dark, you know. He’s a very shy boy, actually, but in those places people seem to lose their inhibitions.’ Charles was not paying attention, and perhaps I shouldn’t have been telling this story.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  [image file=image_rsrc3ND.jpg] CHAPTER 5Make Way for Duck SexA few years ago my wife, Ann, and I attended a lovely dinner party in our New Haven neighborhood with four other couples. We dined by candlelight on a delicious meal at a table set with beautiful linens, crystal wineglasses, and hefty heirloom silverware, while a passel of young children ate in front of an animated cartoon in another room. Many of us were meeting for the first time, so we engaged in the usual polite introductions and chitchat. A short way into our meal, the mother of a few of the spaghetti-eating children in the other room spoke to me from down the table. “Oh, you’re an ornithologist! You’re just the person I need to ask.” I expected to field another of the innumerable identification questions that arise from people’s personal encounters with birds, but her question proved to be much more thought provoking. “The other day I was reading Make Way for Ducklings to my kids.” I nodded in recognition of the classic story by Robert McCloskey, a book that had been read to me as a child and that I in turn had read to my three boys—so many times that I had nearly memorized it. “So, you know when the pair of Mallards settles down and builds their nest, and she lays her eggs? It seems that they’re just getting started with a nice family together, but then he just takes off! What’s with that?” Before I could even inhale, from the other side of the table Ann gave me the anxious look we refer to in our house as the “hairy eyeball.” She murmured the verbal warning shot “Don’t go there!” Soon, all attention was on us, and everyone wanted to know exactly where it was I was not supposed to go. As if to warn all involved, Ann asked the curious mom, “You didn’t just ask my husband about duck sex, did you?” From this casual inquiry into the family life of ducks, our conversation veered into territory I knew in far greater depth than anyone might have expected. Thanks to Dr. Patricia Brennan, who spent from 2005 to 2010 as a remarkably enterprising postdoc in my lab at Yale, my research in those years had taken an unexpected detour into the study of the sexual behavior and genital anatomy of waterfowl. So, just as my wife feared, discussion of the kinky qualities of duck sex came to dominate the conversation that evening.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  I hope Reagan, or Carter, or someone, could get me out of this, but I’m not holding my breath. On the first day of school, it’s clear I’ve made a horrible mistake with my outfit choice. As I walk down the halls, calls from the other students are all that drown out the sound of my baggy denim seams rubbing together: “It’s the Orange Ethiopian!” they yell. I know I have more meat on me than the skeletal starving Ethiopians I see on TV, but did I have to go and highlight myself with a pair of fluorescent orange pants? Nothing like blending in at my new school. Aside from the orange-denim disaster, the first day in this new school is the same as everywhere I’ve ever been. I don’t really mind walking from classroom to classroom by myself—in a way, it’s a relief not to have any friends because there’s no one who I have to tell about my family. There are assignments to keep me busy and teachers to listen to. I don’t say much in class because I don’t want any attention directed at me, but I make sure to follow the huddles of students in front of me to each classroom so that I arrive right on time and act alert when class starts. I’ve learned to give straight answers when the teachers call on me, but that doesn’t typically start to happen until the third week of school when the social breakdown between the kids is clear: Teachers take one look at me and go gentle. Leaving the classroom is always the giveaway: If the teacher stands by the door as the class files into the hallway, my trademark is a modest, closed-mouth smile—a well-adjusted, friendly kid. It’s the free times during the day that make my status as the new girl painfully obvious: lunch and recess, and also gym class, where I use Cherie and Camille’s fake cramps trick, even though I have yet to get my period. Most kids might complain about their teachers, but mine give me a sense of assurance—wrapping myself in my work and obeying their instructions is the easiest, best way to stay safe. School has always been my escape and solace, a place where an independent kid like me finds stability. Because I keep a low profile, my teachers never really know about my life at home. I’m sure some have detected that things aren’t exactly as they should be, but most of them have used any vulnerabilities they sensed as a reason to encourage me. ON SEPTEMBER 17, 1980, just a week after school starts, Cherie gives birth to her first child: a baby boy. I’m down the street, greeting Norman and Rosie from the bus, when I hear Cookie’s tires screeching into the driveway and her hoarse voice blaring down the block. “Regina!” she yells. “Your sister had a baby—I’m a grandma!” My first nephew. “Can I come, Mom?

