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.

Page 37 of 79 · 20 per page

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  my tree (2003) My father answers the door with a huge gash above his eye—swollen, bruised. Here we go. I mention the gash, unsure I want to know the details. This? he barks, pointing to his eye. I got nailed. But you should see those two cocksuckers, tried to rob me, I’m stepping on their motherfuckin’ heads. Off to Charles Street jail, they’re in for twenty years . I nod, look at the last of the day’s sunlight coming through the ivy that fills his three windows with green. Cartoons on tv, coffee gone cold. How does he keep those plants so healthy? You don’t want any vodka? he asks, hoisting the jug. Fine, it’s evil shit . A room without corners, without a place to sit. After a few minutes of listening to this latest installment in his endless unraveling his room begins to feel especially suffocating, cramped. A seventy-three-year-old man in trouble with the law for the umpteenth time. I suggest a stroll, offer to buy him a sandwich. He mentions my book, the poems in it that deal with him, says he’s impressed. I wonder if he’s thinking of the one where I say I want to “ bend / each finger back, until the bottle / falls, until the bone snaps, save him / by destroying his hands .” On the sidewalk I notice how gnomelike he’s become—cross-eyed, stiff gait, smaller and smaller, as is the way with all parents, perhaps, though my father is smaller yet cocky still, cocky and paranoid at once. Not a formidable presence, except in that madman way that drunks wield, that does-it-look-like-I-give-a-fuck-about-anything? look. First we walk to the 7-Eleven to replenish his stash of orange juice, where he introduces me to the guy behind the counter as his son. The cashier smiles, a bit reservedly, says only, Your son? Along with the o.j. he buys two bunches of cut flowers, one for his room, one for Jasmine, the seven-year-old girl who lives next door to him. A note from Jasmine is taped to his door—“Dear man that lives in 21, I love you.” Once he knocked on their door while I was there, insisted I meet Jasmine and her mother. The mother gave me a look much like the one this cashier is giving me, of weary exasperation. Jasmine hid behind her mother’s leg, waved hola . As we leave the cashier tells me my father is a good customer. Damn right I am , my father says, as he ambles back out. Next door is a junk store, a CLOSED sign hanging in the window. My father bangs on the sign with his fist. A man opens the door and is introduced as Sharkey. Nice to meet you, I say, and take his offered hand. This is my son , my father says. Sharkey squints into my face, confused. He teaches at Columbia University , my father says, do you believe that? Sharkey leans in to me, squints.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  These types of agile strategies can only work if you have the option to quit. You can’t put out an MVP unless you have the ability to pull it back. The whole point is to get information quickly, so you can quit the stuff that isn’t working and stick with the things that are worthwhile or develop new things that might work even better. Quitting is what allows companies to maximize speed, experimentation, and effectiveness in highly uncertain environments. If you are moving fast, by definition, you are going to have greater uncertainty. You are taking less time to gather and analyze information before acting. An MVP is meant to allow you to quit or change things before you put too much time or effort into a course of action, all while speeding up the information-gathering process so crucial to good decision-making. Richard Pryor, when he was arguably the world’s best stand-up comedian from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, was known for his dedication to this kind of strategy for developing new material. Pryor, if a little less familiar to the current generation, is still considered among the most important comedians ever, in the scope of his success, in using comedy to break down boundaries, and in his influence on comedians ever since. Twenty years after his last stand-up work, Comedy Central ranked him as number one of all time. In 2017, more than a decade after Pryor’s death, Rolling Stone also ranked him number one. Practically every legendary comedian since has called him the best, including Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, Eddie Murphy, David Letterman, Jim Carrey, Chris Rock, and the late Robin Williams. At the height of Pryor’s celebrity, not just as a comedian but as a movie star and a cultural icon, he would book a series of gigs to work on new material at the Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip. The Comedy Store was a small club but so influential that it was considered impossible to appear on The Tonight Show without proving yourself there first. Time on the stage there was a coveted commodity. Pryor was so big that he could get stage time whenever he wanted. In fact, once his name appeared on the marquee, expectations soared. News quickly spread throughout LA and in the entertainment business. The line for the few tickets would stretch around the block. When he arrived onstage, the atmosphere was like the start of a heavyweight championship fight. And Pryor would bomb. On the first night, he would show up with nothing prepared beyond “a couple of ideas,” “one or two jokes at the most.” The audience would beg him to pull out trademark characters from his latest album and scream out punch lines. Once it was clear he wouldn’t give the audience what they wanted (or anything new that was actually funny), the yelling subsided. He would stumble through at least a half hour of terrible material in awkward, embarrassing silence.