Exposure Dread

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 6 of 16 · 20 per page

• From Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (2018)

  I had to stop going to the corner bakery one recent summer because a man working there wouldn’t stop creeping on me, even when I was with my children. He’d give me my change and slide his hand slowly across mine. He’d tell me I looked sexy. He’d tell me how beautiful I am and then he’d nod to my kids. He’d stare at me so hard that I felt like if I moved I’d stumble. A couple of times he followed just behind me on the sidewalk making grunting noises. I couldn’t get the courage to say: please stop. I know what it feels like to be held down and I know what it feels like to be hit in the face. I know that saying please stop made it no more likely that these things would stop. I quit going to the bakery, even though their coffee is essential to my functioning as a human. So there I was, in my neighborhood, altering my behavior to try to avoid being harassed. Luckily, fall semester came and he went back to study at school. Here’s a partial list, just off the top of my head right now, of all the places I’ve dreaded, feared, or even stopped going to, because I felt exposed, harassed, creeped on: the bakery, the pizza place, the deli across from work, the deli in my office building, the closer entrance to the subway, the playground with the baby swings, the playground with the frog statue, my daughter’s ballet school waiting room, a poetry reading I’d just given, a poetry reading as I was giving it, walking my kids to school, picking my kids up from school, the construction site to the left of my building, the construction site to the right of my building, the airport, the train station, the zoo. A couple of years ago, I was part of a question-and-answer session involving poetry and photography when an older man in the audience thought a good question to ask was (I’m paraphrasing) why, when I look so nice and respectable and pretty and kinda hot, well, why do you write all these nasty poems with sex and violence in them? Are these about you really? Which parts are true? The room seemed silent forever but it was probably just a second before I said, “Wow. Okay.” I didn’t know how to respond. Ugh, because then I said, “Thank you for the nice things you say” and babbled on about something that included statistics about intimate partner violence, just because I know them, just because my fear of men beating me is not sexy. But what if I am some kind of Trojan horse of respectability? I was thrown. This panel was a major deal for me, career-wise. I was being taken seriously in a room of serious artists and I was trying like heck to take myself seriously. And there I was being objectified in front of the entire audience. I blamed myself.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  It was the last summer they stayed with their grandparents. The last summer that her father was alive. So much had come to an end that summer. Grace should move to the bed, but she is so tired. She’s got one of her grandmother’s old blankets tossed over her legs. The window emits a cold chill that turns the room bluish in its light. She will regret falling asleep in this chair. Her body will torment her in the morning. But her legs refuse to cooperate. Her arms too heavy. She sinks low in the old chair and closes her eyes. She will rest a moment. Just a moment. She dreams of a boat going farther and farther into the distance. One of those rickety white boats out back, the kind she and Davis had taken across the pond, shouting and squealing so loud, they scared all the fish away. Such a boat had no purpose on the sea or a river, where the water was too wild and would rend it to pieces. She dreams of a boat going farther and farther into the distance, disintegrating all the way, leaving behind a trail like a comet, the shrapnel that a life leaves behind as it burns itself out. And now she feels herself beneath the weight of the invisible world, stuck. After all these years, stuck. She might have known it would happen, might have known to prepare herself for this, but she did not. Beyond the periphery of the dream, though her eyes are still closed, Grace feels suddenly that she is not alone. There is some sort of presence in the far corner of the room. Some barely there shift in the room’s air pressure, the impression of space being taken up. She cannot make her body move, cannot get her eyes to open. Instead, she turns the whole of her concentration toward the presence in the corner. It reaches back toward her, as if it were using her concentration to pull itself hand over hand in her direction. A sensation, heavy, dragging up the length of her leg, the quilt rumpling under this unseen force. She forces her eyes open with all her willpower. What is this, what is this, what is this, she chants to herself. The presence has always been amorphous. Her tongue is stuck to the roof her mouth, her throat full of static fuzz. She floats beneath the surface of her skin, staring at the ceiling, the white globe of the lamp overhead. The door creaks open. There is a change in the shape of the darkness as it lightens fractionally, insignificantly, but perceptibly, if only just so. There is another presence now, coming on from the distance, coming across the void toward her. She swallows thickly. Something is reaching for her, and there, suddenly, contact. Warmth like a human hand. MEAT They were lying in lionel’s bed again, facing each other.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Men from across the river sat around the low granite rim of the basin—at least, I guessed they were hillbillies from their accents, a missing tooth, greased-back hair, their way of spitting, of holding a Camel cupped between the thumb and third finger, of walking with a hard, loud, stiff-legged tread across the paved park as though they hoped to ring sparks off the stone. Others sat singly along the metal fence that enclosed the park, an island around which traffic flowed. They perched on the steel rail, legs wide apart, bodies licked by headlights, and looked down, into the slowly circling cars. At last a driver would pause before a young man who’d hop down and lean into the open window, listen—and then the young man would either shake his head or spit or, if a deal had been struck, swagger around to the other side and get in. Look at them: the curving windshield whispers down the reflection of a blinking neon sign on two faces, a bald man behind the wheel whose glasses are crazed by streaks of green light from the dashboard below, whose ears are fleshy, whose small mouth is pinched smaller by anxiety or anticipation. Beside him the young man, head thrown back on the seat so that we can see only the strong white parabola of his jaw and the working Adam’s apple. He’s slumped far down and he’s already thinking his way into his job. Or maybe he’s embarrassed by so much downtown