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Within ten stifling minutes, we pull into the driveway of a tidy, red ranch house sitting on a manicured corner property. Camille nudges me out of the backseat and we edge around to the trunk to unload our Hefty bags. We follow Ms. Davis to the porch, keeping our eyes to the ground all the while. When I look up to the stoop, I’m met by the gaze of a blue-eyed, blond-haired lady, very proper and petite. She appears to be near fifty. Her forced smile turns to a look of horror, then a gasp escapes from her mouth. I suppose this is the first time she’s ever met a walking white Ethiopian with cuts and bruises covering her face. Ms. Davis gestures for Camille and me to stand next to her. “Girls, this is Addie Peterman. You’re welcome to call her Aunt Addie.” I stare at the clean cuff at the bottom of Addie’s pants, at her shockingly white Keds sneakers. It takes all my will to stop from blurting, “Why don’t we call you what you are to us: Mrs. Rent-a-Kid.” I always hate this Foster Mommy Dearest baloney. Addie opens the front door, a wreath and a lace curtain hanging from its window. She leads us inside and I gawk around the living room. “Don’t touch anything,” Camille whispers. As far as foster homes go, this is one of the nicest we’ve seen. Addie looks down at our feet and I understand this is polite-lady code for Please take off your shoes. My feet leave imprints across the fresh-vacuumed nap of her carpeting. Addie’s décor is a quintessential 1970s housewife motif of gingham fabrics and lace; scalloped edges and spindle legs; braided rugs and silk floral arrangements. She leads us down the hall, suggesting for Camille to set down her bag while she shows us into my room. I rest my shins against the Hefty bag, taking it all in. Addie’s generosity with her space does not melt my numbness to her home, nor does her domestic perfection. What’s the point? I’ll only be here two weeks. A floral wallpaper covers the walls, which are lined with bookshelves and a single bed (that includes both a mattress and a box spring), a dresser and a closet. Next to the bed is a white vanity desk that makes me imagine sitting down with a stack of books and some homework, until my eyes scan up to the huge mirror that’s hanging over it: On second thought, why don’t I avoid mirrors for now. There’s also a window—complete with a lock and actual shutters, the wooden accordion kind, for privacy. When Addie leads us into Camille’s room, we find her space is just as Cottage Country –esque as mine, only a little bigger. I raise my eyebrows at my sister. Nice, but let’s not get too comfortable. After Ms.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  When I decided to write Hillbilly Elegy, I wanted to answer two questions that had bothered me since my first days as a student at Yale Law School: Why does this elite institution seem so culturally foreign? And relatedly, why are so few kids who grow up the way I did—“disadvantaged,” to use the vocabulary of the day—making it to our society’s elite institutions. The book I wrote is an effort to answer that question in incredibly personal ways, and as I often tell people, I was initially uncomfortable with that. Indeed, even the process of finding endorsers—part of which forced me to send the book to strangers—made me want to gag. But I wrote the book the way I did because I thought it would make my argument more compelling—that if people experienced these problems through the perspectives of real people, they might appreciate their complexity. Hillbilly Elegy’s reception makes me think this was a wise decision. Interestingly, many of the family members I interviewed had an analogous reaction. “I was pretty open with you,” one of them explained, “because I didn’t think anyone would read it. Who’d want to hear our family story?” Judging by the largely positive reception, it turns out that many people did. Admittedly, “largely positive” is not the same as “completely positive,” and my book has its fair share of critics. It’s conventional for people to say they were surprised by criticism, but I wasn’t. I was definitely surprised that many people read the book—our initial print run was ten thousand copies, and we’re approaching two million now—but I knew that if the book was successful, there would eventually be blowback. With a few exceptions, I’ve tried to avoid commenting on those reactions. A respected social scientist once told me that a book is like a baby. Eventually it leaves the house and you can’t control the way people interact with it. But I’ve also found that critics occasionally react to the book in contradictory ways. If I haven’t been surprised by the fact of criticism, I have occasionally been confused by that conflict. I’ve heard, for instance, from someone on the Left that my book is a victim-blaming piece of anti-government libertarianism and then, in the very same week, from someone on the Right that my book’s premises, if accepted, would justify a massive expansion of government welfare programs. Both of these things can’t possibly be true. I tried to lay my cards explicitly on the table in one of the later chapters of the book: I am a conservative, one who doubts that the 1960s approach to welfare has made it easier for our country’s poor children to achieve their dreams.