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  To hang Christmas lights around the dining room, you drag a thrift-store bookcase over to the wall and stand on it. You are reaching up and up when you hear the particle board give. You don’t fall off, you fall through it, and that’s where John and Laura find you: standing in the ruins of the bookcase with blood trickling down your legs, sobbing gushily.43 (At the ocean at your feet, a Dodo paddles by, waves to you.) You are embarrassed that you thought a cheap, piece-of-shit set of shelves could bear your weight; you are embarrassed about your blood, its redness, the way it is just coming out of you with no concern for anyone’s feelings. You are embarrassed to be throwing a party in this state, embarrassed to be alive. “What happened?” John asks, and when you don’t answer he repeats the question, and then he leads you to the couch and asks Laura to get some Band-Aids. Laura rolls up your leggings and cleans the cuts with hydrogen peroxide. John sits next to you, resting his wide hand between your shoulder blades, anchoring your shuddering skeleton. John calls one friend, who calls another, and soon all the people you’ve spent a year and a half not confiding in have shown up on your doorstep. They find you lying across the couch and get to work like the mice in Cinderella—sweeping, cleaning, making shopping lists. Someone asks you if you’ve eaten, and someone else answers for you (“Nope”), so someone else orders a pizza. You sit there, a glass of water in your hand, as they all crisscross in front of you, being kinder than you think you deserve. The doorbell rings. As someone signs for the pizza there is a blur of color and light, and suddenly something small and warm is in your lap. It’s a puppy, a tiny, wiggling hound puppy with massive paws and a whipping tail. When you get a good look at her, you realize she belongs to your neighbor, who is also coincidentally your therapist (Iowa City!). You pick up the puppy, who is writhing with inarticulable joy, slathering your face in sloppy, flat-tongued kisses. You are crying as you carry the puppy outside, where you can hear your therapist and his wife calling her name. You go to the fence, and your therapist apologizes—they’d been loading up the car and she’d gotten away. Your therapist does not say anything about your shiny red nose and tearstained face. “I’ll see you next week,” you whisper as you bundle the vibrating creature over the fence. Home once again, the puppy gives you one last kiss, darting across the barrier like a clandestine lover. You rally enough to dress and light the tea candles. The party hums around you, a machine that doesn’t need you at all. A tremendous success.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  irritating details, they are overwhelmed. They may even accuse you of adding to their stress. You must understand that at the root of this is the need to make it clear to themselves and to you that they are in some way superior. If they were to say in so many words that they felt superior to you, they would incur ridicule and shame. They want you to feel it in subtle ways, while they are able to deny what they are up to. Putting you in the inferior position is a form of control, in which they get to define the relationship. You must pay attention to the pattern more than the apologies, but also notice the nonverbal signs as they excuse themselves. The tone of the voice is whiny, as if they really feel it is your problem. The apologies are laid on extra thick to disguise the lack of sincerity; in the end, such excuses communicate more about their problems in life than about the facts of their forgetfulness. They are not really sorry. If this is chronic behavior, you must not get angry or display overt irritation—passive aggressors thrive on getting a rise out of you. Instead, stay calm and subtly mirror their behavior, calling attention to what they are doing, and inducing some shame if possible. You might make dates or appointments and leave them in the lurch, or show up impossibly late with the sincerest of apologies, laced with a touch of irony. Let them brood on what this might mean. Earlier on in his career, when the renowned psychotherapist Milton Erickson was a medical professor at a university, he had to deal with a very smart student named Anne, who always showed up late to classes, then apologized profusely and very sincerely. She happened to be a straight-A student. She always promised to be on time for the next class but never was. This made it difficult for her fellow students; she frequently held up lectures or laboratory work. And on the first day of one of Erickson’s lecture classes she was up to her old tricks, but Erickson was prepared. When she entered late, he had the entire class stand up and bow down to her in mock reverence; he did the same. Even after class, as she walked down the hall, the students continued their bowing. The message was clear—“We see through you”—and feeling embarrassed and ashamed, she stopped showing up late. If you are dealing with a boss or someone in a position of power who makes you wait, their assertion of superiority is not so subtle. The best you can do is keep as calm as possible, showing your own form of superiority by remaining patient and cool. The Sympathy Strategy: Somehow the person you are dealing with is always the victim—of irrational hostility, of unfair circumstances, of society in general. You notice with these types that

• 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 Boys of My Youth (1998)

  It’s been about two months since he’s had a drink. Every night he sits in here while we watch TV, reading his bird books and talking to us. At first we didn’t like it, but now we do. My mother is in the kitchen alone, chipping the polish off her nails and smoking. I put the ice cream dishes in the sink and drift toward the refrigerator, where my bottle of pop is waiting. “No you don’t,” she says curtly. Nothing is fair around here. I can’t decide whether to argue or not. The only light is coming from the living room, and she has her glasses off. Her eyes look weak and vulnerable, but her lips look like blades. “He embarrassed me to death tonight,” she says. Uh-oh. Why did I come out here; what was I thinking? “In front of everyone,” she continues. “Embarrassed. To death.” She looks pretty alive to me, but if the truth be known, I’ve been embarrassed by him myself. Slumped and staggering, or sleeping all night in the passenger seat of the car, parked in the driveway, because he can’t manage the back steps. Disappearing into the garage at odd times during the day, sipping from a sack and staring at the back of the house through the dark doorway, thinking no one can see him. We see him. “There we all are,” she says in a low voice. “Playing cards, trying to have fun, drinking a few cocktails, and he sits there for two hours drinking orange juice. Holier than thou; won’t even have a drink on a Saturday night when we’re at a tavern.” I think about this, standing on one foot. The dark kitchen, her cigarette going, the bitten-off words. It’s hard to know what expression to put on my face. From the living room comes the sound of a fuse burning and then a theme song starts up. “Mission Impossible is on,” I tell her. She turns back to her ashtray and I return to the sofa. Linda is explaining the gist of the show to my dad. “They all have different identities, and they have impossible missions,” she tells him. “I see,” he says agreeably. “All different identities and missions.” “Impossible ones,” she stresses. “They aren’t impossible, the people just think they are,” I explain. “They seem impossible, until the different-identity guys take over,” he clarifies. “Is that it?” We nod. He’s drinking a glass of milk. “Want me to get you a bottle of beer?” I ask him. Linda swivels her head around to stare at me but my dad keeps watching the television. After a minute he shakes his head no.