between fantasy and act. They drive off, only the high notes from the car radio reaching me. That night, however, I had no comfortable assumptions about who these men were and what they were willing to do. I crossed the street to the island, ascended the two steps onto the stone platform—and sat down on a bench. There were policemen nearby. I had a white shirt on, a tie at half-mast, seersucker pants from a suit, polished lace-up shoes, clean nails and short hair, money in my wallet. I was a polite, well-spoken teen, not a vagrant or a criminal—the law would favor me. My father was nearby, working in his office; I was hanging around, waiting for him. Years of traveling alone on trains across the country to see my father had made me fearless before strangers and had led me to assume the unknown is safe, at least reasonably safe if encountered in public places. I set great store by my tie and raised the knot to cover the still-unbuttoned collar opening. No one could tell me to leave this bench. It was hot and dark. The circling cars were unnerving—so many unseen viewers looking at me.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Marta was bigger than Sigrid, taller by a couple of inches and broader through the shoulders. Her hands were tough from the plant. But Sigrid smelled like sweat and work. Her forearms were firm, and her back had slender, excellent muscles. It was from the swimming, Marta thought. She knew that Sigrid swam five times a week, that in her younger years she’d been a competitive swimmer. But she’d injured something in herself. That’s when Sigrid had learned of her capacity for reading and remembering things. In those snowy days in her Minnesota town, tucked away in some dank library room, reading book after book, a cast on her arm (or leg? Marta could not remember). Under Sigrid’s body, Marta was aware of how soft her own body had become. She felt formless. Thick. But Sigrid unbuttoned her shirt and helped her out of it. When Sigrid’s fingers first entered her, Marta gasped because she had not expected their tips to be so hard and so kind. She gasped, and Sigrid kissed her forehead and then her neck and then the space below her navel. She kept whispering kind things to Marta. She kept saying that she was beautiful, that she smelled good, that she was so soft, so good. Marta clenched her eyes and knotted her fingers in the bedspread. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Sigrid. She tried to close her legs, but Sigrid opened them, and it was then that Marta felt most naked, most exposed. She wanted to cry again. She almost cried again. She put her arm over her face. “What’s wrong?” Sigrid said. She could feel Sigrid’s shoulders under her legs. “What’s wrong, Marta? Do you want to stop?” “No,” she said hoarsely. “I’ve just. I’ve never.” “Oh, Marta,” Sigrid said. She kissed Marta’s thigh and then her knee. “It’s okay.” “I’m afraid I’ll mess it up,” she said. “I’m afraid you’ll see me.” Marta looked at Sigrid, who was looking up at her, those green eyes. “I see you,” Sigrid said. “You’re wonderful.” Marta did cry. She cried, but Sigrid didn’t stop. She seemed to know that the crying meant that Marta didn’t want her to stop. It hadn’t been that way with Peter, Marta thought. It hadn’t been like that. She had not cried with him. She had not felt nervous with him. Because with Peter there hadn’t been any room for her feelings at all. • • •

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  She will rest a moment. Just a moment. She dreams of a boat going farther and farther into the distance. One of those rickety white boats out back, the kind she and Davis had taken across the pond, shouting and squealing so loud, they scared all the fish away. Such a boat had no purpose on the sea or a river, where the water was too wild and would rend it to pieces. She dreams of a boat going farther and farther into the distance, disintegrating all the way, leaving behind a trail like a comet, the shrapnel that a life leaves behind as it burns itself out. And now she feels herself beneath the weight of the invisible world, stuck. After all these years, stuck. She might have known it would happen, might have known to prepare herself for this, but she did not. Beyond the periphery of the dream, though her eyes are still closed, Grace feels suddenly that she is not alone. There is some sort of presence in the far corner of the room. Some barely there shift in the room’s air pressure, the impression of space being taken up. She cannot make her body move, cannot get her eyes to open. Instead, she turns the whole of her concentration toward the presence in the corner. It reaches back toward her, as if it were using her concentration to pull itself hand over hand in her direction. A sensation, heavy, dragging up the length of her leg, the quilt rumpling under this unseen force. She forces her eyes open with all her willpower. What is this, what is this, what is this , she chants to herself. The presence has always been amorphous. Her tongue is stuck to the roof her mouth, her throat full of static fuzz. She floats beneath the surface of her skin, staring at the ceiling, the white globe of the lamp overhead. The door creaks open. There is a change in the shape of the darkness as it lightens fractionally, insignificantly, but perceptibly, if only just so. There is another presence now, coming on from the distance, coming across the void toward her. She swallows thickly. Something is reaching for her, and there, suddenly, contact. Warmth like a human hand. APARTMENT They walked up the street together, the three of them. The sky was iridescent with cold. Out to their right, a shelf of white steam from the industrial park and the last of the academic buildings giving way to retail space and a few scraggly houses where the undergrads lived. To the left, the botanical gardens, Bascom’s high hill. Lionel hung back a little behind Sophie and Charles. They were talking about the rehearsal again. Sophie seemed kinder about it now. She listened to Charles with narrowed eyes. “It could be good for me,” Charles said. “Like, really good.” “Sure,” Sophie said. Their shoes scraped over the dry sidewalk.