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 The Folding Star (1994)

  I lurched into the other room and got into the cupboard. There was the faint sound of a radio-voice, something beginning—oh, I knew it, K361. Had I done anything truly terrible? Surely not, though there was a lingering sense of pain. He'd have to be a bit of a prig to hold it against me. Had I tried to kiss him? Awful guilt-circuit of years ago. The music snapped off and then a door slammed. I went to the front window and looked down into the yard, and saw him go busily out. It was only for a moment of course, but he seemed to have displaced Luc at the summit of my mania. Edie said, "I thought we'd agreed long ago that you didn't get involved with straight boys and I didn't get involved with queer ones, since it was in either case a recipe for heartbreak?" "You are right," I said, standing unguarded, paunchy in my boxer-shorts. In a spirit of mortification I went to look for my swimming things. I did feel a little queasy by the time we reached the Baths, what with the rash drinking and the anticipated misery of swimming, memories of last time, and the sense of hearty purpose in the echoing din after the quiet streets outside. The air in there had the morning-after chlorine smell of nail-varnish remover and stale cigarette-smoke. The changing-room was busy and there were a lot of dads with their sons and friends' sons, kids screeching about, running into me as I winced and wove through the room. I found a locker and started to undress. I got my new trunks on and they seemed okay, just not very supporting: they had a good sleek feel. They were perhaps rather conspicuous. I was pulling my shirt over my head when I heard a voice I knew and then another. My heart leapt, I had no time to plan an escape: for a second or two I thought I might keep my head hidden in my shirt, and move off somewhere else like a defendant leaving court under a blanket. But I nerved myself, tugged my arms free, and looked. Luc and Patrick were sauntering towards me, and just behind them, smiling to himself, was Matt. I was so appalled by this grouping, and what it implied, that I simply sat back with a sigh and a smile. The group themselves showed no concern, however: they were relaxed and cheerful. They didn't see themselves as a tribunal for my complex, shaming crime. They had come from the shower—the teenagers in long towels tucked round their waists, Matt naked, but holding his towel and wrung-out shorts in front of him. Luc was the first to notice me, and stepped forward with a big grin and shook my hand as if he was really fond of me, or as if this bleak male place demanded classic camaraderie. "What extremely good luck, Edward!" he said.

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

  In fact, adult explanations often push the child’s real feelings and thoughts underground. Children know exactly what adults expect of them. They’re eager to comfort their troubled parents and are well schooled in supplying answers that grown-ups want to hear. I stress this aspect of a child’s response because current popular educational programs for children whose parents are in the process of divorcing assume that children willingly believe what they are told. Well-meaning adults think that children will modify their thinking because a kindly teacher, counselor, or parent explains that they are wrong. I know of several court-sponsored educational programs where the children march around chanting, “I didn’t do it.” But the explanation that “no one is at fault” is far too abstract and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the young child. The truth is that many children believe for years that they caused their parents’ divorce regardless of what they are told. When the parents quarrel, the children’s view that they are the root of the difficulty is confirmed. They conclude: if I were to disappear, the rift between my parents would mend. No explanation to the contrary can undo this observation. Of course, children need to make rational sense of this central event in their lives. But any explanation of divorce needs to be told and retold in accord with the child’s unfolding capacity to understand as she grows up. There is no quick way to accomplish this. Like children in other violent families, Larry and his sister witnessed their father’s assaults on their mother. No attempt was made to hide the violence or to protect them from seeing or hearing everything that transpired. If the children tried to intervene and protect their mother, they were in danger of being hurt—and so they stopped trying. Yet I am always surprised at how little these same children understood about their mother’s plight and how, like Larry, they tried to rewrite family history. Many of them spent years trying to restore the abusive, violent, dysfunctional family. It makes you wonder whether their eyes were ever open. One boy who was physically beaten by his father said, “All I can think of was how much she hurt my dad by leaving him. She probably feels like a conqueror.” How did he get it so wrong? Another child said, “My mom is such a bad person. She is so cold-blooded. My dad was so upset.” And another told me, “Divorce upset my dad real bad. He lost much more than my mom did. It was unfair.” The Need for Intervention in Violent Families A T THE TIME of divorce much can be done to help children who have witnessed violence. But before we get to suggestions, let’s first consider what happened to the families in our study in the years following the breakup. Every child from a violent family continued to visit his or her father after the divorce.