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Mrs. Dalloway On the night of the day she breaks up with you, you are meant to host a party for one of your professors after her reading. To hang Christmas lights around the dining room, you drag a thrift-store bookcase over to the wall and stand on it. You are reaching up and up when you hear the particle board give. You don’t fall off, you fall through it, and that’s where John and Laura find you: standing in the ruins of the bookcase with blood trickling down your legs, sobbing gushily. 43 (At the ocean at your feet, a Dodo paddles by, waves to you.) You are embarrassed that you thought a cheap, piece-of-shit set of shelves could bear your weight; you are embarrassed about your blood, its redness, the way it is just coming out of you with no concern for anyone’s feelings. You are embarrassed to be throwing a party in this state, embarrassed to be alive. “What happened?” John asks, and when you don’t answer he repeats the question, and then he leads you to the couch and asks Laura to get some Band-Aids. Laura rolls up your leggings and cleans the cuts with hydrogen peroxide. John sits next to you, resting his wide hand between your shoulder blades, anchoring your shuddering skeleton. John calls one friend, who calls another, and soon all the people you’ve spent a year and a half not confiding in have shown up on your doorstep. They find you lying across the couch and get to work like the mice in Cinderella —sweeping, cleaning, making shopping lists. Someone asks you if you’ve eaten, and someone else answers for you (“Nope”), so someone else orders a pizza. You sit there, a glass of water in your hand, as they all crisscross in front of you, being kinder than you think you deserve . The doorbell rings. As someone signs for the pizza there is a blur of color and light, and suddenly something small and warm is in your lap. It’s a puppy, a tiny, wiggling hound puppy with massive paws and a whipping tail. When you get a good look at her, you realize she belongs to your neighbor, who is also coincidentally your therapist (Iowa City!). You pick up the puppy, who is writhing with inarticulable joy, slathering your face in sloppy, flat-tongued kisses. You are crying as you carry the puppy outside, where you can hear your therapist and his wife calling her name. You go to the fence, and your therapist apologizes—they’d been loading up the car and she’d gotten away. Your therapist does not say anything about your shiny red nose and tearstained face. “I’ll see you next week,” you whisper as you bundle the vibrating creature over the fence. Home once again, the puppy gives you one last kiss, darting across the barrier like a clandestine lover. You rally enough to dress and light the tea candles. The party hums around you, a machine that doesn’t need you at all. A tremendous success. 43 . Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature , Type C949.4, Bleeding from breaking taboo.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  We seek love, pleasure, and validation. Some of us find in sex the perfect venue for rebellion and escape. Others reach for transcendence and ecstasy, even spiritual communion. What I got from Joni was a history of her experience. What I was looking for was a sense of the longings and conflicts she brought to these experiences. “Can I ask you about your fantasies?” I ask. Joni pales. “Oh, God. That’s so personal. What I do, or what I have done, doesn’t seem nearly as embarrassing as what goes on in my mind.” “But that’s exactly where I want us to go. I have a sense that if we talk about your fantasies we may be able to get to the heart of what stands between you and Ray.” Over time, and with much coaxing, Joni divulges a fantastic collection of intemperate, luscious, and infinitely detailed erotic tableaux, which she’s been constructing since early adolescence. Cowboys, pirates, kings, and concubines parade in endless configurations of carefully wielded power and highly refined surrender. Over the years the plots have changed, but the essence has not. The latest installment takes place on her “husband’s” ranch, where she is ritualistically presented to his hired hands as a sexual offering. The night they arrive, she is told to dress for dinner, where she’ll be meeting his staff. Her husband (who is, in her characterization, emphatically not Ray) chooses her clothing, an elegant, highly revealing dress and other exquisitely fitting adornments—chandelier earrings, a diamond pendant dangling between her breasts, stiletto heels. He pays attention to every detail of her appearance. After the meal, he asks her to undress for them, so they can appreciate her beauty. She complies; even though she is embarrassed and even humiliated, all this is oddly thrilling. She is completely at their mercy, and makes no attempt to escape. The men are given their own challenge—to anticipate her every desire, and to bring her to heights of sexual ecstasy she has never before known. “You want to know what I’m afraid of? I’m afraid that I’m a masochist, just like my mother,” she tells me. “How are you a masochist in this story?” I inquire. “I submit. I’m passive, I’m without my own will. I do what I’m told, and I like being told what to do. What am I doing there, taking orders from men? I resent taking orders from anybody. I can’t stand authority, but I get off on submitting to a bunch of cowboys? It makes no fucking sense.” “Actually, it makes quite a lot of sense to me,” I tell her. “Well, would you mind enlightening the rest of us, Doctor?” I explain that sexual fantasy doesn’t work like other fantasies. If people tell me they daydream about a vacation in Tahiti, I believe they want a vacation in Tahiti. The connection between what they fantasize about and what they really want is refreshingly uncomplicated.