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  A presentiment of what he might do. “Why are you doing this?” he asked. “Isn’t it what you want?” “No,” he said, but his mouth was dry. Her lips were on his, her tongue parting, sinking. She kissed him again on the corner of his mouth, and then on his cheek. She bit his lip, and the sharpness was a jolt. “Are you a good boy, Lionel?” “No.” He tried to lean away from her. She swayed. She didn’t need him to stay upright. She withdrew as if she’d made up her mind about him. And she climbed back onto the sofa. “I think you’re right about that,” she said. She shrugged, sighed. “I don’t think you’re good at all.” The words crackled in the dim apartment like blue static. He saw them flare to life and then vanish. Charles returned, his wrists still soapy from the dishes. He leaned over the back of the couch, looking down at them. “I was trying to get Lionel to tell me what he’s thinking,” Sophie said. “But he won’t.” “What are you thinking?” Charles asked. Lionel stood up and cleared his throat. He wanted to be anywhere but there. They were both watching him very closely, so much so that their eyes felt like a single organ through which every one of his actions, no matter how small, was being categorized and stored away. “I should go,” he said. “Why?” Sophie asked. “It’s cold out.” “It’s fine.” “You’ll freeze,” Charles said. “It’s okay. I don’t mind.” “You don’t mind freezing?” Charles asked with a bewildered smile. “Are you crazy? Sit down, Lionel.” “I should be going,” he said. “Sit down, Lionel,” Charles said again, firmer this time. Something in Lionel responded to that firmness, used it as a guide as he let himself settle back on the floor. Charles smiled at him and came around the couch. He sat next to Lionel and put his arm across Lionel’s shoulders. He drew him closer, inspecting the bruise. Lionel was awash in Charles’s body heat, in the proximity of his touch. He felt he’d come undone under the insistent stroking of Charles’s finger back and forth across the bruise on his cheek, back and forth across that place that had been marked with a promise of violence. Lionel tried to get away from Charles’s hand, but he couldn’t. Charles gripped the back of his neck tightly. Lionel thought of Sophie. Looked to her. Casually, she lay on her side, watching them. “Why are you always trying to get away? You don’t like me anymore?” “I’m not,” Lionel said. “Maybe it’s because you bit him,” Sophie said. “Oh? I’m sorry,” Charles murmured, and there was a soft, brushing kiss against Lionel’s neck. He shivered from both the softness of the touch and the breath, the closeness of it. “It’s all right.” “Look at him, poor little fawn, shivering,” Sophie said.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  But what made me frantic was the fear that no one was behind the door. No bed, no lazily smiling German face, no huge hand stroking a pale, engorged pelvis—nothing, an unlit room devoid of everything but a ticking clock and a refrigerator that groans and goes dead, groans and goes dead. And I was terrified someone would ask me what I was doing in the hall. A great deal of time had already gone by. People had begun to cook supper and the overheated corridor was filling with the smells of food. I had peeled off my coat, scarf and sweater. I sat on them and leaned against a wall. In the distance I could hear the elevator doors opening and closing. An old woman shouted into a telephone. Another woman was giving instructions to a child. This corridor was a sort of catch basin for the domesticity trickling down around me. The smells. The irritations. The complicated lives of absolutely everyone. My professor didn’t come that day. Of course he phoned the next with a reasonable excuse. Of course I should have anticipated just such a hitch and explanation, but my need, though usually held in check or released only on imaginary beings, could, if turned on someone real, devour him. I had worshipped my teacher, I’d even forgiven him for not loving me—but now I hated him. I dreamed of revenge. In the past I’d been protected from humiliating rejection because I so seldom asked anything of anyone. The gods were my company; the lilac in flower embraced me; books did all the talking but only when I permitted the monologue to begin. They were transparent companions whose intentions were never in doubt. Gods, flowers, words—why, I could see right through them! Nor did they waver into or out of focus or leave even an inch of the surround blank. Whereas people batted thoughts and feelings like badminton birdies at you, a whir that might take you by surprise, that you might not even see but that you were expected to return until the air began to go white, the gods made no such demands. They propped themselves up on gold elbows and lazily turned their wide, smiling faces down on you. When their glance locked with yours their eyebeams lit up. In an instant you were they, they you, gods mortal and mortals divine, the mutual regard a reflecting pool into which everything substantial would soon melt and flow.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  I stripped naked, and Armando helped me into the gown. Then he started filling a hypodermic. “What the fuck’s that?” I gasped. “Just a shot. You’re a little nervous. This will help relax you.” I didn’t like the idea, but Armando stuck my arm before I could protest. A feeling of euphoria came over me before he pulled the needle out. Doctor Tartt came in and examined me. I didn’t care when they took away the hospital gown, along with my street clothes. I giggled as they gave me a series of enemas, and I laughed as they shaved me head to toe. Mr. Jack and Armando scrubbed me under the shower before the tattoo artist arrived. I was dozing facedown on the examination table when he began to work on me. I was dimly aware of the needle for a while. Now, standing in front of the mirror with nothing covering my body but a few bandages and a printed thong, I tried to remember if anything else had been done to me. I was still standing when Doctor Tartt and Armando entered. Both smiled brightly at me, but Mr. Jack slipped in behind them and watched me closely. “Are you ready to see your body art?” Doctor Tartt asked brightly. I nodded, so she removed the bandage from my arm. A band of gay rainbow shapes encircled my arm. I slipped into a state of shock so profound that I lost all willpower. “It’s beautiful,” Armando gasped. “What a wonderful way to come out to everyone.” “Let’s see your back,” Doctor Tartt said, carefully pulling off the bandage. Intricate designs of flowers arose from my buttcrack and swelled to cover my lower back. The floral design surrounded ornate calligraphy that spelled Bottom. Marked for life with that tramp stamp, I stood naked, hairless and cruelly exposed. “So pretty,” Armando said, and I turned my dull, dazed eyes upon him. “Time to get dressed, Bottom,” Mr. Jack said. I nodded numbly. He handed me a slinky crop top and a pair of Lycra shorts. After tucking my thong between my buttocks, I pulled on the top, which did not descend to my navel, and I pulled up the shorts, which my ass packed effeminately. A pair of pink sneakers completed this ensemble. With my shaved head and my fuck-my-ass clothing, my own mother would have passed me in the street. Pop Tingle owned one of those Nob Hill mansions that hung over the rocky cliff. The house had a four-car garage built into one side of the house, while the other wing enclosed a swimming pool. The front entrance was carved wood in a twining rose pattern. When Mr. Jack escorted me through the front hall into the room with the curving staircase, Pop Tingle came in from the pool. He was wearing lime swim briefs, and I gulped at the sight.

