Guilt

Passages

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

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• From Middlesex (2002)

  "YOU HAVEHEARDOFTHE DARWINIAN THEORYOF NATURAL SELECTION? THISWASUNNATURALSELEC- TION. BY HISSCIENTIFIC GRAFTINGYACUBPRO- DUCED THEFIRSTYELLOWAND REDPEOPLE.BUTHE DIDN'TSTOP THERE. HEWENTONMATING THELIGHT- SKINNEDOFFSPRING OFTHOSEPEOPLE.OVERMANY, MANY YEARS HE GENETICALLY CHANGEDTHEBLACK MAN,ONE GENERATION ATATIME, MAKINGHIMPALER AND WEAKER,DILUTING HISRIGHTEOUSNESS AND MORALITY,TURNINGHIM INTOTHEPATHS OFEVIL. ANDTHEN,MYBROTHERS, ONEDAYYACUB WASDONE. ONEDAYYACUBWASFINISHEDWITH HISWORK.AND WHATHADHISWICKEDNESS CREATED?ASIHAVETOLD YOUBEFORE: LIKE CANONLYCOME FROMLIKE.YACUB HADCREATEDTHE WHITEMAN!BORN OFLIES.BORN OFHOMICIDE.ARACE OFBLUE-EYED DEVILS." Outside,theMuslim GirlsTrainingandGeneralCivilization Classinstalledsilkworm trays. They workedinsilence,daydreaming ofvariousthings. Ruby James wasthinkingabouthowhandsome John 2X hadlookedthat morning,andwonderediftheywould get married someday.Darlene Woodwasbeginningtogetmiffedbe- causeallthe brothershadgottenridoftheir slavenamesbutMinister Fard hadn't gottenaroundtothegirls yet,sohereshewas, stillDar- lene Wood.LilyHale was thinking almostentirely aboutthe spitcurl hairdo shehadhidden up underher headscarfandhowtonightshe wasgoing tostickherheadoutherbedroom window,pretendingto check the weather,sothatLubbockT.Hassnext doorcouldsee. Betty Smith wasthinking,Praise Allah PraiseAllahPraiseAllah.Mil- lie Little wanted gum. While upstairs,herfacehotfromtheairrushing outof thevent, Desdemona resisted thisnew twistin thestoryline."Devils? All white people?" Shesnorted.Shegotupfromthefloor,dustingher- self off. "Enough. I'mnot goingtolisten tothis crazy personany- more. I work.They pay me.That'sit." But the nextmorning,shewasback at thetemple.Atoneo'clock the voice beganspeaking, andagain mygrandmother paid attention: "NOW LET US MAKE APHYSIOLOGICALCOMPARI- SON BETWEEN THEWHITERACEANDTHEORIGINAL 155 PEOPLE. WHITEBONES,ANATOMICALLY SPEAKING, ARE MOREFRAGILE. WHITEBLOODISTHINNER. WHITES POSSESS ROUGHLYONE-THIRDTHEPHYSICAL STRENGTH OFBLACKS. WHOCANDENYTHIS? WHAT DOES THE EVIDENCEOFYOUR OWNEYES SUGGEST?" Desdemonaarguedwiththevoice. SheridiculedFard'spro- nouncements.But asthedayspassed, my grandmotherfoundherself obediendyspreading outsilkbeforetheheatingventtocushionher knees.Shekneltforward,puttinghereartothegrate,herforehead nearlytouchingthefloor."He'sjustacharlatan," she said."Taking everyone'smoney."Still,she didn't move.Inamoment,theheating systemrumbledwiththelatestrevelations. What was happening to Desdemona?Wasshe,alwayssoreceptive toadeeppriesdyvoice,comingundertheinfluenceof Fard'sdisem- bodiedone?Orwasshejust,aftertenyearsinthecity,finallybecom- ing a Detroiter, meaning that shesaw everythingintermsofblack andwhite? There's onelast possibility.Couldit be thatmy grandmother's senseofguilt,thatsodden,malarialdreadthat swampedherinsides almostseasonally—couldthisincurablevirus haveopenedher up to Fard'sappeal?Plaguedbyasenseof sin,didshefeelthatFard'saccu- sationshadweight?Didshetakehisracial denunciationspersonally? Onenightsheasked Lefty, "Doyou thinkanything iswrongwith thechildren?" "No.They'refine." "Howdoyouknow?" "Look at them." "What'sthematterwithus?How couldwedo whatwedid?" "Nothing'sthematterwithus." "No,Lefty. We"— shestartedtocry—"we arenot goodpeople." "The childrenarefine.We're happy.That's allin the pastnow." But Desdemonathrew herselfontothebed. "WhydidIlistento you?" shesobbed."Whydidn'tIjump into the waterlikeeverybody else!" Mygrandfather triedtoembrace her,but she shruggedhimoff. "Don'ttouch me!" "Des,please .. ." "IwishIhaddied inthe fire!Isweartoyou! I wishIhaddiedin Smyrna!" 156 She began to watchher childrenclosely.Sofar,aside fromone scare—at five, Miltonhad nearlydiedfromamastoid infection— they had both been healthy.When they cutthemselves, theirblood congealed. Milton gotgoodmarksat school,Zoeaboveaverage.But Desdemona wasn't reassured by any of this.Shekeptwaiting for somethingto happen,somedisease, someabnormality,fearing that the punishment forhercrimewas goingto be taken outinthemost devastating way possible:noton herownsoul but in the bodies of her children. Ican feelhowthe housechangedinthemonthsleadingto1933.A coldness passingthroughitsroot-beer-coloredbricks,invadingits roomsand blowingoutthevigillightburninginthehall.Acold windthat flutteredthepagesofDesdemona'sdreambook,which she consulted forinterpretationstoincreasinglynightmarishdreams. Dreamsofthegermsofinfantsbubbling,dividing.Ofhideouscrea- turesgrowingupfrompalefoam.Nowsheavoidedalllovemaking, eveninthesummer,even afterthreeglasses ofwineonsomebody's nameday.Afterawhile,Leftystoppedpersisting.Mygrandparents, onceso inseparable, had drifted apart.WhenDesdemonawent off to TempleNo.1inthemorning,Lefty wasasleep,havingkeptthe speakeasyopenallnight.Hedisappearedinto thebasementbefore shereturnedhome. Following thiscoldwind,whichkeptblowing throughtheIndian summerof 1932, 1saildownthebasementstairs tofindmygrandfa- ther,onemorning, counting money. Shutoutof hiswife'saffections, Lefty Stephanidesconcentratedonwork. Hisbusiness, however,had gonethrough somechanges.Responding tothefall-offincustomers at the speakeasy, mygrandfatherhaddiversified. Itis aTuesday, justpast eight o'clock.Desdemona hasleftfor work. Andin thefrontwindow, a hand isremovingtheiconof St. George fromview. Atthe curb, anoldDaimler pullsup.Leftyhurries outsideand getsinto the backseat. My grandfather's newbusinessassociates: inthefrontseat sits Mabel Reese, twenty-sixyearsold, fromKentucky,facerouged, hair giving off aburntsmellfromthe morning'scurling iron."BackinPa- ducah," sheis tellingthedriver, "there'sthisdeafmanwho's got a camera. He justgoesupanddown theriver,takingpictures. He takes the darndest things." 157