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He grabbed it and huddled back in the chair, taking nips from the bottle as if he'd just been rescued. It wasn't as if I'd been with another man, or only with dear old Paul, I didn't see why I should have to cajole him back into humour, but his suspicion stuck to me and wakened some vaguer guilt. Still, it seemed I was off the hook. When the questions started they were lugubriously tarty. "Edward?" "Mm." "Do you think I'm too fat?" "I don't mind how fat you are. Let me have men about me that are fat. Anyway, I can hardly talk." I went over to the window and looked into the murk below—a gleam on the canal from a light on the bridge, the school weekend-dark. "Edward?" "I am the only person here . . ." "I know, but, Edward? What do you think of my tuyau d'incendie?" (his own vainglorious euphemism). "I think it's, um, admirable." I badly wanted to be somewhere else. It would have been a relief to see Matt, to spend a night or two in illusionless infidelity, but there had been no sign of him since my return from England. I wondered how Luc was spending his evening. I realised that since our aborted lesson, the lesson of the cold, I had unconsciously swung round to my old view that Luc and Sibylle were, well, lovers. Perhaps I was just rationalising my sense of rejection—though it wasn't honestly as decisive, as dramatically cogent as rejection: it was the awareness, late in the day, that I had made no impression, that I simply didn't figure with him, that I hadn't yet even become a thing to reject. "You should see my brother," Cherif was saying; "he's got a much bigger one." "Really, darling, I'm quite satisfied with yours. Anyway you haven't got a brother. You've got four sisters, remember? you send them all your money." It was the old evasive Cherif for a second or two, sexily unreliable, the one I had dumbly exchanged for the plaintive lover, the dopy stay-at-home . . . "Just because I haven't told you about my brother, Ahmed, before doesn't mean he doesn't exist," he said, with a certain self-satisfaction. "He is in Rotterdam. I was staying with him when I was there, after you sent me away." This was just about possible, I supposed. As for sending him away—there was nothing I could do about the stories he told himself.

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

  But others like her have stayed single. Ghosts of the Past I ASKED LISA if she still felt numb while having sex. “That hasn’t changed,” she confessed. “But on top of that, I’ve gotten myself entangled with some real losers since I saw you last. ” “What do you mean, losers?” She sounded like Karen, who lived with a man she didn’t love simply because she knew he’d never leave her. “There have been several men in my life over the last ten years. My longest relationship was with Jim. We met during our senior year in college and then lived together for five years. I kept trying to break up with him but every time I tried, I went back the next day.” “What was wrong?” “For starters, he was a party guy, I’m not. He drank heavily. I hardly drink. He did sports that don’t interest me. We were really opposites. I had a hard time asking him for what I wanted. Like I really wanted him to show that he cared about me and get me a gift at Christmas, be sympathetic and nice and kind, but he didn’t do any of those things. He was a pretty self-centered guy.” I thought to myself, “What a strange relationship. What did she find appealing in him?” “I couldn’t let go,” Lisa said softly. “Every time I tried to leave, to tell him it was quits, I chickened out. I wanted to break it off but I couldn’t.” “Why not?” I asked as gently as I could. The reply came in a barely audible whisper. “Whenever I decided to quit, I panicked. I thought of my dad leaving my mom. And I said to myself, ‘I can’t do this to another human being.’” “What did your mom and dad’s experience have to do with you and Jim?” Lisa looked at me, startled. “Everything!” It took me a minute to absorb what she was saying. On the surface, Lisa’s attachment to a man who didn’t meet her needs looked very much like Karen’s first relationship. But then I realized that the source of their entrapment was different. Karen couldn’t leave because she had installed her caretaking role into her love life. She had to stay with her boyfriend to take care of him. But Lisa’s boyfriend didn’t need to be taken care of. Lisa couldn’t leave because she didn’t want to do to him what was done to her mother. She couldn’t bear to repeat the hurt that she always understood was at the root of her mother’s lifelong distress. In effect, she was blocked from defending her own interests out of her intense fear of hurting the other person. As she confessed, it made her feel like a bad person to tell a man that their relationship was over. It was too close a parallel to her mother’s experience with her father, and in this, Lisa’s identification with her mother blocked her ability to reject an unsuitable lover.