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

  What happened to her between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four? First, she described her decision to leave Nick, a journey that took her to a new life in Washington, D.C., where she stayed with a close friend from college and examined her options. “I realized that I wanted to help children but that to make a difference I’d need a degree, I’d need some expertise,” she said. Working her contacts, Karen soon heard about a masters of public health program at Johns Hopkins that would allow her to combine her interest in child welfare and community organization. Drawing on student loans and what remained from her grandmother’s inheritance, she applied and was accepted into the three-year program, moved to Baltimore, and worked part-time in a pediatric outreach program while attending school. Karen, at last following her own desires, was an outstanding student who soon caught the attention of senior professors who mentored her as she negotiated career opportunities. “I have the best job,” Karen informed me. “I work with severely handicapped children in five southern states where I run a rural outreach program. We’re based in Chapel Hill. I love my work, Judy. I make it my business to spend a lot of time out in the community working with the children. People ask how I can stand it but I don’t find it depressing because I get a lot of gifts from the children. They open up and share things with me, their hopes, their dreams, the things they want to do, and the many things they fear. I realize from being with them how precious life is and how you only have this day.” “Karen, you’ve been helping other people ever since I met you, when you were ten years old. But now it looks like you decided to take a chance on what you want. Maybe the dice will fall your way.” “That’s right. I decided to take a chance and I discovered what I want. And I finally figured out what I don’t want. I don’t want another edition of my relationships with my mom or dad. I don’t want a man who is dependent on me.” “And you do want?” “I want a lover and a husband. I’m no longer frantic to find just anybody because if I have to, I can live alone. I can stand on my own two feet. I’m no longer afraid.” And then the sadness around her eyes returned. “But it’s not really all behind me. Like I told you, part of me is always waiting for disaster to strike. I keep reminding myself that I’m doing this to myself, but the truth is that I live in dread that something bad will happen to me. Some terrible loss that will change my life.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  As for the old Victorian bugaboo that anything in the vagina had to be ‘stimulating,’ Dickinson said that if there was any erotic stimulus it was both ‘momentary’ and ‘negligible.’ ” Tampon use among teenagers slowly became more socially acceptable. By the time Blume was writing Forever , the vast majority of high school seniors would have at least tried them. Girls teaching each other how to insert them became a typical right of passage, Brumberg explains. During Katherine’s first pelvic exam, when the gynecologist holds a mirror between her legs to help her get acquainted with her genitals, Katherine notes that it reminds her “of the time that Erica taught me how to use tampons. I had to hold a mirror between my legs then, too, to find the right hole.” Tampons helped to temper the cultural importance of the hymen. Even with the assurance that a girl could physically remain a virgin while using internal menstrual products, the taboo of penetration started to lose its teeth. This, along with changing social mores and the rise of heavy petting in cars, all meant that by the 1970s, a girl’s virginity had a lot less to do with her eligibility for marriage. To use the parlance of the time: there were still sluts and prudes, but you didn’t need to stay a cherry to land a husband anymore. Katherine and her family come together around the topic not because she’s in danger of ruining herself, but because they care about the safety and sanctity of her first sexual experience. They want to make sure she treats the milestone with the appropriate reverence, that she acknowledges it as special. Reading Forever through today’s lens, Michael comes off as pushy, or worse. In a TikTok from 2022, a Gen Z–appearing user rants: “Michael is like a predator. This man pressures her so many times into sexual intercourse that I feel like she eventually just gave in… Michael was just so nasty.” He’s not as bad as Katherine’s former boyfriend—the one who gives her an ultimatum—but he’s still written as a “typical” horny teenage guy trying to drive their sexual exploration to the finish line as quickly as possible. After they’ve been seeing each other for a little bit over a month, they split off from a double date with Erica and Artie and start making out in Katherine’s den. When Michael tries to unbutton Katherine’s jeans, she stops him. She doesn’t want to go so far with their friends playing Monopoly in the next room. Michael says he understands but then asks for a minute to himself. “This is really rough,” he tells her. The next time they’re together, Jamie’s the only other person in the house. Katherine asks for privacy to change her clothes but Michael follows her into her bedroom.