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Doesn’t make any sense. But ‘straight and fast.’ Bit of an odd premonition, isn’t it? And we still don’t really know what happened, if you think about it. Where she was going, why. Who called. Someone called, right, or did I make—” And the Colonel kept talking, puzzling it out, while I picked up the book and found my way to that page where the general’s headlong race came to its end, and we were both stuck in our heads, the distance between us unbridgeable, and I could not listen to the Colonel, because I was busy trying to get the last hints of her smell, busy telling myself that of course she had not done it. It was me—I had done it, and so had the Colonel. He could try to puzzle his way out of it, but I knew better, knew that we could never be anything but wholly, unforgivably guilty. eight days after TUESDAY—WE HAD SCHOOL for the first time. Madame O’Malley had a moment of silence at the beginning of French class, a class that was always punctuated with long moments of silence, and then asked us how we were feeling. “Awful,” a girl said. “En français,” Madame O’Malley replied. “En français.” — Everything looked the same, but more still: the Weekday Warriors still sat on the benches outside the library, but their gossip was quiet, understated. The cafeteria clamored with the sounds of plastic trays against wooden tables and forks scraping plates, but any conversations were muted. But more than the noiselessness of everyone else was the silence where she should have been, the bubbling bursting storytelling Alaska, but instead it felt like those times when she had withdrawn into herself, like she was refusing to answer how or why questions, only this time for good. The Colonel sat down next to me in religion class, sighed, and said, “You reek of smoke, Pudge.” “Ask me if I give a shit.” Dr. Hyde shuffled into class then, our final exams stacked underneath one arm. He sat down, took a series of labored breaths, and began to talk. “It is a law that parents should not have to bury their children,” he said. “And someone should enforce it. This semester, we’re going to continue studying the religious traditions to which you were introduced this fall. But there’s no doubting that the questions we’ll be asking have more immediacy now than they did just a few days ago. What happens to us after we die, for instance, is no longer a question of idle philosophical interest. It is a question we must ask about our classmate. And how to live in the shadow of grief is not something nameless Buddhists, Christians, and Muslims have to explore. The questions of religious thought have become, I suspect, personal.” He shuffled through our exams, pulling one out from the pile before him. “I have here Alaska’s final.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Why had I told Sister Coleman things I knew would make her hate me?A car pulled into the driveway. Car doors opened and closed. The front door creaked. Might as well get it over with. I trudged into the living room. Sister Coleman stood with her back to me, facing the door. Bug’s head rolled on her shoulder. “Come on, Gary. We don’t have all day.” She bent down and placed Bug on the daybed, then turned to face me.“We’ve got a lot to do here tonight. Some people made sure of that.” She walked toward me. “I guess you’re happy with yourself, Miss Smarty-Pants. I hear you told Evelyn how mean I was to you all.”She turned to my brother. “You think I’m mean, Gary?”He shook his head no.She bent down and pulled my face to hers. I stared at the crease between her thin, pale eyebrows. “You think your mama wants you? If she takes you back, it will be for a minute; then she’ll send you to the next person who feels sorry for you. I wanted to give you kids a stable home, something you could count on, but you stabbed me in the back with your lies.”She raised her hand to slap me. My eyes met hers and she started to cry. Gary moved over to us and we put our arms around her.“I’m sorry, Mama. Please don’t cry. I’m sorry.” I was sorry. For so many things.Sister Coleman fed Bug and put him to bed. She asked us if we wanted dinner, and for the first time in months, we did. We ate grilledcheese sandwiches and reminisced: about the time her husband took us fishing at the lake, the swinging bridge in the Smoky Mountains, the first time I saw her lab.“You had the funniest look on your face. I really believe you thought we were robbing people of their teeth.”We all laughed, and I was sorry again.After dinner, we packed our clothes, books, and toys into a small suitcase and a few paper bags, and sat down to wait for Evelyn and her mother. Sister Coleman’s husband came home and told us he would really miss us. He pulled us to him and I felt tears on his scratchy face. Aunt Eunice came by to wait with us. She gave me embroidery hoops and told me not to give up on embroidery or faith. Evelyn and her mom drove up late that evening to find all of us sobbing and hugging.Sister Coleman handed our suitcase and sacks of books and toys to Evelyn and her mother. “These kids have been crying all evening.”Evelyn loaded us into the car and backed out of the driveway. Once we were in the street, she turned to look at Gary and me sniffling in the backseat. “I don’t understand. Don’t you want to leave here?”We nodded yes and continued sobbing.“Why on earth are you crying?