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  On the one hand, they can scarcely dare to open a dialogue which must, if it is honest, become a per sonal confession-a cry for help and healing, which is, really, I think, the basis of all dialogues-and, on the other hand, the black man can scarcely dare to open a dialogue which must, if it is honest, become a personal confession which, fa tally, contains an accusation. And yet, if neither of us cannot do this, each of us will perish in those traps in which we have been struggling for so long. The American situation is very peculiar, andjt_fD�Y i?ewith out precedent in the wo iW . No curtain under heaven is heav ier than that curtain of guilt and lies behind which white Americans hi.Q.f. That curtain may prove to be yet more deadly to t h e lives of human beings than that Iron Curtain of which we speak ch, and know so little. The American curtain is color. Color. bite men have used this word, this conce pt, to JUSt! ' u peaka61e crimes, not onl y in the past, but in_rhe present. One can measure very neatly the white American's di stance from his conscience-from himself-by observing the distance between White America and Black America. One has only to ask oneself who established this distance, who is this distance designed to protect. and fr om what is this distance designed to offer protectionl I h ave seen all this very vividly, for example, in the eyes of southern law enforcement otllcers barring, let us say, the door to a courthouse. There they stood, comrades all, invested with the authority of the community, with helmets, with sticks, with guns, with cattle prods. Facing them were unarmed black people-or, more precisely, they were faced by a group of unarmed people arbitrarily called black, whose color really ranged fr om the Russian steppes to the Golden Horn to Zan zibar. In a moment, because he could resolve the situation in no other way, this sheriff, this deputy, this honored American citizen, began to club these people down. Some ofthese peo ple might have been related to him by blood. They are assur edly related to the black mammy of his memory and the black playmates of his childhood. And for a moment, therefore, he seemed nearly to be pleading with the people facing him not to force him to commit yet another crime and not to make -z6 OTHER ESSAYS yet deeper that ocean of blood in which his conscience was drenched, in which his manhood was perishing.

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

  This is not the common view of divorce given that attorneys and mental health professionals typically see people who are agitated. Nevertheless it happens frequently. The problem in Billy’s family is that no one faced the fact that the boy’s special needs had not changed. As we’ve seen in all the stories in this book, when parents divorce and become preoccupied with reorganizing their own lives, the children are less protected. There’s almost never room for extra nurturing. More insidiously, there is far less tolerance for distress, weakness, or protest. Behaviors and feelings that have been treated compassionately as part of a child’s vulnerability are now viewed as deliberate, spoiled grabs for attention. Both parents have moved on. Their needs for themselves and for their child have changed. Billy’s lifelong problem became that he did not have the internal capability to successfully adapt to the postdivorce situation. He remained a vulnerable, needy child in a world that could no longer give him what he needed in order to thrive. There are many children like Billy who are born with special needs, including early surgery, medication every six hours around the clock, and regular monitoring of vital signs. It’s hard enough to care for a baby, but those born with handicaps are especially challenging for experienced and inexperienced mothers alike. These include infants and children with heart conditions, asthma, cystic fibrosis, Down’s syndrome, epilepsy, and a long list of other familiar maladies. In addition, many more babies who would have died from rare genetic conditions, including difficult-to-diagnose metabolic diseases, are now being saved by modern medical treatments. Many will live, but they are afflicted with severe mental or physical handicaps that improve very little over time. Other children challenge their parents with developmental disorders such as attention deficit, specific language impairment, dyslexia, or conduct disorder. Finally, there are many parents who adopt children who arrive with severe emotional problems due to lack of early caregiving or whose mothers have abused drugs and alcohol. Such children often have severe emotional problems, including an inability to form close attachments to parents or siblings. Many of them literally cry and fuss for twelve hours a day, rarely giving the baby smiles that help keep parents sane. All such children need an enormous amount of extra help just to survive and grow. Social workers, special educators, and medical professionals who work with vulnerable children frequently report that marital tensions and divorce are much higher in such families. 1 It’s no surprise that the tremendous need for care, coupled with worry about a vulnerable child, puts special strains of physical fatigue and emotional depletion on the couple. It’s understandable that powerful feelings of anger, guilt, and blame intrude into the couple’s intimate life—burdens that carry a high potential for disrupting the family.