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  But maybe I was already a hostage. The hostage of my fantasies. The hostage of my fears. The hostage of my false definitions. What did it mean to be a woman, anyway? If it meant being what Randy was or what my mother was, then I didn’t want it. If it meant seething resentment and giving lectures on the joys of childbearing, then I didn’t want it. Far better to be an intellectual nun than that. But the intellectual nun was no fun either. She had no juice. And what were the alternatives? Why didn’t someone show me some alternatives? I looked up and grazed my chin on the hem of my mother’s sable coat. “Isadora!” “OK. I’m coming.” I walked out of the closet and confronted Pierre. “Apologize to Randy!” he demanded. “What for?” “For all the bitchy disgusting things you said about me!” Randy yelled. “Apologize!” “I only said that you deny who you are and that I don’t want to be like you. Why does that require an apology?” “Apologize!” she screamed. “Why?” “Since when do you care so fucking much about being Jewish? Since when are you so goddamned holy?” “I’m not so holy,” I said. “Then why are you making such an issue?” Pierre was now using his sweetest Middle-Eastern French accent. “I never started this holy crusade to multiply the true believers—you did. I’m not trying to convert you to anything. I’m just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion.” “But Isadora,” Pierre wheedled, “that’s exactly it—we’re trying to help you.” FOURNear the Black Forest Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work…. Very frequently women would hide their children under their clothes, but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz. —Affidavit of S.S.-Oberstürmführer Rudolph Hoess, April 5, 1946, Nürnberg The 8:29 to Frankfurt Europe is dusty plush, first-class carriages with first-class dust. And the conductor resembles a pink marzipan pig and goose-steps down the corridor. fräulein! He says it with four umlauts and his red patent-leather chest strap zings the air like a snapped rubber band. And his cap peaks and peaks, a papal crown reaching heavenward to claim an absolute authority, the divine right of Bundesbahn conductors. fräulein! E pericoloso sporgersi. Nicht hinauslehnen. Il est dangereux… the wheels repeat. But I am not so dumb. I know where the tracks end and the train rolls on into silence. I know the station won’t be marked. My hair’s as Aryan as anything. My name is heather. My passport, eyes bluer than Bavarian skies. But he can see

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  5In a street called Thayer Street, in the residential green, fawn, and golden of a mellow academic townlet, one was bound to have a few amiable fine-dayers yelping at you. I prided myself on the exact temperature of my relations with them: never rude, always aloof. My west-door neighbor, who might have been a businessman or a college teacher, or both, would speak to me once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered his car, or, at a later date, defrosted his driveway (I don’t mind if these verbs are all wrong), but my brief grunts, just sufficiently articulate to sound like conventional assents or interrogative pause-fillers, precluded any evolution toward chummi-ness. Of the two houses flanking the bit of scrubby waste opposite, one was closed, and the other contained two professors of English, tweedy and short-haired Miss Lester and fadedly feminine Miss Fabian, whose only subject of brief sidewalk conversation with me was (God bless their tact!) the young loveliness of my daughter and the naive charm of Gaston Godin. My east-door neighbor was by far the most dangerous one, a sharp-nosed character whose late brother had been attached to the College as Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds. I remember her waylaying Dolly, while I stood at the living-room window, feverishly awaiting my darling’s return from school. The odious spinster, trying to conceal her morbid in-quisitiveness under a mask of dulcet goodwill, stood leaning on her slim umbrella (the sleet had just stopped, a cold wet sun had sidled out), and Dolly, her brown coat open despite the raw weather, her structural heap of books pressed against her stomach, her knees showing pink above her clumsy Wellingtons, a sheepish frightened little smile flitting over and off her snub-nosed face, which—owing perhaps to the pale wintry light—looked almost plain, in a rustic, German, Mägdlein-like way, as she stood there and dealt with Miss East’s questions “And where is your mother, my dear? And what is your poor father’s occupation? And where did you live before?” Another time the loathsome creature accosted me with a welcoming whine—but I evaded her; and a few days later there came from her a note in a blue-margined envelope, a nice mixture of poison and treacle, suggesting Dolly come over on a Sunday and curl up in a chair to look through the “loads of beautiful books my dear mother gave me when I was a child, instead of having the radio on at full blast till all hours of the night.”