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  Their way of dealing with this is to distract and deceive with appearances (as opposed to real originality in their work), surrounding themselves with the extraordinary and with special knowledge. Underneath it all is the real person waiting to come out— rather ordinary and not so very different. In any case, those who are truly original and different do not need to make a great show of it. In fact, they are often embarrassed by being so different and learn to appear more humble. (As an example of this, see the story of Abraham Lincoln in the section below.) Be extra wary of those who go out of their way to make a show of their difference. The Extreme Entrepreneur: At first glance these types seem to possess very positive qualities, especially for work. They maintain very high standards and pay exceptional attention to detail. They are willing to do much of the work themselves. If mixed with talent, this often leads to success early on in life. But underneath the façade the seeds of failure are taking root. This first appears in their inability to listen to others. They cannot take advice. They need no one. In fact, they mistrust others who do not have their same high standards. With success they are forced to take on more and more responsibility. If they were truly self-reliant, they would know the importance of delegating on a lower level to maintain control on the higher level, but something else is stirring within—the Shadow. Soon the situation becomes chaotic. Others must come in and take over the business. Their health and finances are ruined and they become completely dependent on doctors or outside financiers. They go from complete control to total dependence on others. (Think of the pop star Michael Jackson near the end of his life.) Often their outward show of self-reliance disguises a hidden desire to have others take care of them, to regress to the dependency of childhood. They can never admit this to themselves or show any signs of such weakness, but unconsciously they are drawn to creating enough chaos that they break down and are forced into some form of dependency. There are signs beforehand: recurring health issues, the sudden microneeds to be pampered by people in their daily lives. But the big sign comes as they lose control and fail to take steps to halt this.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I am embarrassed because teenagers are yelling at me. Within five seconds men are throwing off their shoes and diving from the dock; my own dad gets hold of one girl and swims her back in. Black hair plastered to her neck, she throws up on the mud about eight times before they carry her back to wherever she came from. One teenager is unconscious when they drag him out and a guy pushes on his chest until a low fountain of water springs up out of his mouth and nose. That kid eventually walks away on his own, but he’s crying. The third teenager lands a ways down the bank and comes walking by fifteen minutes later, a grown-up on either side of him and a towel around his waist. His skin looks like Silly Putty. “Oh man,” he says when he sees me. “I saw her go by about ninety miles an hour!” He stops and points at me. I just stand there, embarrassed to be noticed by a teenager. I hope my shorts aren’t bagging out again. I put one hand in my pocket and slouch sideways a little. “Man, I thought she was gonna be the last thing I ever seen!” he says, shaking his head. The girl teenager had had on a swimming suit top with a built-in bra. I cross my arms nonchalantly across my chest and smile at the teenage boy. He keeps walking and talking, the grown-ups supporting him and giving each other looks over the top of his head. His legs are shaking like crazy. “I thought, Man oh man, that skinny little chick is gonna be the last thing ever,” he exclaims. I look down. My shorts are bagging out. Bonanza My grandmother married a guy named Ralph, about a year and a half after Pokey, my real grandfather, died of a stroke in the upstairs bedroom of Uncle Rex’s house. At Grandma and Ralph’s wedding ceremony a man sang opera-style, which took the children by surprise and caused an uproar among the grandchildren, who were barely able to sit still as it was. Afterward, there was white cake with white frosting in the church basement, and bowls of peanuts. My mother and my aunts were quite upset about Grandma marrying Ralph barely a year after their dad had died. They sat in clumps in the church basement, a few here, a few there, and ate their cake while giving each other meaningful looks, shaking their heads ominously. My grandmother, a kind woman, was way above reproach. So, it was all Ralph’s fault. He took her to Florida on a honeymoon, a place where no one in the family had ever been. There was an ocean there. They walked the beach morning and night, and Grandma brought home shells. She divided them up evenly, put them in cigar boxes, and gave them to each of her thirty-five grandchildren.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  The third teenager lands a ways down the bank and comes walking by fifteen minutes later, a grown-up on either side of him and a towel around his waist. His skin looks like Silly Putty. “Oh man,” he says when he sees me. “I saw her go by about ninety miles an hour!” He stops and points at me. I just stand there, embarrassed to be noticed by a teenager. I hope my shorts aren’t bagging out again. I put one hand in my pocket and slouch sideways a little. “Man, I thought she was gonna be the last thing I ever seen!” he says, shaking his head. The girl teenager had had on a swimming suit top with a built-in bra. I cross my arms nonchalantly across my chest and smile at the teenage boy. He keeps walking and talking, the grown-ups supporting him and giving each other looks over the top of his head. His legs are shaking like crazy. “I thought, Man oh man, that skinny little chick is gonna be the last thing ever,” he exclaims. I look down. My shorts are bagging out. Bonanza [image "art" file=Image00000.jpg] M y grandmother married a guy named Ralph, about a year and a half after Pokey, my real grandfather, died of a stroke in the upstairs bedroom of Uncle Rex’s house. At Grandma and Ralph’s wedding ceremony a man sang opera-style, which took the children by surprise and caused an uproar among the grandchildren, who were barely able to sit still as it was. Afterward, there was white cake with white frosting in the church basement, and bowls of peanuts. My mother and my aunts