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

  Moreover, the girl is deeply afraid that she will succeed where her mother failed. Everywhere she walks, the ice is thin. If she follows in her mother’s footsteps, she fears that she’ll end up alone and miserable. If she leaves her mother to pursue her own career, she repeats her father’s rejection and leaves her mother alone and grieving. If she stays at her mother’s side, she’ll give up a life of independence, her career, and the man she wants. If she’s happy in a relationship with a desirable man, then she commits the ultimate betrayal. She has taken what her mother never had and never will have. This dilemma is widespread. In one form or another, it’s the central drama of many sensitive, devoted daughters who grow up in the loving care of an unhappy, lonely mother who has been left by her husband or who may have sought the divorce but failed to fill the void that was left. For example, from age twenty to thirty-two, Denise lived with a man who criticized and humiliated her. “I believed him when he said that I was bad person,” she told me. When I saw her in her early thirties she had finally left him and was dating an eligible, attractive man. “I’ve been on a long detour,” she explained. “It’s long overdue but I’m finally finding my way. I’ve been preoccupied with what happened to my mom when I was ten years old. I think I’m free of her now. My mind and her mind are not enmeshed anymore. I feel separate now, though I still feel guilty.” Denise married her boyfriend of three years when she was thirty-seven. No one in her family, including her mom, was invited to the ceremony, which took place at dawn overlooking Zion National Park in Utah. But others like her have stayed single. Ghosts of the PastI ASKED LISA if she still felt numb while having sex. “That hasn’t changed,” she confessed. “But on top of that, I’ve gotten myself entangled with some real losers since I saw you last.” “What do you mean, losers?” She sounded like Karen, who lived with a man she didn’t love simply because she knew he’d never leave her. “There have been several men in my life over the last ten years. My longest relationship was with Jim. We met during our senior year in college and then lived together for five years. I kept trying to break up with him but every time I tried, I went back the next day.” “What was wrong?”

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  This was one of her most important rules of fighting: Unless someone really knows how to hit, a punch in the face is no big deal. Better to take a blow to the face than to miss an opportunity to deliver your own. Her second tip was to stand sideways, with your left shoulder facing your opponent and your hands raised because “you’re a much smaller target that way.” Her third rule was to punch with your whole body, especially your hips. Very few people, Mamaw told me, appreciate how unimportant your fist is when it comes to hitting someone. Despite her admonition not to start fights, our unspoken honor code made it easy to convince someone else to start a fight for you. If you really wanted to get into it with someone, all you needed to do was insult his mom. No amount of self-control could withstand a well-played maternal criticism. “Your mom’s so fat that her ass has its own zip code”; “Your mom’s such a hillbilly that her false teeth have cavities”; or a simple “Yo’ mama!” These were fighting words, whether you wanted them to be or not. To shirk from avenging a string of insults was to lose your honor, your dignity, or even your friends. It was to go home and be afraid to tell your family that you had disgraced them. I don’t know why, but after a few years Mamaw’s views evolved on fighting. I was in third grade, had just lost a race, and felt there was only one way to adequately deal with the taunting victor. Mamaw, lurking nearby, intervened in what was certain to be another schoolyard cage match. She sternly asked whether I had forgotten her lesson that the only just fights are defensive. I didn’t know what to say—she had endorsed the unstated rule of honor fighting only a few years earlier. “One time I got in a fight and you told me that I did good,” I told her. She said, “Well, then, I was wrong. You shouldn’t fight unless you have to.” Now, that made an impression. Mamaw never admitted mistakes. The next year, I noticed that a class bully had taken a particular interest in a specific victim, an odd kid I rarely spoke to. Thanks to my prior exploits, I was largely immune to bullying, and, like most kids, was usually content to avoid the bully’s attention. One day, though, he said something about his victim that I overheard, and I felt a strong urge to stick up for the poor kid. There was something pathetic about the target, who seemed especially wounded by the bully’s treatment. When I spoke to Mamaw after school that day, I broke down in tears. I felt incredibly guilty that I hadn’t had the courage to speak up for this poor kid—that I had just sat there and listened to someone else make his life a living hell.