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The sex comes easily, his body doing what he asks of it, and she sits on top of him, while his hands hold the parts of her waist that get so plump and soft and inviting when she’s sitting like that. But even with Katrina, his mind doesn’t connect, not fully. Not in the heavy saturated way of his years as a woman, and he can’t help but think, doubtfully, if he’s lying to Katrina. Maybe she deserves something better. More than just a proficient facsimile of a man in tune with himself, but the truth of it: a man who wants her with a body in synchrony with his mind. Even if he accepted her offer to raise a child with her, perhaps the child deserved better too. A parent whose presence was unquestionable, because it was true. Perhaps Katrina may or may not figure it out, but a child certainly would. Children make studies of their parents, decipher them, propose theories about their behavior, turn them this way and that, examining every flaw, and continue to do so long after the parents themselves are gone. In stories, at the therapist’s office, at holidays—the study of the parent never ends. Ames’s child will know him. It is inevitable. And finally, there, an answer: He does not want his child to know him as he is. After sex, he tells Katrina that he has an answer. That he has made a decision, but in turn, she must make a decision about him. He will raise a child with her. They can be parents together—but he cannot promise that he won’t someday decide to live again as a woman. He cannot promise her that kind of stability. He cannot promise that he is sure of who he is, and so he cannot promise that Katrina or their baby will have an unchanging constant as either a partner or a father. And while he wants to promise consistency in his ability to be a provider and lover, he knows from experience that he can’t promise that either. It’s not up to him. As he changes, so too do the opportunities offered by the world around him ebb and flow. Katrina sits up in bed. Her skin is still faintly dewy, as it gets after sex. She breathes in and says finally, “I can’t say I’m surprised.” He shifts, reaches out to her, but she says, “Give me a second,” and turns her face away from him. Then, with her hand over her face, she gets up, naked, walks into the bathroom, and closes the door. Ames’s phone rings, a number he doesn’t recognize. He silences it, but whoever it is calls back. Then again, and this time he answers. When Katrina exits the bathroom, she has a robe wrapped around herself, but he is putting on his clothes. She widens her eyes; she cannot believe what she is seeing. Is he really getting dressed to leave?

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  In addition to Reese’s generalized one-size-fits-all-trans-women opinions on plastic surgery, she had her own particular self-serving reason to insist that Amy get a nose job. The day would come that Reese could enroll on Amy’s insurance. With a precedent set by insurance already having covered one employee’s gender-affirming surgery, the path for a second widened. Reese would need it widened too, because she wanted more than just a nose job; she wanted her long-awaited vagina and, yes, her brow reconstructed as well. Just because she saw that the vagaries of capitalism, patriarchy, gender norms, or consumerism contributed to facial dysphoria didn’t mean she had developed immunity to them. In fact, a_ political consciousness honed on queer sensitivity simply made her feel guilty about not having managed to change her deeply ingrained beauty norms. Call her a fraud, a hypocrite, superficial, but politics and practice parted paths at her own body. She would happily cheer on any other woman who flaunted her orbital ridge in the name of challenging cis-normative beauty standards, but she would have the first available misogynist dick of a surgeon burr her skull Barbie smooth. As long as she tortured herself with a traitorously retrograde sense of what made a woman beautiful in her heart of hearts, she would assuage herself with cis-passibility in her face of faces. Reese sat down on the bed beside a sleeping Amy. She gazed at that pretty face, with its lips parted slightly, innocent and unaggrieved. The faint odor of lacquer that Amy seemed to emit, that Reese had come to find comforting, clung to the sheets by her side. Amy stirred. It had been a month since they had done anything but give each other hand jobs. Reese leaned over to kiss Amy’s cheek, while slowly trailing a hand across Amy’s hip. Amy opened her eyes. “Hey,” Reese said. “I can’t sleep. I want some.” Amy gave a wan smile. “I’m sleepy, I don’t think I have the energy. I can get you off, though.” Reese shook her head, and took back her hand. “Tm sorry,” Amy said, but she was already falling back asleep. Reese wished Amy understood how the offer of an unreciprocated hand job made her feel like a creep, like she was some kind of pawing teenage boy. In the daylight hours, the thought of broaching the subject of their abortive sex caused tendrils of aphasia to constrict around her throat. Remember Amy and Reese in their first weeks together? When Reese would come home late and Amy would slip down off the bed to crawl panting after her into the shower like some kind of kinky sleepwalker? Where did that go? Reese wanted a dining set, but also maybe she wanted to have bruising sex all over that dining set.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  No. He thinks I’m a nerd.” “You are a nerd, Pudge. But you’re not gonna let a detail like that keep you from drinking.” Actually, I hadn’t drunk since that night, and didn’t feel particularly inclined to ever take it up ever again. Then I nearly elbowed the Colonel in the face, swinging my arms wildly as if contorting my body in the right ways mattered as much as pressing the right buttons at the right moments—the same video-game-playing delusion that had always gripped Alaska. But the Colonel was so focused on the game he didn’t even notice. “Do you have a plan for how, exactly, we’re going to steal the Breathalyzer from inside the Eagle’s house?” The Colonel looked over at me and said, “Do you suck at this game?” and then, without turning back to the screen, shot my skater in the balls with a blue paint blast. “But first, we gotta get some liquor, because the ambrosia’s sour and my booze connection is—” “POOF. Gone,” I finished. — When I opened his door, Takumi was sitting at his desk, boxy headphones surrounding his entire head, bouncing his head to the beat. He seemed oblivious to