were quite upset about Grandma marrying Ralph barely a year after their dad had died. They sat in clumps in the church basement, a few here, a few there, and ate their cake while giving each other meaningful looks, shaking their heads ominously. My grandmother, a kind woman, was way above reproach. So, it was all Ralph’s fault. He took her to Florida on a honeymoon, a place where no one in the family had ever been. There was an ocean there. They walked the beach morning and night, and Grandma brought home shells. She divided them up evenly, put them in cigar boxes, and gave them to each of her thirty-five grandchildren. The cigar boxes were painted flat white and glued to the top were pictures cut from greeting cards: a lamb, a big-eyed kitty, a bunch of flowers. On that trip to Florida, I always imagine my grandmother walking in the foamy tide, picking up dead starfish, while Ralph sat silently in a beach chair, not smiling at anyone. When we’d drive down to Knoxville for a visit, everyone would be hale and hearty, the food eaten, the iced tea drunk, the new rag rugs admired, and then we’d pile back into the car for the hour ride home.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  In the supermarket I mirrored what I had done just a few years earlier as my mother was busy making donuts in the still-dark morning, only now I did it in daylight. I was maybe all of eight. I’d wander in, put plums in my pockets, Twinkies, walk out. We got no allowance, and this was where the food was. The good food. I had been feeding myself there as long as I knew. Soon I didn’t even bother to see if I was being watched. I ate the plums as I wandered, left the pits on the shelves beside boxes of cereal, beside the faces of smiling athletes. I’d go to the bakery, look past the glass cabinet at the donut machine, I’d remember standing on a chair watching the yellowy dough extrude into the hot oil, watching the donuts form, roiling in the agony of becoming. My mother would set us up at the formica lunch counter on the spinning stools and give us juice, milk, hot donuts. I would take the little packages of jelly and fill my pockets, the vast parking lot slowly coming out of the darkness through the plate-glass windows behind us. Occasionally a carpenter would come and rap on the window, hoping to be let in, to be allowed an early donut. Occasionally my mother would unlock the door, let him in. Within a few months the house caught fire—the raccoons toppled a smoldering grill left on the back porch. My brother and I were asleep upstairs when our mother came in with Vernon, her boyfriend at the time, and lifted us, still wrapped in blankets, to carry us through the smoky house. The fire station sat directly across the street, I remember running up the stairs, busting in on the firemen’s card game. The firemen barely looked up from their hands, gestured to the alarm box on the wall, told us to pull it. Only then did they throw their cards down, jump into their boots and slide down the pole to the waiting truck. They drove past the house first, then returned, dragged the hoses into the backyard, put out the blaze. It turned out not to be such a bad thing, as my mother got some insurance money and had the whole house renovated. Vernon was a carpenter, did all the work. He was also married, so this was a way for him to spend more time with her without arousing suspicion. I got stopped one day as I was leaving the supermarket, a half-eaten candy bar in my hand. The manager brought me into a little room elevated above the registers that had two-way mirrors on four sides, just like on television. I realized he sat up there on the lookout for people like me. I felt sick. He asked what I was doing and I said I didn’t know. He asked where my mother was and I said at work.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  Joni is quite forthcoming in disclosing her sexual past: the best experiences she’s had, the worst, and what made them so. She gives me a raft of information about the atmosphere she grew up in, her early stirrings, the age she started to masturbate, and the age when she understood what masturbation was. But when I ask her, “What does sex mean to you? What are the feelings that accompany your desire? What do you seek in sex? What do you want to feel? To express? Where do you hold back?” she looks at me, perplexed. “I have no idea,” she admits. “No one’s ever asked me that before.” All of us invest our erotic encounters with a complex set of needs and expectations. We seek love, pleasure, and validation. Some of us find in sex the perfect venue for rebellion and escape. Others reach for transcendence and ecstasy, even spiritual communion. What I got from Joni was a history of her experience. What I was looking for was a sense of the longings and conflicts she brought to these experiences. “Can I ask you about your fantasies?” I ask. Joni pales. “Oh, God. That’s so personal. What I do, or what I have done, doesn’t seem nearly as embarrassing as what goes on in my mind.” “But that’s exactly where I want us to go. I have a sense that if we talk about your fantasies we may be able to get to the heart of what stands between you and Ray.” Over time, and with much coaxing, Joni divulges a fantastic collection of intemperate, luscious, and infinitely detailed erotic tableaux, which she’s been constructing since early adolescence. Cowboys, pirates, kings, and concubines parade in endless configurations of carefully wielded power and highly refined surrender. Over the years the plots have changed, but the essence has not. The latest installment takes place on her “husband’s” ranch, where she is ritualistically presented to his hired hands as a sexual offering. The night they arrive, she is told to dress for dinner, where she’ll be meeting his staff. Her husband (who is, in her characterization, emphatically not Ray) chooses her clothing, an elegant, highly revealing dress and other exquisitely fitting adornments—chandelier earrings, a diamond pendant dangling between her breasts, stiletto heels. He pays attention to every detail of her appearance. After the meal, he asks her to undress for them, so they can appreciate her beauty. She complies; even though she is embarrassed and even humiliated, all this is oddly thrilling. She is completely at their mercy, and makes no attempt to escape. The men are given their own challenge—to anticipate her every desire, and to bring her to heights of sexual ecstasy she has never before known. “You want to know what I’m afraid of? I’m afraid that I’m a masochist, just like my mother,” she tells me. “How are you a masochist in this story?” I inquire.