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "So I took that as a sign and went out later to our meeting-place. He was there waiting, but in uniform. 'You know now,' he said, and looked rather ashamed as I undid the jacket and took it off him, horrible brown stuff. I thought I couldn't do anything with him, but then I found I could, just as usual. After we had . . . made love, he tried to make me put his jacket on, he wanted me to be a little soldier, he said. I did put on the jacket and sat there in the undergrowth with the prickly cloth against my skin and talked and talked to him. I remember the surprise and novelty of that for us both. But not what I said. The truth is I went through it so many thousands of times afterwards, slowly pressing it into a new and less accusing shape, rather as a carpenter or boatmaker steams and twists the wood into the curve he needs. I won't pretend now to know what reasoning I used or what evidence I produced. I know most of what I remember is what I made up later, to my own advantage." "Well, you were only trying to help." I felt my nerves about Luc's father focusing on Paul's predicament—I was trying to justify myself as well with this bland remark.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I had no idea that, behind the scenes, the adults—meaning Mamaw on the one hand and Uncle Jimmy and his wife, Aunt Donna, on the other—were debating whether I should move permanently to California. Mom flailing and screaming in the street was the culmination of the things I hadn’t seen. She’d begun taking prescription narcotics not long after we moved to Preble County. I believe the problem started with a legitimate prescription, but soon enough, Mom was stealing from her patients and getting so high that turning an emergency room into a skating rink seemed like a good idea. Papaw’s death turned a semi-functioning addict into a woman unable to follow the basic norms of adult behavior. In this way, Papaw’s death permanently altered the trajectory of our family. Before his death, I had settled into the chaotic but happy routine of splitting time between Mom’s and Mamaw’s. Boyfriends came and went, Mom had good days and bad, but I always had an escape route. With Papaw gone and Mom in rehab at the Cincinnati Center for Addiction Treatment—or “the CAT house,” as we called it—I began to feel myself a burden. Though she never said anything to make me feel unwanted, Mamaw’s life had been a constant struggle: From the poverty of the holler to Papaw’s abuse, from Aunt Wee’s teenage marriage to Mom’s rap sheet, Mamaw had spent the better part of her seven decades managing crises. And now, when most people her age were enjoying the fruits of retirement, she was raising two teenage grandchildren. Without Papaw to help her, that burden seemed twice as heavy. In the months after Papaw’s death, I remembered the woman I found in an isolated corner of Deaton’s funeral home and couldn’t shake the feeling that, no matter what aura of strength Mamaw projected, that other woman lived somewhere inside her. So instead of retreating to Mamaw’s house, or calling her every time problems arose with Mom, I relied on Lindsay and on myself. Lindsay was a recent high school graduate, and I had just started seventh grade, but we made it work. Sometimes Matt or Tammy brought us food, but we largely fended for ourselves: Hamburger Helper, TV dinners, Pop-Tarts, and breakfast cereal. I’m not sure who paid the bills (probably Mamaw). We didn’t have a lot of structure—Lindsay once came home from work to find me hanging out with a couple of her friends, all of us drunk—but in some ways we didn’t need it. When Lindsay learned that I got the beer from a friend of hers, she didn’t lose her cool or laugh at the indulgence; she kicked everyone out and then lectured me on substance abuse. We saw Mamaw often, and she asked about us constantly. But we both enjoyed the independence, and I think we enjoyed the feeling that we burdened no one except perhaps each other.