us. “Hey,” I said. Nothing. “Takumi!” Nothing. “TAKUMI!” He turned around and pulled off his headphones. I closed the door behind me and said, “You got any alcohol?” “Why?” he asked. “Uh, because we want to get drunk?” the Colonel answered. “Great. I’ll join you.” “Takumi,” the Colonel said. “This is—we need to do this alone.” “No. I’ve had enough of that shit.” Takumi stood up, walked into his bathroom, and came out with a Gatorade bottle filled with clear liquid. “I keep it in the medicine cabinet,” Takumi said. “On account of how it’s medicine.” He pocketed the bottle and then walked out of the room, leaving the door open behind him. A moment later, he peeked his head back in and, brilliantly mimicking the Colonel’s bossy bass voice, said, “Christ, you comin’ or what?” “Takumi,” the Colonel said. “Okay. Look, what we’re doing is a little dangerous, and I don’t want you caught up in it. Honestly. But, listen, we’ll tell you everything starting tomorrow.” “I’m tired of all this secret shit. She was my friend, too.” “Tomorrow. Honestly.” He pulled the bottle out of his pocket and tossed it to me. “Tomorrow,” he said. “I don’t really want him to know,” I said as we walked back to the room, the Gatorade bottle stuffed in the pocket of my sweatshirt. “He’ll hate us.” “Yeah, well, he’ll hate us more if we keep pretending he doesn’t exist,” the Colonel answered. — Fifteen minutes later, I stood at the Eagle’s doorstep.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Mary Sue pulled her off me, and then turned to help me up. Pam buried her face in the older girl’s chest. Mary Sue put her arms around her and rubbed her hands up and down her back, like an older sister, like a mother. Pam cried long, heaving sobs. I felt miserable and useless. I had used a seemingly casual remark as a weapon against a girl I loved like a sister, and worse, I had aimed it at what I knew was a tender spot. Mary Sue walked her to the bed and sat down beside her.“Look, Pam, that coat don’t mean nothing. Your daddy bought one a few months back for all the women who work for him. He bought one for Martha Joyce and Sister Sonnie and Brother Starrs’s wife.”Pam snuffled. “Really?”“Yes, really. Now you and Donna make up so we can all go to bed.”“Sorry” seemed a flimsy word, but it was all I had to offer. Pam and I hugged each other’s necks and fell into bed, exhausted by everything we had said and all the tension created by what we had left unsaid. The next morning, when Mary Sue went to the tent service, Pam and I walked to the store. She pulled out twenty dollars—from her daddy, she said—and bought bags of notebooks, paper, files, pens, stamps, envelopes, and other office supplies. We went back to the room and played secretary. I filled out forms and Pam signed them. We wrote about twenty-five letters to people who didn’t exist, sealed them in envelopes with fake addresses and real stamps, and dropped them in the out-box of the motel office. We ran back to the room and fell on the bed laughing. With our pretend work finished, we fixed each other’s hair, put on Pam’s best dresses, and pretended to be secretaries, then singers, then actresses. Ann-Margret and Sandra Dee, out on the town. We held out our pinkies and drank Coke from the stubby motel glasses. We giggled and vamped as the light outside deepened and shadow spread across the room. Pam was right; we were not kids anymore. At least we never would be again, not together. Mama picked me up early that evening before church started, and without a word of protest, I climbed in the car. It was time. I waved briefly through the dusty car window and turned to face the front, sad and relieved to be on my way. Chapter EighteenLIFE CHANGED THE DAY I SLAMMED BILL DODGE’S ARM DOWN FOR THE third time on our front porch in Houston.“Ta-da! I’m the arm-wrestling champ.”His face flushed and the red rushed all the way up and through his blond crew cut. He pulled himself up and stood by my front door, the same door he had walked out of so many times carrying a stack of Mama’s homemade oatmeal cookies.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Tonight, one of the twinks asks about sharing chores in a relationship—the twink has found that in his relationship with a masc dom, he is doing much more household work, so can he employ feminist arguments for a more equitable share in the domestic labor? To which Thalia responds that no, he is a little bitch, and in the midst of a shortage of actual true-to-god dom tops, he had best start scrubbing if he wants to keep his man happy. However, Thalia adds, the whole premise of the question ought to be rejected, because there is no such thing as a pure masc top—everyone will eventually want something in their butt, because that is the nature of having a butt— when the moment comes that things get equitable in bed, so should they be in domestic labor. The twinks giggle happily, but Thalia rebukes them, and demands they give her quarters for her own laundry, because her parents have cut off her money as a consequence for yelling at them on the phone. For emphasis, she shakes her tip bucket from the pedestal/deejay booth from which she reigns, then segues into one of her favorite themes: her parents. Her parents are good, long-suffering people, she tells the assembled twinks, and these good, long-suffering people still support her at age twenty-nine, because she is a spoiled brat who has never had a job—a weekly show at a queer bar doesn’t count—which is an embarrassment to her. And what does she do to repay her parents for their generosity? She spits the words into the mic so acerbically that it pops with her consonants, then pauses a second before answering her own question in a mock outraged oration. She changed her gender! Just to stymie and confuse them! And now she yells at them on the phone and hangs up on them if they misgender her! That’s what they get for supporting a child with artistic tendencies! But what else did they expect? Did they think they could just let their child wear capri pants and that there would be no consequences? “And do you know the worst part?” Thalia demands of her twinks. “The worst part is that most parents get to one day have a moment of comeuppance, when their kids become parents, and then those kids reassess their own childhood with a parent’s eyes and regretfully admit that Dad knew best all along. And Mommy was so generous! So kind! And also beautiful and young!” “But not my parents,” Thalia concludes with a cackle. “Because with all the hormones, now I’m sterile! I stole that comeuppance from them!”