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  To hang Christmas lights around the dining room, you drag a thrift-store bookcase over to the wall and stand on it. You are reaching up and up when you hear the particle board give. You don’t fall off, you fall through it, and that’s where John and Laura find you: standing in the ruins of the bookcase with blood trickling down your legs, sobbing gushily.43 (At the ocean at your feet, a Dodo paddles by, waves to you.) You are embarrassed that you thought a cheap, piece-of-shit set of shelves could bear your weight; you are embarrassed about your blood, its redness, the way it is just coming out of you with no concern for anyone’s feelings. You are embarrassed to be throwing a party in this state, embarrassed to be alive. “What happened?” John asks, and when you don’t answer he repeats the question, and then he leads you to the couch and asks Laura to get some Band-Aids. Laura rolls up your leggings and cleans the cuts with hydrogen peroxide. John sits next to you, resting his wide hand between your shoulder blades, anchoring your shuddering skeleton. John calls one friend, who calls another, and soon all the people you’ve spent a year and a half not confiding in have shown up on your doorstep. They find you lying across the couch and get to work like the mice in Cinderella—sweeping, cleaning, making shopping lists. Someone asks you if you’ve eaten, and someone else answers for you (“Nope”), so someone else orders a pizza. You sit there, a glass of water in your hand, as they all crisscross in front of you, being kinder than you think you deserve. The doorbell rings. As someone signs for the pizza there is a blur of color and light, and suddenly something small and warm is in your lap. It’s a puppy, a tiny, wiggling hound puppy with massive paws and a whipping tail. When you get a good look at her, you realize she belongs to your neighbor, who is also coincidentally your therapist (Iowa City!). You pick up the puppy, who is writhing with inarticulable joy, slathering your face in sloppy, flat-tongued kisses. You are crying as you carry the puppy outside, where you can hear your therapist and his wife calling her name. You go to the fence, and your therapist apologizes—they’d been loading up the car and she’d gotten away. Your therapist does not say anything about your shiny red nose and tearstained face. “I’ll see you next week,” you whisper as you bundle the vibrating creature over the fence. Home once again, the puppy gives you one last kiss, darting across the barrier like a clandestine lover. You rally enough to dress and light the tea candles. The party hums around you, a machine that doesn’t need you at all. A tremendous success.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  “Georgette?” Mrs. McLaughlin says. “Ou est la bibliothèque?” Georgette continues to watch the wall, but her left cheek, the visible one, slowly turns red beneath its curtain of hair. Seconds tick past and then she whispers something. “Pardon , Georgette?” Mrs. McLaughlin moves down the aisle to get a better view. “Près d’ici,” Georgette says softly. Then a little louder, “Près d’ici.” “If you were in France, no one would be able to understand you,” Mrs. McLaughlin says shortly. “Take your hand away from your mouth and roll your r.” She waits. “Okay,” Georgette says desperately; she holds her hands away from her mouth but they hover in the air about six inches above her desk. “Okay, pway dee-cee.” Mrs. McLaughlin lets out a genuine laugh, for an instant you can see how Mr. McLaughlin might have ended up marrying her. Then her eyes crinkle at the corners and she exclaims meanly, “You sound like Porky the Pig!” She laughs again, and then says, “Pway d’ici,” in a sputtering fat-cheeked way. Georgette allows her hands to come back up to her face. She pushes her glasses up and stares once again intently at the wall. The minute hand crawls around the face of the clock, others are called on, dialogue is read out of the book, words are written on the board. At some point I look over at Georgette just as she looks at me. I shake my head, almost imperceptibly, in disbelief; she widens her eyes for an instant, mimicking a look of abject terror. “That was ninth grade, not seventh,” Elizabeth says. “We were already friends when that happened.” She’s at her office in downtown Chicago, talking to me on the WATS line. “You wouldn’t believe what my desk looks like right now.” I would because I’ve witnessed it. She’s an editor, and there are manuscripts stacked everywhere and yellow notes with Urgent scrawled across them stuck to the carpet. Her office is a wall that’s a window surrounded by three orange head-high partitions. The view is of Lake Michigan, and at least in the summer it’s spectacular, white triangles of boat sails and a stretching blue horizon. Thumbtacked to the partition next to her desk is a photograph of her and me at age twelve, wearing matching lime green shorts (stretchy) and dark green men’s T-shirts (baggy). We both have our hair in braids, mine as slim as snakes, hers thick and bushy. We’ve got variegated green yarn tied in bows at the ends. We’re draped across her canopy bed, listening to records and enjoying our outfits. “They’re actually making me work,” she says disconsolately. I can hear her rifling through papers. I’m at work, too, and I’m an editor, too. My office is in a small town in Iowa, and it’s neat and tidy in a very annoying way, according to my co-workers. There’s a picture on my bulletin board of the two of us when we were in love with Dave Anderson.