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Cookie pulls into a gas station and parks next to the Dumpster. “This is humiliating,” Cherie says. We watch our mother approach drivers as they’re sliding the nozzle inside their tanks to fill up. However, we quickly learn our cue: When Cookie points to us fanning ourselves with hands of cards, we wave and put on expressions of misery and desperation . . . which is not all that challenging, under the circumstances. Finally, her shameless strategy gets us a full tank of gas. As she takes the expressway ramp, Cookie announces: “We’re going to meet your grandparents.” “Our grandparents?” I ask her. “You mean the ones you fibbed to Karl about?” “You mean I have grandparents?” Norm says. “I thought they lived in another state,” Camille says. “What’d you think,” Cookie says, “that I was born from apes?” I watch Camille dig her knee hard into Cherie’s, and with all our might the three of us try not to explode into laughter. Forty-five minutes later we pull into the driveway of a blue ranch house with a garage attached and small, trimmed evergreen bushes lining the front bay window. Cookie puts the car in park and stares at the house with an awareness I’ve never seen her have before. “Get out,” she finally says, her eyes still fixed on the house. We sit silently. “I said, get out ,” she growls through her teeth. “This’ll be a lot easier if they see you.” The four doors of the car slowly move ajar, and simultaneously the house’s front door opens, too. With the help of a walker, a thin woman in a pink floral muumuu shuffles onto the porch. With dark, slanted eyes she stares at us, and at her side arrives a wrinkled, tanned man with navy Bermuda shorts met by knee-high black socks. My eyes are drawn up to his belly, which is as round and bare as a newborn elephant’s. There’s a showdown of eyes until Baby Elephant Belly speaks up. “Get the hell out of here,” he says. We all look at Cookie, paralyzed to budge. “Nobody move a muscle,” Cookie says. “We’re gonna do this my way. Kids, these are your grandparents—the grandparents who turned their backs on you, especially when you needed them the most.” She turns her gaze toward the two elderly figures on the porch. “Mom, Dad, meet Cherie. She’s fourteen. Camille is thirteen, Regina is ten, Norman is nine, and Rosie is four. These are your grandkids . . . do you get that? They have no place to stay, and unless you stop acting like careless fucks, they’ll be sleeping on the street tonight. Is that what you want?” From the stoop, they peer at us, and the muumuu wearer tells her, “For God’s sake Camille, put your children in the car. Kids don’t need to witness all this.” Hearing Cookie called by her real name makes me curious about how she must have been raised.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was the year of Trouble for Men, a talc and aftershave lotion of peculiar suggestiveness that, without any noticeable advertising, had permeated the gay world in a matter of weeks. Every bar and locker-room hummed with it, you picked it up on the Tube or waiting to cross the road. It was in the air and, had it been advertised, it could have been called decadent and irresistible. Re-entering the changing room I passed through a cloud of it, registering at first its quite bracing, outdoor quality before discovering the paler bluey-green femininity within. I found my locker that evening was next to Maurice—a lean black boxer, straight, and one of the most attractive men in the Corry, with a high forehead and a mischievous, sentimental expression. I asked him about a match that was coming up next week, and he made a few feint swipes at me as he talked. I involuntarily flinched a centimetre or two, and my stomach muscles clenched. ‘Don’t worry, mate,’ he said, ‘I won’t hit you—hard,’ and he grinned and cuffed me round the ear. If only life were always so simple, I thought, as he tugged off his singlet and his Lordship, looking perturbedly about, came back into view at the end of the alley of lockers. ‘I really am most frightfully obliged,’ he said loudly when he saw me, and I readied myself, half-dressed, to conduct this conversation under the casual scrutiny of all the other men who were sitting and standing around us. ‘Don’t mention it,’ I said brightly, embarrassed by the crass double entendre that might publicly arise. He came up closer, and Maurice stepped aside with a droll raised eyebrow. ‘See you, then,’ he said as he went off to the shower. ‘What is your name?’ his Lordship enquired, and then, with the forced Christian candour of one who has learnt the ways of teams and charities, ‘I am Charles.’ ‘William,’ I replied (though I am not often called that). ‘William, I want to show you my gratitude. Heavens!’ he added theatrically. ‘It is to you I owe my presence here.’ ‘There’s really no need. I did what anyone would have done.’ He raised a finger and knocked it on my chest. ‘Lunch,’ he said, nodding his head. ‘You’ll come to luncheon—my Club, nothing extraordinary, but it will do.’ ‘Well, that’s very kind of you …’ I felt drawn because I thought he was interesting and might have a distracting story to tell. If he were a nuisance I needn’t see him again: there was also Arthur and the odder story of home and love and guilt, and I didn’t know that I wanted to take on anything new.