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  “You go t’ Culver Creek?” she asked me, and I did not know whether to answer truthfully, since no high-school student was likely to be nineteen, but she grabbed the carton of cigarettes from beneath her and put it on the counter without asking for an ID, so I said, “Yes, ma’am.” “How’s school?” she asked. “Pretty good,” I answered. “Heard y’all had a death up there.” “Yes’m,” I say. “I’s awful sorry t’ hear it.” “Yes’m.” The woman, whose name I did not know because this was not the sort of commercial establishment to waste money on name tags, had one long, white hair growing from a mole on her left cheek. It wasn’t disgusting, exactly, but I couldn’t stop glancing at it and then looking away. Back in the car, I handed a pack of cigarettes to the Colonel. We rolled down the windows, although the February cold bit at my face and the loud wind made conversation impossible. I sat in my quarter of the car and smoked, wondering why the old woman at Coosa Liquors didn’t just pull that one hair out of her mole. The wind blew through Takumi’s rolled-down window in front of me and against my face. I scooted to the middle of the backseat and looked up at the Colonel sitting shotgun, smiling, his face turned to the wind blowing in through his window. forty-six days after I DIDN’T WANT TO TALK TO LARA, but the next day at lunch, Takumi pulled the ultimate guilt trip. “How do you think Alaska would feel about this shit?” he asked as he stared across the cafeteria at Lara. She was sitting three tables away from us with her roommate, Katie, who was telling some story, and Lara smiled whenever Katie laughed at one of her own jokes. Lara scooped up a forkful of canned corn and held it above her plate, moving her mouth to it and bowing her head toward her lap as she took the bite from the fork—a quiet eater. “She could talk to me ,” I told Takumi. Takumi shook his head. His open mouth gooey with mashed potatoes, he said, “Yuh ha’ to.” He swallowed. “Let me ask you a question, Pudge. When you’re old and gray and your grandchildren are sitting on your knee and look up at you and say, ‘Grandpappy, who gave you your first blow job?’ do you want to have to tell them it was some girl you spent the rest of high school ignoring? No!” He smiled. “You want to say, ‘My dear friend Lara Buterskaya. Lovely girl. Prettier than your grandma by a wide margin.’” I laughed. So yeah, okay. I had to talk to Lara. After classes, I walked over to Lara’s room and knocked, and then she stood in the doorway, looking like, What? What now?

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Because if she knew what she was doing, Pudge, she made us accomplices. And I hate her for that. I mean, God, look at us. We can’t even talk to anyone anymore. So listen, I wrote out a game plan: One. Talk to eyewitnesses. Two. Figure out how drunk she was. Three. Figure out where she was going, and why.” “I don’t want to talk to Jake,” I said halfheartedly, already resigned to the Colonel’s incessant planning. “If he knows, I definitely don’t want to talk to him. And if he doesn’t, I don’t want to pretend like it didn’t happen.” The Colonel stood up and sighed. “You know what, Pudge? I feel bad for you. I do. I know you kissed her, and I know you’re broken up about it. But honestly, shut up. If Jake knows, you’re not gonna make it any worse. And if he doesn’t, he won’t find out. So just stop worrying about your goddamned self for one minute and think about your dead friend. Sorry. Long day.” “It’s fine,” I said, pulling the covers back over my head. “It’s fine,” I repeated. And, whatever. It was fine. It had to be. I couldn’t afford to lose the Colonel. thirteen days after BECAUSE OUR MAIN SOURCE of vehicular transportation was interred in Vine Station, Alabama, the Colonel and I were forced to walk to the Pelham Police Department to search for eyewitnesses. We left after eating dinner in the cafeteria, the night falling fast and early, and trudged up Highway 119 for a mile and a half before coming to a single-story stucco building situated between a Waffle House and a gas station. Inside, a long desk that rose to the Colonel’s solar plexus separated us from the police station proper, which seemed to consist of three uniformed officers sitting at three desks, all of them talking on the phone. “I’m Alaska Young’s brother,” the Colonel announced brazenly. “And I want to talk to the cop who saw her die.” A pale, thin man with a reddish blond beard spoke quickly into the phone and then hung up. “I seen ’er,” he said. “She hit mah cruiser.” “Can we talk to you outside?” the Colonel asked. “Yup.” The cop grabbed a coat and walked toward us, and as he approached, I could see the blue veins through the translucent skin of his face. For a cop, he didn’t seem to get out much. Once outside, the Colonel lit a cigarette. “You nineteen?” the cop asked. In Alabama, you can get married at eighteen (fourteen with Mom and Dad’s permission), but you have to be nineteen to smoke. “So fine me. I just need to know what you saw.” “Ah most always work from six t’ midnight, but I was coverin’ the graveyard shift. We got a call ’bout a jackknifed truck, and I’s only about a mile away, so I headed over, and I’d just pulled up.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Now she was silent. She picked up a stocking and started to darn it, ignoring him; his eyes followed her every move, particularly the way she rubbed her bare knee. Finally he brought up Lohmann again, and the police. "You've no idea what this life's like," she said. "Everyone who comes here thinks he's the only pebble on the beach. If you don't give them what they want they threaten you with the police!" "I certainly regret having hurt a lady's feelings," he replied sheepishly. As she got up from her chair, their knees rubbed, and he felt a shiver up his spine. Now she was nice to him again, and poured him some more wine. She invited him to come back, then left abruptly to perform another number. 342 • The Art of Seduction The next day he kept thinking about her words, her looks. Thinking about her while he was teaching gave him a kind of naughty thrill. That night he went back to the club, still determined to catch Lohmann in the act, and once again found himself in Rosa's dressing room, drinking wine and becoming strangely passive. She asked him to help her get dressed; that seemed quite an honor and he obliged her. Helping her with her corset and her makeup, he forgot about Lohmann. He felt he was being initiated into some new world. She pinched his cheeks and stroked his chin, and occasionally let him glimpse her bare leg as she rolled up a stocking. Now Professor Mut showed up night after night, helping her dress, watching her perform, all with a strange kind of pride. He was there so often that Lohmann and his friends no longer showed up. He had taken their place—he was the one to bring her flowers, pay for her champagne, the one to serve her. Yes, an old man like himself had bested the youthful Lohmann, who thought himself so suave! He liked it when she stroked his chin, complimented him for doing things right, but he felt even more excited when she rebuked him, throwing a powder puff in his face or pushing him off a chair. It meant she liked him. And so, gradually, he began to pay for all her caprices. It cost him a pretty penny but kept her away from other men. Eventually he proposed to her. They married, and scandal ensued: he lost his job, and soon all his money; finally he landed in prison. To the very end, however, he could never get angry with Rosa. Instead he felt guilty: he had never done enough for her.