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  His brother found him a job leading ski tours of eager coeds to Switzerland, where he was last heard yodeling on his way to his death as he missed a turn and sailed off into a crevasse. The college I went to was near Eton and I often visited the Scotts. One day I discovered Rachel laughing and sobbing. Finally overcome by curiosity, she’d broken open the casket where DeQuincey kept his pastoral letters from Father Burke. They were all love letters, hysterical avowals of pornographic desire, some of it clearly referring to actual nights of passion they’d spent together. “To think Burke kept urging me to stay with Quince,” she said. “I was their cover.” She kept sifting through the letters, and her horrible silent chuckle resumed. Tim, older now and in first grade, looked in, but when he saw his mother talking to herself he frowned and clattered up the stairs to his room. As I left the headmaster’s office that day I noticed the wind was now sharp with snow needles. Evening was coming on rapidly. It had been implicit in the dim day all along, just as the snow had been. In the gray light the snow could be felt but not seen; suddenly lamps along the walkway snapped on and their halos were grained by a million, million lights. The return to the music building wasn’t lustful or fearful but ceremonial. I felt as though I were a dancer not up to his role but inspired by the expectation everywhere in the darkness around me. Or I felt like someone in history, a queen on her way to the scaffold determined to suppress her usual quips, to give the spectators the high deeds they wanted to see. Mr. Beattie was stoned. His smile was unfocused and perpetual. He started telling me a long story I couldn’t follow, something about something someone had once said to him somewhere, but then he noticed we’d drifted into the listening booth. He didn’t turn on the light. The darkness was illumined by light reflected up through the windows off the snowdrifts outside. He put on a record. He sat in an armchair, lit another marijuana cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. When he offered me a drag I smiled with what I hoped passed for affection and shook my head. A moment later I was kneeling on the floor beside him. I opened his fly and pulled out his large and already erect penis. “Here,” he said, “let me make it better for you,” and he undid his belt and dropped his trousers to his knees. I’d been right; his thighs were very powerful. He took my right hand and guided it to his testicles in the loose, floppy bag. I gathered I was supposed to roll them around.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The college I went to was near Eton and I often visited the Scotts. One day I discovered Rachel laughing and sobbing. Finally overcome by curiosity, she’d broken open the casket where DeQuincey kept his pastoral letters from Father Burke. They were all love letters, hysterical avowals of pornographic desire, some of it clearly referring to actual nights of passion they’d spent together. “To think Burke kept urging me to stay with Quince,” she said. “I was their cover.” She kept sifting through the letters, and her horrible silent chuckle resumed. Tim, older now and in first grade, looked in, but when he saw his mother talking to herself he frowned and clattered up the stairs to his room. As I left the headmaster’s office that day I noticed the wind was now sharp with snow needles. Evening was coming on rapidly. It had been implicit in the dim day all along, just as the snow had been. In the gray light the snow could be felt but not seen; suddenly lamps along the walkway snapped on and their halos were grained by a million, million lights. The return to the music building wasn’t lustful or fearful but ceremonial. I felt as though I were a dancer not up to his role but inspired by the expectation everywhere in the darkness around me. Or I felt like someone in history, a queen on her way to the scaffold determined to suppress her usual quips, to give the spectators the high deeds they wanted to see. Mr. Beattie was stoned. His smile was unfocused and perpetual. He started telling me a long story I couldn’t follow, something about something someone had once said to him somewhere, but then he noticed we’d drifted into the listening booth. He didn’t turn on the light. The darkness was illumined by light reflected up through the windows off the snowdrifts outside. He put on a record. He sat in an armchair, lit another marijuana cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling. When he offered me a drag I smiled with what I hoped passed for affection and shook my head. A moment later I was kneeling on the floor beside him. I opened his fly and pulled out his large and already erect penis. “Here,” he said, “let me make it better for you,” and he undid his belt and dropped his trousers to his knees. I’d been right; his thighs were very powerful. He took my right hand and guided it to his testicles in the loose, floppy bag. I gathered I was supposed to roll them around.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Would either of us be anything without the incredible success of Fear of Flying? Would I have the career I have today, writing for Vanity Fair and punditing, if my mother had not become famous from a book she wrote before I was born? It’s an impossible question to answer, but one that I come back to again and again: how much of my success is due to hers? Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night haunted by just how much of my life is tied to her and to this book. I became a writer because I thought that was what people did. As a kid, I don’t think I even knew there were any careers besides policewoman and writer of autobiographical novels—and possibly communist who went to jail due to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Maybe I wanted to become a writer to get her to pay attention to me or to respect me or to just be interested in me. I am not sure why I fell down this very-hard-to-maneuver rabbit hole, but the minute I became a writer (I published my first book in 2000), my entire life became inextricably bound to a novel written in 1973, when I was negative five. There are many, many women (and men, too) who found themselves in the story of Isadora Wing, but I am not one of those people. When I was growing up, women my mother’s age would stop us in stores and restaurants, look earnestly into her eyes and tell her how the book had changed their lives. It changed the trajectory of my life, too, just in a completely different way. I do not have a normal relationship with the book or the author. I think of this book as the reason I have a career today but also as the anvil my mother could never get out from under. So you can see why I found this assignment very intimidating. It’s just a book, I told myself, but it’s a book that means very different things to me than it does to anyone else. I was not inspired to find sexual freedom by reading about Isadora’s adventures! In fact, I felt deeply uncomfortable with the content —but that was probably pretty healthy, since Isadora was basically my mother. On top of that, I knew many of the people the characters were based on, which adds a truly disturbing dynamic to the experience of reading such an explicit book. Fear of Flying is one of those inescapable books that defines a very particular time in history. It’s a kind of time capsule transporting us back to the era before Roe, a time that is particularly relevant right now.