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  It is not just a matter of being in the mood; it requires patience and sustained attention. The tennis player knows intuitively that growth is rarely linear; she may experience some plateaus and some slowdowns, but the reward is worth the effort. Unfortunately, all too often we associate effort with work, and discipline with pain. But there’s a different way to think of work. It can be creative and life-affirming, sparking a heightened sense of vitality rather than a bone-deep exhaustion. If we want sex to be fulfilling, then we have to apply effort in just this artful way. The Myth of Spontaneity There is a powerful ideal operating in many people’s view of sex—that it’s an instant fit, a hand-in-pocket, skin-to-skin compatibility that is perfect from the start. Good sex is supposed to be easy, tension-free, and uninhibited. Either you have it or you don’t. This idea is often accompanied by its good neighbor, the myth of spontaneity. The word “spontaneity” comes up like a mantra whenever men and women in my office talk about what constitutes, for them, exciting, thrilling, can’t-wait, truly erotic sex. It is hard to overstate their enthusiastic conviction that really sexy sex is supposed to be spur-of-the-moment. We like to believe that sex arises from an impulse or inclination that is natural, unprompted, and artless. We talk about being swept away. “I couldn’t resist…I felt such a rush through my veins…It was bigger than both of us…I was completely taken over.” This infatuation with the big bang theory of sex suggests our impatience with seduction and playful eroticism, which take up too much time, require too much effort, and—most important—demand full consciousness of what we are doing. For many of us, premeditated sex is suspicious. It threatens our belief that sex is subject only to the machinations of magic and chemistry. The idea that sex must be spontaneous keeps us one step removed from having to will sex, to own our desire, and to express it with intent. As long as sex is something that just happens, you don’t have to claim it. It’s ironic that in such a willful society, willfully conjuring up sex seems obvious and crass. It embarrasses us, as if we’ve been caught doing something inappropriate. When my patients wax nostalgic about the early days of rapid ignition sex, I remind them that even in the beginning, spontaneity was a myth. Whatever used to happen “in the moment” was often the result of hours, if not days, of preparation. What outfit, what conversation, which restaurant, which music? All that planning—that highly detailed, imaginative production—was part of the buildup and part of the denouement. For this reason, I urge my patients not to be spontaneous about sex. Spontaneity is a fabulous idea, but in an ongoing relationship whatever is going to “just happen” already has. Now they have to make it happen.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  “What is she?” someone asks, pointing to your girlfriend. “A Dalek.” “What’s that?” “The most evil aliens in the entire Doctor Who universe. They committed genocide against the Time Lords, and the Time Lords against them. They basically destroyed each other.” You are definitely the most uncool person ever to attend this MFA program. The woman from the Dream House, as a Dalek, can barely move through the crowd. People keep knocking into her costume. 21 You want to tell her a joke—“Start yelling ‘Exterminate!’ People will move!”—but she wouldn’t get it. You watch her down one drink, then another. After an hour, she walks home drunk and furious. You follow her for blocks, watching her bump along ahead of you, not certain what to do because you have the keys to your house. She has a colander on her head, like a conspiracy theorist—a true tinfoil hat. You’d been angry with her before, but there is something so tender and vulnerable about a grown woman, in a disintegrating costume of a character from a show she does not watch, stumbling back to a house in drunken anger. You think, this will be a good story, one day. A wasted undergrad happens across your path. “A ghost,” he says, his eyes widening. “A ghost!” 22 He tries to touch you. You tell him to go fuck himself, dip away from his grasp, and unlike that time in Savannah, she does not rescue you. When you get to the house, she is kicking the door. The knobs of her Dalek costume are falling off into the grass. You approach her. “I have the keys,” you say, wearily. She jumps, and then begins to scream. “Why would you scare me like that? What the fuck is wrong with you?” She is still yelling as you go inside. “Why did you want to make such a fancy dinner?” she says. “You fucked everything up, this whole night you fucked up. We just have this weekend together and you have fucked everything up.” She is still yelling as you begin the laborious process of washing your face, your skin emerging in patches through the makeup. “What the fuck are you supposed to be, anyway?” She is still yelling as you stand in the shower, the temporary hair dye swirling creamily down the drain. She is still yelling as you put on your pajamas. In bed, she says, “I want to fuck,” and you say, “Maybe tomorrow,” and turn into your pillow. Maybe next Halloween will be

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  If an economist can fall for this illusion, even after his friends have been poking fun at him in academic journals for years, imagine how bad this is for the rest of us. Over the past forty years, researchers in well over a hundred subsequent studies have replicated and expanded on Thaler’s initial work. The early demonstrations of the endowment effect in the lab were quite simple. In one of Jack Knetsch’s early experiments, students signed up for the task of completing a questionnaire. Before filling it out, one group of participants received their payment in the form of a coffee mug. A second group received payment in the form of a big chocolate bar. (A third group was offered a choice between the two as a fresh decision with no prior ownership of either. This group split pretty evenly, favoring the mug 56%–44%.) Knetsch wanted to know whether ownership of the mug or the chocolate bar among the first two groups would change how the participants valued those items. To do that, after completing the questionnaire, he gave the participants in those groups a chance to switch their payment for the other item. In other words, the students with the mug could trade for the chocolate bar, and the students with the chocolate bar could trade for the mug. If there was no effect of ownership, you would expect that the first two groups, after trading when they preferred the other item, would end up with the same proportion of mugs and chocolate bars as those who came to the decision fresh. About half the participants in each group would trade, perhaps slightly more in the group that started with the chocolate bar and slightly fewer in the group starting with the mug. But that’s not what Knetsch found. It turned out that endowment to an item, even for such a brief period of time, had quite a strong effect on how much value they attached to the items. Of those given the mug, 89% declined to trade it for the chocolate bar. Among those given the chocolate, 90% favored the chocolate and only 10% traded it for the mug. Knetsch, along with several other collaborators (including Thaler and Kahneman) ran additional experiments to uncover the disparity that the endowment effect creates in buying and selling prices. These studies were an attempt to replicate the behavior of their economist friend, who simultaneously