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  This is the most insidious thing about depression, I think: It makes itself more powerful by dragging you away from the world outside of yourself. So I don’t want to diagnose Alaska, but certainly she lives with terrible hurt, and I wanted us as readers to be able to glimpse that in ways that Pudge (and her other friends) fail to understand. We never find out how Alaska truly feels about Pudge. Was your intention to make Alaska fall in love with Pudge, too? My intention was for it to be a complicated mess that was totally impossible to parse, just like real romantic interactions between teenagers in high school. (And also adults after high school.) I don’t think we feel only one thing in our lives. I don’t think it’s as simple as either (a) being in love or (b) not being in love. I think our feelings for each other are really complicated and motivated by an endless interconnected web of desires and fears. I wanted to reflect that as best I could. Pudge seems to lack any agency over his actions. Every hang-out and prank is planned by others, the Colonel gives him his nickname, etc. Is this intentional? Pudge starts to affect the action in the second half of the novel, but he is very conscious of this passivity. (He calls himself drizzle to Alaska’s hurricane, and the tail to his friends’ comet.) This inability to act is part of what keeps him from following Alaska out to the pay phone, a decision that he’ll have to live with for the rest of his life. It was important to me when writing the story that Pudge not be blameless. It’s natural to feel guilty in the wake of a friend’s death, but usually, you can eventually say to yourself, “You know what? This wasn’t actually my fault. There was really nothing I could’ve done.” But in Pudge’s, there is something he should’ve done. He should have followed her to the pay phone. He should’ve stopped her from leaving. He should have acted. And that’s a much more complicated kind of guilt to live with. Alaska’s death still isn’t his fault, of course. But he will always know he could’ve—and should’ve—stopped her. The question for me becomes whether you can find a way to live with yourself, whether forgiveness is still available to you even though the person you need to forgive you is gone. Alaska can never reconcile that question for herself with regards to her own mother. Pudge does eventually find an answer that brings him comfort, but along the way he has to become much more proactive about his life and his choices. Did you know when you started writing that Alaska would die, or did you realize it in the process of writing the book? Initially the book was about the death of a boy as narrated by a girl, but that switched very early on.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Please,” Ames says. He is glad she’s spoken. His curiosity had grown to the point of morbidity, but he was afraid of Reese’s temper, and was being careful to remain solicitous of Katrina, who’d surprised him, after Thalia called, by telling him that she would drive him to the hospital. “Tm sorry about the letter,” Reese says, more to Katrina than Ames. “I was really angry. And I’m sorry that Garrett is your friend’s husband. I should have put it together sooner.” “You were partly right,” Katrina says. “I wanted the good parts of queerness without the hard parts. At the first hard part, I had a panic. It was homophobic. I’m embarrassed.” She leaves the rest of the letter unaddressed. Then, after a long period of silence, Katrina adds, “I didn’t tell Diana.” Reese nods. Then after another stretch of time without speaking, she adds, “I won’t see him again. You don’t have to worry. The messages he left me are not the kind of thing you say if you ever expect to see someone again. He’s scared of me now that I know his friends and could ruin his marriage, and that’s not sexy for him. He can’t treat me however he wants anymore.” “She'll probably leave him eventually,” Katrina says. “This is the season for it. For a while everyone was getting married. Then everyone was having children. Now it’s divorces. Diana always likes to do what’s in vogue in the moment.” Reese laughs, but without force. She asks Ames to turn up the heat in the car. In her beachwear she’s grown chilly. But not in a meaningful Wim Hof sort of way. Ames obliges, and directs a stream of air to the back seat. At the next stoplight, Reese says, “I didn’t go into the water for attention.” “T never thought that,” Ames assures her. “Yeah, but that’s what the doctor at the hospital clearly thought. He didn’t say it right out, but I could tell from his questions. Like, ‘how cold was the water really?’ And when I guessed the temperature was in the low fifties, he said that that water was never cold enough to kill me, only give me hypothermia. Instead, he suggested that I was making a scene in front of people at the beach for attention. Not even a cry for help. Just a cry for attention. It is literally the most ungenerous, most embarrassing conclusion that he could have come to. It makes me guilty that you came, because now it seems like I did it for attention, to get you here. And because I’m glad you came, it must really seem like that was my plan all along.” “So why did you go into the water?” Ames asks, trying to pitch his voice softly to make the question more tender than its blunt construction.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Will you—um,” and she sat up straight and then moved toward me, and I raised my arm as she collapsed into my skinny chest and cried. I felt bad for her, but she’d done it to herself. She didn’t have to rat. “I don’t want to upset you, but maybe you just need to tell us all why you told on Marya. Were you scared of going home or something?” She pulled away from me and gave me a Look of Doom that would have made the Eagle proud, and I felt like she hated me or hated my question or both, and then she looked away, out the window, toward the soccer field, and said, “There’s no home.” “Well, you have a family,” I backpedaled. She’d talked to me about her mom just that morning. How could the girl who told that joke three hours before become a sobbing mess? Still staring at me, she said, “I try not to be scared, you know. But I still ruin everything. I still fuck up.” “Okay,” I told her. “It’s okay.” I didn’t even know what she was talking about anymore. One vague notion after another. “Don’t you know who you love, Pudge? You love the girl who makes you laugh and shows you porn and drinks wine with you. You don’t love the crazy, sullen bitch.” And there was something to that, truth be told. christmas WE ALL WENT HOME for Christmas break—even purportedly homeless Alaska. I got a nice watch and a new wallet—“grown-up gifts,” my dad called them. But mostly I just studied for those two weeks. Christmas vacation wasn’t really a vacation, on account of how it was our last chance to study for exams, which started the day after we got back. I focused on precalc and biology, the two classes that most deeply threatened my goal of a 3.4 GPA. I wish I could say I was in it for the thrill of learning, but mostly I was in it for the thrill of getting into a worthwhile college. So, yeah, I spent a lot of my time at home studying math and memorizing French vocab, just like I had before Culver Creek. Really, being at home for two weeks was just like my entire life before Culver Creek, except my parents were more emotional. They talked very little about their trip to London. I think they felt guilty. That’s a funny thing about parents. Even though I pretty much stayed at the Creek over Thanksgiving because I wanted to, my parents still felt guilty. It’s nice to have people who will feel guilty for you, although I could have lived without my mom crying during every single family dinner. She would say, “I’m a bad mother,” and my dad and I would immediately reply, “No, you’re not.