• From How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (2017)

  We already know that our senses do not reveal reality, and judges and jurors necessarily suffer from affective realism. These factors, along with the rest of our knowledge of mind and brain, lead to a fairly radical idea (I’m almost afraid to say it): perhaps it is time to reevaluate trial by jury as the basis for determining guilt and innocence. Yes, it’s enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, but the writers of that landmark document had no inkling of how the human brain works, nor that one day we could detect a defendant’s DNA under a victim’s fingernails. Before DNA evidence, the law could not say whether a judgment of guilt was true or false. The legal system could only decide whether or not the judgment was rendered fairly, meaning that the rules and procedures of law were followed consistently. The law was therefore not about truth but consistency. Due process was about avoiding procedural errors in rendering a decision of guilt or innocence, not about the validity of the decision itself. Today’s legal system works only if we assume that consistency produces a just outcome. DNA testing is changing all that. It’s not perfect, but it’s immeasurably more objective than the affect-laden perceptions of human jurors. 71 When DNA evidence is unavailable or irrelevant, perhaps trials might dispense with a jury and instead feature the collective wisdom of multiple judges working together, randomly drawn from a larger pool of judges. As I’ve said already, I’m not a legal scholar, just a scientist, so perhaps wiser legal minds can construct a balanced judicial panel system in better ways. A panel of skilled judges who are trained to be self-aware and emotionally granular might avoid affective realism more effectively than a jury would. It’s not a perfect solution by any means: in the United States at least, judges tend to be on the older side, predominantly European American, and may overrepresent a particular set of beliefs while maintaining the illusion that they are free of them. Judges are also more likely to hand out maximum sentences. But one thing is certain: every day in America, thousands of people appear before a jury of their peers and hope they will be judged fairly, when in reality they are judged by human brains that always perceive the world from a self-interested point of view. To believe otherwise is a fiction that is not supported by the architecture of the brain. 72 And now we get to the toughest issue of all: what it means to control your behavior and therefore be responsible for your actions. The law (like much of psychology) usually considers responsibility in two parts: actions caused by you, where you have more responsibility, and actions caused by the situation, where you have less.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Across our street, exactly in front of our house, there was, I noticed, a gap of weedy wasteland, with some colorful bushes and a pile of bricks and a few scattered planks, and the foam of shabby mauve and chrome autumn roadside flowers; and through that gap you could see a shimmery section of School Rd., running parallel to our Thayer St., and immediately beyond that, the playground of the school. Apart from the psychological comfort this general arrangement should afford me by keeping Dolly’s day adjacent to mine, I immediately foresaw the pleasure I would have in distinguishing from my study-bedroom, by means of powerful binoculars, the statistically inevitable percentage of nymphets among the other girl-children playing around Dolly during recess; unfortunately, on the very first day of school, workmen arrived and put up a fence some way down the gap, and in no time a construction of tawny wood maliciously arose beyond that fence utterly blocking my magic vista; and as soon as they had erected a sufficient amount of material to spoil everything, those absurd builders suspended their work and never appeared again. 5 In a street called Thayer Street, in the residential green, fawn, and golden of a mellow academic townlet, one was bound to have a few amiable fine-dayers yelping at you. I prided myself on the exact temperature of my relations with them: never rude, always aloof. My west- door neighbor, who might have been a businessman or a college teacher, or both, would speak to me once in a while as he barbered some late garden blooms or watered his car, or, at a later date, defrosted his driveway (I don’t mind if these verbs are all wrong), but my brief grunts, just sufficiently articulate to sound like conventional assents or interrogative pause-fillers, precluded any evolution toward chummi- ness. Of the two houses flanking the bit of scrubby waste opposite, one was closed, and the other contained two professors of English, tweedy and short-haired Miss Lester and fadedly feminine Miss Fabian, whose only subject of brief sidewalk conversation with me was (God bless their tact!) the young loveliness of my daughter and the naive charm of Gaston Godin. My east-door neighbor was by far the most dangerous one, a sharp-nosed character whose late brother had been attached to the College as Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds. I remember her waylaying Dolly, while I stood at the living-room window, feverishly awaiting my darling’s return from school.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  What’s up?” It was a poor choice of words under the circumstances. “You seem so depressed,” he said, full of counterfeit tenderness. “I guess I am. All that craziness with Brian last summer and now Charlie...” “I hate to see my little sister depressed,” he said, stroking my hair. And for some reason that “little sister” sent chills through me. “You know I always think of you as my little sister, don’t you?” “Actually I didn’t, but thanks anyway, I’ll be OK. Don’t worry. I’m thinking of going back home and stopping in Italy again for a few days on the way. My ticket gives me a free stop in Rome. I don’t think the climate here agrees with me. Lalah and Chloe are supposed to fly to New York next week anyway and it keeps getting hotter and hotter....” I was babbling on out of nervousness. Meanwhile, Pierre was stretching out on the bed next to me and putting his arms around me. What was I supposed to do? If I fought him off like an ordinary rapist, I’d offend him, but if I took the path of least resistance and went along with him, it was incest. Not to mention the fact that Randy would probably kill me. But what should I say? What was the etiquette in a situation like this? “I