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  From the scientific and cultural perspectives of today, Darwin’s choice of aesthetic language may seem quaint, anthropomorphic, and possibly even embarrassingly silly. And that may help to account for why Darwin’s aesthetic view of mate choice is treated today like the crazy aunt in the evolutionary attic; she is not to be spoken of. Clearly, Darwin did not have our contemporary fear of anthropomorphism. Indeed, because he was vitally engaged in breaking down the previously unquestioned barrier between humans and other forms of life, his use of aesthetic language was not just a curious mannerism or a quaint Victorian affectation. It was an integral feature of his scientific argument about the nature of evolutionary process. Darwin was making explicit claims about the sensory and cognitive abilities of animals and the evolutionary consequences of those abilities. Having put humans and all other organisms on different branches of the same great Tree of Life, Darwin used ordinary language to make an extraordinary scientific claim: that the subjective sensory experiences of humans can be compared scientifically to those of the animals. The first implication of Darwin’s language was that animals are choosing among their prospective mates on the basis of judgments about their aesthetic appeal. To many Victorian readers, even those sympathetic to evolution, this was patently absurd. It seemed impossible that animals could make fine aesthetic judgments. Even if they were able to observe differences in the color of their suitors’ plumage or the musical notes of their songs, the notion that they could cognitively distinguish among them, and then demonstrate a specific preference for one or another variation, was considered ludicrous. These Victorian-era objections have been definitively rejected. Darwin’s hypothesis that animals are able to make sensory evaluations and exercise mate preferences is now supported by volumes of evidence and is universally accepted. There have been numerous experiments across the animal kingdom—from birds to fishes, grasshoppers to moths—showing that animals have the capacity to make sensory evaluations that influence their mate choices. Although Darwin’s proposal of animal cognitive choice is now the accepted wisdom, the second implication of his aesthetic theory of sexual selection remains as revolutionary today, and as controversial, as when he first proposed it. By using the words “beauty,” “taste,” “charm,” “appreciate,” “admire,” and “love,” Darwin was suggesting that mating preferences could evolve for displays that had no utilitarian value at all to the chooser, only aesthetic value. In short, Darwin hypothesized that beauty evolves primarily because it is pleasurable to the observer. Darwin’s views on this issue developed over time. In an early discussion of sexual selection in Origin, Darwin wrote, “Amongst many animals, sexual selection will give its aid to ordinary [natural] selection by assuring to the most vigorous and best adaptive of all males the greatest number of offspring.”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  At first I used to feel embarrassed about getting a hard-on in the shower. But at the Corry much deliberate excitative soaping of cocks went on, and a number of members had their routine erections there each day. My own, though less regular, were, I think, hoped and looked out for. There is a paradoxical strength in display; the naked person always has the social advantage over the clothed one (though the naked person can forget this, as innumerable farces show), and under the shower I was reckless. The effect of this on others, though, was not necessarily a good thing. It would be vain to pretend that all the men at the Corry looked like the stars of a physique magazine. There were gods—demi-gods, at least—but a place which gathered the fantasies of so many, young and old, was bound to have its own sorry network of unspoken loyalties, stolen and resented glances, ungainly gambits and humiliating crushes. This naked mingling, which formed a ritualistic heart to the life of the club, produced its own improper incitements to ideal liaisons, and polyandrous happenings which could not survive into the world of jackets and ties, cycleclips and duffel-coats. And how difficult social distinctions are in the shower. How could I now smile at my enormous African neighbour, who was responding in elephantine manner to my own erection, and yet scowl at the disastrous nearly-boy smirking under the next jet along? I first met James at Oxford, where he had heard of me but I knew nothing of him: it was at one of the little parties organised by my tutor at Saturday lunchtimes, with red and white wine, and nuts—genially queeny occasions where gay chaplains (chaplains, that is to say) and the more enlightened dons mingled with undergraduates chosen for their charm or connections, while one or two very old and distinguished people sat among the standing guests, holding audience and spilling their drinks on the carpet. I was feeling particularly full of myself: I had been fucking a French boy from Brasenose, it was a hot early summer in my second year, and I had the strange experience, on arriving in the crowded college room, of standing just behind my tutor and one of his graduate students who said to him, ‘I hope you’ve asked young Beckwith; I must say I should think he’s just in his prime this year …’ before I watched the graduate’s pleasure seep away in blushing discomfiture. James, in a crumpled linen jacket, open Aertex shirt, and baggy russet cords, was standing by the window. He looked very young, innocent, and yet mature, as he was already losing his fair, fine hair. His eyes, in contrast to his general colouring, were deep brown, and as my tutor introduced us James said ‘Oh, how do you do?’, indicating pleasure and surprise, and I said, in the rude way that I then thought brilliant, ‘He has very beautiful eyes.’