• From Cleanness (2020)

  He hunched his shoulders a little, as if to say I don’t know or maybe what does it matter, and then he started talking about something else, or what seemed like something else, making me feel again that I was on the wrong tack, that I had failed to sense or say what I should. You know those poems you put up in the classroom, he began, and I nodded, of course I did: five student poems from the two classes of twelfth-graders I taught, which I hung up in a little display on the back wall. For a week before the students handed them in there had been an extraordinary wind in Sofia, fierce and incessant, a wind from Africa, people said, which played havoc through the city and left all of us feeling anxious or exalted. It was constant, unignorable, and in each of the poems I posted it appeared, in one as a snake, in another as horses galloping on sand, in a third as the sea they galloped by, the pages hanging on the wall together like panes of a compound eye. Four of the poems you put up were by me and my closest friends, he said, three of us are in one class and the fourth is in the other; we hadn’t talked about it at all, it was funny that we wrote about the same thing. Did you know we were so close, he asked, but I didn’t know; I was embarrassed to realize, in fact, that in the weeks since the assignment I had forgotten exactly whose work I had chosen, and as G. spoke that afternoon I would puzzle out only slowly who the other students in his story were. Or maybe it wasn’t funny, he went on, I guess there’s nothing so funny about it, but it was odd, anyway, how we were all drawn to the same thing. They had been friends since they came to the College, he said then, they met as eighth-graders, three boys and one girl, and almost from the first day they were inseparable. As he spoke of these friends, I felt that despite my missteps he had decided I was worthy of his confidence, of a deeper confidence than he had already shown; or maybe it wasn’t judgment but need that drove him to speak to me as he did, not for some virtue of my own but merely for the function I could serve. They were easy with one another in a way he had never been before, he told me, he had never been part of a group like that; he had always held himself apart from others, it was his nature to hold himself apart. I felt lucky, he said, I expected the whole time that I would mess it up, that our friendship would burn out the way my friendships always burn out; I don’t have any friends from before the College, he said, they slip away from me somehow. Or maybe those weren’t the phrases he used, burn out and slip away, maybe I’ve supplied them just now, though I’m fairly certain of the shape of what he said as we sipped our second cups of coffee, as I kept pouring more sugar into mine, packet after packet. But they didn’t slip away, he continued, they stuck. We met at the same place every morning before classes and then again for lunch, after school we took the bus together, on weekends we went to the park or the mall. Even during vacations we were together, we went to the mountains for winter break and spent summer at the seaside, our families became friends, we all traveled together. They’re not like me, they had lots of friends, they’ve always been popular, but we were still a special group, I always had my place. I had what I wanted, for the first time I didn’t want anything else, do you understand, and I nodded; I understood him entirely, and it seemed to me the intimacy he had drawn between us deepened further, becoming a sort of kinship, which I greeted with both welcome and dread.

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

  Bobby and Norma let me off outside the school and drove away. They had been glum and prickly with each other on the way down. In a few months they’d be graduating, and their plans didn’t agree. I knew I was in trouble as soon as we started our lay-up drills. The shoes were heavy and squarish, chosen by Dwight to go with both my school clothes and my Scout uniform. They clomped loudly as I ran and the slick new soles slipped like skates on the profoundly varnished floor. I fell down twice before the game began. By tip-off the kids from the other school were already hooting at me. I didn’t want to play, but only five of us had shown up that night so I had no choice. My shoes clomped as I ran blindly up and down the court. Sometimes the ball came at me. I dribbled it once or twice and threw it at someone else in red. Jumped when I saw everyone else jumping. Ran back and forth. Fell down whenever I tried to stop too fast. In the din of voices I heard one in particular, a woman’s, shrieking high above the rest. It was like the crazy voice on laugh tracks. Once I picked it up I couldn’t stop listening for it. It distressed me and made me even clumsier. Every time I slipped or fell down she shrieked higher and louder, and then there came a time when she didn’t stop between falls but kept on shrieking in a breathless, broken voice that had no trace of laughter. I wasn’t the only one to notice. The gym grew quiet. Eventually hers was the only voice to be heard. She didn’t stop. Our coach called time-out, and we went to the sidelines to towel off and slake our thirst. People were turning in their seats to look up at her. She was standing in the top row of the bleachers, a woman I’d never seen before, a huge broad-shouldered woman wearing curlers and toreador pants. She had her hands over her face. Her shoulders jerked as muffled barking sounds escaped her. A short man with scarlet cheeks and downcast eyes was leading her by the elbow. They passed along their row and down the steps, then across the gym floor to the exit, the woman barking convulsively through her fingers. The game resumed, but with a difference. The crowd was quieter now, almost hushed. When the other team had the ball, a few scattered voices called polite encouragement; when they made a basket the applause was subdued. The room came into focus for me. I caught my breath, found my rhythm, and settled into the game. I still had trouble keeping my feet, but nobody laughed when I fell down. The crowd was on my side now, and the other team seemed to know it. They played with an air of deference, almost of apology.