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

  “For starters, he was a party guy, I’m not. He drank heavily. I hardly drink. He did sports that don’t interest me. We were really opposites. I had a hard time asking him for what I wanted. Like I really wanted him to show that he cared about me and get me a gift at Christmas, be sympathetic and nice and kind, but he didn’t do any of those things. He was a pretty self-centered guy.” I thought to myself, “What a strange relationship. What did she find appealing in him?” “I couldn’t let go,” Lisa said softly. “Every time I tried to leave, to tell him it was quits, I chickened out. I wanted to break it off but I couldn’t.” “Why not?” I asked as gently as I could. The reply came in a barely audible whisper. “Whenever I decided to quit, I panicked. I thought of my dad leaving my mom. And I said to myself, ‘I can’t do this to another human being.’” “What did your mom and dad’s experience have to do with you and Jim?” Lisa looked at me, startled. “Everything!” It took me a minute to absorb what she was saying. On the surface, Lisa’s attachment to a man who didn’t meet her needs looked very much like Karen’s first relationship. But then I realized that the source of their entrapment was different. Karen couldn’t leave because she had installed her caretaking role into her love life. She had to stay with her boyfriend to take care of him. But Lisa’s boyfriend didn’t need to be taken care of. Lisa couldn’t leave because she didn’t want to do to him what was done to her mother. She couldn’t bear to repeat the hurt that she always understood was at the root of her mother’s lifelong distress. In effect, she was blocked from defending her own interests out of her intense fear of hurting the other person. As she confessed, it made her feel like a bad person to tell a man that their relationship was over. It was too close a parallel to her mother’s experience with her father, and in this, Lisa’s identification with her mother blocked her ability to reject an unsuitable lover. As a result, she stayed with him unhappily for five very important years. But it went deeper. Lisa’s father also stood in her way. “What do you mean that you couldn’t do to your mom what your dad did?” I wondered if Lisa knew something about her parents’ divorce that I didn’t.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I spent two full days in the hospital as doctors emptied five bags of saline to rehydrate me and discovered that I had contracted a staph infection in addition to the mono, which explained why I grew so sick. The doctors released me to Mom, who wheeled me out of the hospital and took me home to recover. My illness lasted another few weeks, which, happily, coincided with the break between Ohio State’s spring and summer terms. When I was in Middletown, I split time between Aunt Wee’s and Mom’s; both of them cared for me and treated me like a son. It was my first real introduction to the competing emotional demands of Middletown in a post-Mamaw world: I didn’t want to hurt Mom’s feelings, but the past had created rifts that would likely never go away. I never confronted these demands head-on. I never explained to Mom that no matter how nice and caring she was at any given time—and while I had mono, she couldn’t have been a better mother—I just felt uncomfortable around her. To sleep in her house meant talking to husband number five, a kind man but a stranger who would never be anything to me but the future ex–Mr. Mom. It meant looking at her furniture and remembering the time I hid behind it during one of her fights with Bob. It meant trying to understand how Mom could be such a contradiction—a woman who sat patiently with me at the hospital for days and an addict who would lie to her family to extract money from them a month later. I knew that my increasingly close relationship with Aunt Wee hurt Mom’s feelings. She talked about it all the time. “I’m your mother, not her,” she’d repeat. To this day, I often wonder whether, if I’d had the courage as an adult that I’d had as a child, Mom might have gotten better. Addicts are at their weakest during emotionally trying times, and I knew that I had the power to save her from at least some bouts of sadness. But I couldn’t do it any longer. I didn’t know what had changed, but I wasn’t that person anymore. Perhaps it was nothing more than self-preservation. Regardless, I couldn’t pretend to feel at home with her. After a few weeks of mono, I felt well enough to return to Columbus and my classes. I’d lost a lot of weight—twenty pounds over four weeks—but otherwise felt pretty good. With the hospital bills piling up, I got a third job (as an SAT tutor at the Princeton Review), which paid an incredible eighteen dollars an hour. Three jobs were too much, so I dropped the job I loved the most—my work at the Ohio senate—because it paid the least. I needed money and the financial freedom it provided, not rewarding work. That, I told myself, would come later. Shortly before I left, the Ohio senate debated a measure that would significantly curb payday-lending practices.