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  The sex comes easily, his body doing what he asks of it, and she sits on top of him, while his hands hold the parts of her waist that get so plump and soft and inviting when she’s sitting like that. But even with Katrina, his mind doesn’t connect, not fully. Not in the heavy saturated way of his years as a woman, and he can’t help but think, doubtfully, if he’s lying to Katrina. Maybe she deserves something better. More than just a proficient facsimile of a man in tune with himself, but the truth of it: a man who wants her with a body in synchrony with his mind. Even if he accepted her offer to raise a child with her, perhaps the child deserved better too. A parent whose presence was unquestionable, because it was true. Perhaps Katrina may or may not figure it out, but a child certainly would. Children make studies of their parents, decipher them, propose theories about their behavior, turn them this way and that, examining every flaw, and continue to do so long after the parents themselves are gone. In stories, at the therapist’s office, at holidays—the study of the parent never ends. Ames’s child will know him. It is inevitable. And finally, there, an answer: He does not want his child to know him as he is. After sex, he tells Katrina that he has an answer. That he has made a decision, but in turn, she must make a decision about him. He will raise a child with her. They can be parents together—but he cannot promise that he won’t someday decide to live again as a woman. He cannot promise her that kind of stability. He cannot promise that he is sure of who he is, and so he cannot promise that Katrina or their baby will have an unchanging constant as either a partner or a father. And while he wants to promise consistency in his ability to be a provider and lover, he knows from experience that he can’t promise that either. It’s not up to him. As he changes, so too do the opportunities offered by the world around him ebb and flow. Katrina sits up in bed. Her skin is still faintly dewy, as it gets after sex. She breathes in and says finally, “I can’t say I’m surprised.” He shifts, reaches out to her, but she says, “Give me a second,” and turns her face away from him. Then, with her hand over her face, she gets up, naked, walks into the bathroom, and closes the door. Ames’s phone rings, a number he doesn’t recognize. He silences it, but whoever it is calls back. Then again, and this time he answers. When Katrina exits the bathroom, she has a robe wrapped around herself, but he is putting on his clothes. She widens her eyes; she cannot believe what she is seeing. Is he really getting dressed to leave?

• From Untrue (2018)

  “Lawrence hasn’t put it down in a very long time,” Issa tells Molly, a successful lawyer, noting she’s curious about what it would be like to have sex with someone new after five years with the same man. Issa wants excitement. She wants variety and novelty. She wants Daniel, or just someone who isn’t Lawrence. “Maybe I need to get on one of those apps like you…I just wanna see what’s out there!” Rae is unapologetic about her protagonist’s curiosity, the pull she feels to be with and do somebody new. At first the show might seem to be playing into a timeworn trope: Lawrence is down, unmotivated, and basically not being a great boyfriend. They’ve grown increasingly alienated from each other. But then she and Lawrence reconnect emotionally. He finds an interim job. They recommit to each other, feeling happy and connected. Lawrence and Issa seem to be back on track. But Issa goes to Daniel’s recording studio anyway, and has incredibly hot, fun sex with him. In her interview with Wilmore, Rae explained her choice to write it the way she did. In part, she felt it was authentic to show that women don’t just “fall into” infidelities and dalliances. Like Alicia Walker’s study subjects, they often seek them out, because they want them: “She had already opened this door at the first episode, and once the woman decides, like, ‘I’m opening this door,’ she’s gonna walk through it,” Rae mused to Wilmore. This decision wasn’t about being angry at Lawrence or being disconnected from him. In fact, in a fundamental sense it wasn’t about Lawrence at all. It was about Issa and what she wanted, and about Issa acting on what she wanted. It wasn’t about her lackluster boyfriend, who was trying to get his life together, Rae told Wilmore. “It was about her and fulfilling this fantasy and being this person that she had set out to be, this active person who made different decisions.” Rae is talking about agency, something Issa struggles with and sometimes fumbles. But Rae wants her to have it. Like 50 percent of the women who admitted they were unfaithful in a comprehensive 2011 survey of more than 100,000 US adults, Issa stepped out because she wanted to, because sex with a new person was an exciting idea and then an exciting reality. But Issa feels horribly guilty after her liaison with Daniel. She regrets what she’s done and avoids him, then tells him it was a one-time thing. She recommits to Lawrence, feeling at once renewed in her connection to him and tremendously remorseful. It wasn’t enough for viewers. The backlash was astonishing. Social media lit up, with thousands of commenters identifying as #TeamLawrence or #TeamIssa. Many were infuriated at Issa.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Another aspect of the Unification Church, still insufficiently recognized, is that members justify the use of deception to recruit people. 9 When I was a Moonie recruiter, we also used psychological pressure to convince members to turn over all their personal wealth and possessions to the church.10 Members are subjected to workshops that thoroughly indoctrinate them in church beliefs,11 and typically undergo a conversion experience in which they surrender to the group. As a result, they become totally dependent upon the group for financial and emotional support, and lose the ability to act independently of it. Under these conditions, members are required to work long hours; exist on little sleep; eat boring junk food, sometimes for weeks on end; and endure numerous hardships for the sake of their “spiritual growth.” They are discouraged from forming close relationships with members of the opposite sex12 and may be married only under arrangements made by Sun Myung Moon himself or his proxy.13 They are sometimes asked to participate in political demonstrations and other activities which aid causes, candidates, and public office holders supported by the Moon organization.14 If they snap from the pressure and begin to challenge their leaders’ authority or otherwise fall out of line, they are accused of being influenced by Satan and are subjected to even greater pressure in the form of re-indoctrination. I know these things are true. I was a leader in the Moon cult. What Is Mind Control? There are many different forms of mind control. Most people think of brainwashing almost as soon as they hear the term. But that is only one specific form. Mind control is any system of influence that disrupts an individual’s authentic identity and replaces it with a false, new one. In most cases, that new identity is one the person would strongly reject, if they had been asked for their informed consent. That’s why I also use the term undue influence—“undue” because these practices violate personal boundaries and human integrity, as well as ethics and, often, the law. That said, not all of the techniques used in mind control are inherently bad or unethical. The intent, the methods used, and the end result need to be part of the evaluation. They span a continuum from entirely ethical to grossly unethical. It is fine to use hypnosis to stop smoking, for example—but it must be used ethically, to empower the person, not for manipulative, exploitive ends. The locus of control of one’s mind and body should always remain within the adult individual, never with an external authority. Today, many mind control techniques exist that are far more sophisticated than the brainwashing techniques used in the Chinese thought reform camps and the Korean War. Some involve subtle forms of hypnosis or suggestion; others are overt, and are implemented in highly rigid and controlled social environments.