don’t think this is such a good idea,” I said weakly. Pierre’s hands were under my nightgown, stroking my thighs. I wasn’t as unaroused as I wanted to pretend. “What isn’t a good idea?” he asked nonchalantly. “After all, it’s natural for a brother to love his little sister....” And he went on doing what comes naturally. “What did you say?” I asked, sitting up. “Just that it’s perfectly natural for a brother to love his little sister....” He might have been Albert Ellis giving a lecture. “Pierre,” I said gently, “haven’t you ever read Lolita?” “I can’t stand that phony prose style of his,” Pierre said, annoyed with me for distracting him. “But this is incest,” I said emphatically. “Shhh—you’ll wake everyone.... Don’t worry, you won’t get pregnant. We’ll do it the Greek way, if you like....” “It wasn’t pregnancy I was worried about for God’s sake—it was incest!” My reasoning didn’t seem to make a dent in Pierre’s resolve. “Shhhh,” he said, pushing me down on the pillow. He was like some of the guys I’d met in Italy. If you resisted because you really weren’t interested, they thought it was fear of pregnancy and kept suggesting other alternatives—anal intercourse, sucking, mutual masturbation—anything except “NO.” Pierre inched up to the head of the bed and offered his erect penis to my mouth.... The showdown. A battle was raging within me. It would have been so damned easy to oblige. To suck him and be done with it. It was so simple really.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Why didn’t someone show me some alternatives? I looked up and grazed my chin on the hem of my mother’s sable coat. “Isadora!” “OK. I’m coming.” I walked out of the closet and confronted Pierre. “Apologize to Randy!” he demanded. “What for?” “For all the bitchy disgusting things you said about me!” Randy yelled. “Apologize!” “I only said that you deny who you are and that I don’t want to be like you. Why does that require an apology?” “Apologize!” she screamed. “Why?” “Since when do you care so fucking much about being Jewish? Since when are you so goddamned holy?” “I’m not so holy,” I said. “Then why are you making such an issue?” Pierre was now using his sweetest Middle-Eastern French accent. “I never started this holy crusade to multiply the true believers—you did. I’m not trying to convert you to anything. I’m just trying to lead my own fucking life if I can manage to find it in all this confusion.” “But Isadora,” Pierre wheedled, “that’s exactly it—we’re trying to help you.” FOUR Near the Black Forest Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work.... Very frequently women would hide their children under their clothes, but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz. —Affidavit of S.S.-Oberstürmführer Rudolph Hoess, April 5, 1946, Nürnberg The 8:29 to Frankfurt Europe is dusty plush, first-class carriages with first-class dust. And the conductor resembles a pink marzipan pig and goose-steps down the corridor. FRÄULEIN! He says it with four umlauts and his red patent-leather chest strap zings the air like a snapped rubber band. And his cap peaks and peaks, a papal crown reaching heavenward to claim an absolute authority, the divine right of Bundesbahn conductors. FRÄULEIN! E pericoloso sporgersi. Nicht hinauslehnen. Il est dangereux... the wheels repeat. But I am not so dumb. I know where the tracks end and the train rolls on into silence. I know the station won’t be marked. My hair’s as Aryan as anything. My name is heather. My passport, eyes bluer than Bavarian skies. But he can see the Star of David in my navel. Bump. Grind. I wear it for the last striptease. FRÄULEIN! Someone nudges me awake. My coward of a hand almost salutes this bristling little uniform of a man. Schönes Wetter heute, he is saying with a nod toward the blurry farms beyond the window. Crisply he notches my ticket, then his dumpling face smiles down B in sunlight which is suddenly benign as chicken soup. efore I lived in Heidelberg, I was not particularly self-conscious about being Jewish.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Slowly, holding me like a difficult drunk, she brought me towards the parapet. I wanted to do it, but had already the sense of scrabbling for existence on the edge of a cliff. I couldn't have done it with anyone but her. Well, Luc, perhaps could have beckoned me on. The long hexagonal apertures opened at diaphragm height and one could grip the stone on either side. I did give her a perfunctory pointer to the Cathedral and St John's; and there was the lantern of St Narcissus, of course, the school with its two hidden courtyards beyond, and that must be the steep old roof of my own room, with the front dormer just visible: Edie looked along my trembling finger to find it. If I tilted my view too steeply down I panicked and drew back. "Gosh, look at the docks," I said. The sea-canal was bright and empty, and in the distance were raised cranes and beyond them the glimmering line of the coast. I saw the derelict industrial suburbs, roads swinging out across the flat farmlands, and far-off masses of poplar and beech. On the other side there were the shadows of cities towards the horizon, there was the station, and the modest outskirts of the town, and then a beautiful golden wood. It took me a moment to recognise it as the Hermitage. Seeing it all at a glance inside its high wall I could hardly believe how I had wandered in it that night for so long. There was the tea-house; and that long break in the trees must hide the endless, misty pond. And where was the clearing with the yew-niches? Somewhere there, among the autumn magnificence. I wanted to look for Luc's house, but it was too close: I felt faint as I traced the far end of Long Street and had to step back and sit down. I lay out flat for a while and closed my eyes while Edie bounded about. As well as the animal fear I felt a kind of humiliation at seeing the quaint labyrinth of the city contracted below me, and my futile little circuits laid bare. When I opened my eyes it was worse—swinging blue vacancy, the tip of the flagpole with its oxidised lightning-spike. It was like being on top of a mast. Then, with annihilating loudness, eleven o'clock began to strike. "Now you must do something for me," I said. I was stamping and lurching about on the lovely flat ground, giddy like someone who has just been robbed of his autonomy on a scary ride at a fair. Surely passers-by could tell that I had left their dimension for a while and had come back to it with a vow never to leave it again. The warmth! The sensible calm! We went into the Golden Calf and had a settling gin.