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I grasped but little of this fencing match, so much more deadly than those of the arena, and felt only a somewhat arrogant disdain for the tyrant at bay, philosopher's pupil that I then was. Wisely counseled by Attianus, I kept to my work without meddling too much in politics. That first year in office differed little from the years of study. I knew nothing of law but was fortunate in having Neratius Priscus for colleague in the tribunal. He consented to instruct me, and remained throughout his life my legal counselor and my friend. His was that rare type of mind which, though master of a subject, and seeing it, as it were, from within (from a point of view inaccessible to the uninitiated), nevertheless retains a sense of its merely relative value in the general order of things, and measures it in human terms. Better versed than any of his contemporaries in established procedures, he never hesitated when useful innovations were proposed. It is with his help that I have succeeded in my later years in putting certain reforms into effect. There were other things to think of. My Spanish accent had stayed with me; my first speech in the tribunal brought a burst of laughter. Here I made good use of my intimacy with actors, which had scandalized my family: lessons in elocution throughout long months proved the most arduous but most delightful of my tasks, and were the best guarded of my life's secrets. In those difficult years even dissipation was a kind of study: I was trying to keep up with the young fashionables of Rome, but in that I never completely succeeded. With the cowardice typical of that age, when our courage is wholly physical, and is expended elsewhere, I seldom dared to be myself; in the hope of resembling the others I sometimes subdued and sometimes exaggerated my natural disposition. I was not much liked. There was, in fact, no reason why I should have been. Certain traits, for example my taste for the arts, which went unnoticed in the student at Athens, and which was to be more or less generally accepted in the emperor, were disturbing in the officer and magistrate at his first stage of authority. My Hellenism was cause for amusement, the more so in that ineptly I alternated between dissimulating and displaying it. The senators referred to me as "the Greekling." I was beginning to have my legend, that strange flashing reflection made up partly of what we do, and partly of what the public thinks about us. Plaintiffs, on learning of my intrigue with a senator's wife, brazenly sent me their wives in their stead, or their sons when I had flaunted my passion for some young mime.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  If I lift up the mats, I can see the broken pavement move beneath us through the holes in the rear floor. We rarely travel the main roads like the Southern State, Sunrise Highway, or the Long Island Expressway. For Cookie—that’s what we call my mom—the scenic route is the safest because she’s always avoiding the cops. Cookie has more warrants out on her than she has kids. And there are five of us. Her offenses? Where to start? She’s wanted for drunk driving; driving with a suspended license and an unregistered vehicle; stolen license plates; bounced checks to the landlord, utility company, and liquor store totaling hundreds of dollars; stealing from her bosses (on the rare occasion she gets work as a barmaid); and for our truancy. And if there were such a thing as a warrant for sending her kids to school with their heads full of lice, we could add that to the list, too! In the car, we don’t speak. It’s not by choice—it’s actually impossible to hear one another above the loud grunting of the Impala and its broken muffler. Embarrassed by the car’s belches, I slump down in my seat. In the front seat next to Cookie, my older sister Camille’s doing pretty much the same thing . . . but if our mother detects our attitude, we’ll find ourselves suffering nasty bruises. The only comfort is the physical space we now have to actually fit in the car without piling on top of one another as we had to for years. That’s thanks to the fact that, at age seventeen, our oldest sister, Cherie, has finagled an escape by moving in with her new husband and his parents, since she’s expecting a baby soon. In the backseat, Rosie, Norman, and I stay occupied, scratching our bony, bug-bitten legs and comparing who has the most bites and biggest scabs. We take turns pointing to them as Rosie uses her fingers as scorecards to rate them on a scale of one to ten. There’s never really a winner . . . we’re all pretty itchy. None of us bothers hollering to ask where we’re going. With all our belongings packed in garbage bags in the trunk, we know we’re headed to a new home. Our short-term future could take many forms—a trailer, a homeless shelter, the back parking lot of a supermarket, in the car for a few weeks, in Cookie’s next boyfriend’s basement or attic, or dare we dream: an apartment or house. We know better than to expect much—to us, running water and a few old mattresses is good living. We’ve managed with a lot less. Most girls my age idolize their sixteen-year-old sisters, but Camille is my cocaptain in our family’s survival. She’s the only person in my life who’s totally transparent, and we need each other too much for any sisterly mystique to exist.