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  Why?” “One time last year, she and Takumi and I were at the Smoking Hole, and there was this little white daisy on the bank of the creek, and all of a sudden she just jumped waist-deep into the water and waded across and grabbed it. She put it behind her ear, and when I asked her about it, she told me that her parents always put white flowers in her hair when she was little. Maybe she wanted to die with white flowers.” “Maybe she was going to return them to Jake,” I said. “Maybe. But that cop just shit sure convinced me that it might have been a suicide.” “Maybe we should just let her be dead,” I said, frustrated. It seemed to me that nothing we might find out would make anything any better, and I could not get the image of the steering wheel careening into her chest out of my mind, her chest “fairly well crushed” while she sucked for a last breath that would never come, and no, this was not making anything better. “What if she did do it?” I asked the Colonel. “We’re not any less guilty. All it does is make her into this awful, selfish bitch.” “Christ, Pudge. Do you even remember the person she actually was? Do you remember how she could be a selfish bitch? That was part of her, and you used to know it. It’s like now you only care about the Alaska you made up.” I sped up, walking ahead of the Colonel, silent. And he couldn’t know, because he wasn’t the last person she kissed, because he hadn’t been left with an unkeepable promise, because he wasn’t me. Screw this, I thought, and for the first time, I imagined just going back home, ditching the Great Perhaps for the old comforts of school friends. Whatever their faults, I’d never known my school friends in Florida to die on me. After a considerable distance, the Colonel jogged up to me and said, “I just want it to be normal again. You and me. Normal. Fun. Just, normal. And I feel like if we knew—” “Okay, fine,” I cut him off. “Fine. We’ll keep looking.” The Colonel shook his head, but then he smiled. “I have always appreciated your enthusiasm, Pudge. And I’m just going to go ahead and pretend you still have it until it comes back.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  But then even after I wasn’t mad anymore, I still didn’t say anything, and I don’t even really know why. Pudge had that kiss, I guess. And I had this secret. You’ve mostly figured this out, but the truth is that I saw her that night. I’d stayed up late with Lara and some people, and then I was falling asleep and I heard her crying outside my back window. It was like 3:15 that morning, maybe, and I walked out there and saw her walking through the soccer field. I tried to talk to her, but she was in a hurry. She told me that her mother was dead eight years that day, and that she always put flowers on her mother’s grave on the anniversary, but she forgot that year. She was out there looking for flowers, but it was too early—too wintry. That’s how I knew about January 10. I still have no idea whether it was suicide. She was so sad, and I didn’t know what to say or do. I think she counted on me to be the one person who would always say and do the right things to help her, but I couldn’t. I just thought she was looking for flowers. I didn’t know she was going to go. She was drunk, just trashed drunk, and I really didn’t think she would drive or anything. I thought she would just cry herself to sleep and then drive to visit her mom the next day or something. She walked away, and then I heard a car start. I don’t know what I was thinking. So I let her go, too. And I’m sorry. I know you loved her. It was hard not to. Takumi I ran out of the room, like I’d never smoked a cigarette, like I ran with Takumi on Barn Night, across the dorm circle to his room, but Takumi was gone. His bunk was bare vinyl; his desk empty; an outline of dust where his stereo had been. He was gone, and I did not have time to tell him what I had just now realized: that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless. And as I walked back to give Takumi’s note to the Colonel, I saw that I would never know. I would never know her well enough to know her thoughts in those last minutes, would never know if she left us on purpose.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  She was so drunk she didn’t even swerve.” “So drunk? So drunk? The cop car would have had its lights on. Pudge, she ran into a cop car that had its lights on,” he said hurriedly. “Straight and fast. Straight and fast. Out of the labyrinth.” “No,” I said, but even as I said it, I could see it. I could see her drunk enough and pissed off enough. (About what—about cheating on Jake? About hurting me? About wanting me and not him? Still pissed about ratting out Marya?) I could see her staring down the cop car and aiming for it and not giving a shit about anyone else, not thinking of her promise to me, not thinking of her father or anyone, and that bitch, that bitch, she killed herself. But no. No. That was not her. No. She said To be continued. Of course. “No.” “Yeah, you’re probably right,” the Colonel said. He dropped the book, sat down on the bed next to me, and put his forehead in his hands. “Who drives six miles off campus to kill herself? Doesn’t make any sense. But ‘straight and fast.’ Bit of an odd premonition, isn’t it? And we still don’t really know what happened, if you think about it. Where she was going, why. Who called. Someone called, right, or did I make—” And the Colonel kept talking, puzzling it out, while I picked up the book and found my way to that page where the general’s headlong race came to its end, and we were both stuck in our heads, the distance between us unbridgeable, and I could not listen to the Colonel, because I was busy trying to get the last hints of her smell, busy telling myself that of course she had not done it. It was me—I had done it, and so had the Colonel. He could try to puzzle his way out of it, but I knew better, knew that we could never be anything but wholly, unforgivably guilty. eight days after TUESDAY—WE HAD SCHOOL for the first time. Madame O’Malley had a moment of silence at the beginning of French class, a class that was always punctuated with long moments of silence, and then asked us how we were feeling. “Awful,” a girl said. “En français,” Madame O’Malley replied. “En français.” — Everything looked the same, but more still: the Weekday Warriors still sat on the benches outside the library, but their gossip was quiet, understated.