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I had a nice job, a recently purchased home, a loving relationship, and a happy life in a city I loved—Cincinnati. Usha and I had returned there for a year after law school for one-year clerkships and had built a home with our two dogs. I was upwardly mobile. I had made it. I had achieved the American Dream. Or at least that’s how it looked to an outsider. But upward mobility is never clean-cut, and the world I left always finds a way to reel me back in. I don’t know the precise chain of events that led me to that hotel, but I knew the stuff that mattered. Mom had begun using again. She’d stolen some family heirlooms from her fifth husband to buy drugs (prescription opiates, I think), and he’d kicked her out of the house in response. They were divorcing, and she had nowhere to go. I’d sworn to myself that I’d never help Mom again, but the person who made that oath to himself had changed. I was exploring, however uneasily, the Christian faith that I’d discarded years earlier. I had learned, for the first time, the extent of Mom’s childhood emotional wounds. And I had realized that those wounds never truly heal, even for me. So when I discovered that Mom was in dire straits, I didn’t mutter insults under my breath and hang up the phone. I offered to help her. I tried to call a Middletown hotel and give them my credit card information. The cost for a week was a hundred and fifty dollars, and I figured that would give us time to come up with a plan. But they wouldn’t accept my card over the phone, so at eleven P.M. on a Tuesday night, I drove from Cincinnati to Middletown (about an hour’s drive each way) to keep Mom from homelessness. The plan I developed seemed relatively simple. I’d give Mom enough money to help her get on her feet. She’d find her own place, save money to get her nursing license back, and go from there. In the meantime, I’d monitor her finances to ensure that she stayed clean and on track financially. It reminded me of the “plans” Mamaw and Papaw used to put together, but I convinced myself that this time things would be different. I’d like to say that helping Mom came easily. That I had made some peace with my past and was able to fix a problem that had plagued me since elementary school. That, armed with sympathy and an understanding of Mom’s childhood, I was able to patiently help Mom deal with her addiction. But dealing with that sleazy motel was hard. And actively managing her finances, as I planned to do, required more patience and time than I had. By the grace of God, I no longer hide from Mom. But I can’t fix everything, either.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I supposed it was a substitute for the love I couldn't return, or what's called throwing money at a problem and is always held not to work. He turned up the collar and stepped back to the mirror, to catch the surprise of his metamorphosis. And it was a different Cherif, bourgeois, self-conscious. It seemed to imply that further changes would have to be made: those old jeans, those dusty boots, that cap. Alejo's ideas were even more radical. "What about some new undies, to go with it?" "I can't afford anything else, I'm afraid." Cherif came and hugged me and I sniffed in the expensive and assuaging wool smell. "Thank you, my friend," he said. It struck me that it wasn't a practical coat for going to the docks. I supposed he'd carry on wearing his old what was it?, bolero?, to work and the coat would at once be elevated to luxury evening wear. The whole exercise was a useless indulgence. Alejo bobbed back with some slithery packets of underpants. "You can have one of these with the compliments of the house," he said quickly—obviously an offer to be kept from the management and the one or two other customers moodily riffling the shirt-shelves. "Which would you like, darling?" "He'd better try them on," said Alejo demurely. Cherif was helped from his coat and sent into a curtained cubicle, wondering if he was being made a fool of. Alejo drew me aside. "Whatever did you do to my poor cousin from Bilbao?" he said. "Oh dear . . . " I laughed guiltily. "Agustin. Well, I think I . . . " I didn't quite know what I'd done, of course. "What did he say?" "He was too shocked to say anything," said Alejo solemnly. "I certainly didn't do what I wanted to," I said. "I guess I just fell madly in love with him for two or three hours." "He breaks everyone's heart," Alejo confirmed. "And you know he is still a virgen —his parents are very strict and religious. All my queer friends are crazy about him, they keep sending him flowers and asking him to imaginary parties." "I haven't seen him around lately, you know he sometimes stays next door to me." "Oh, he's moved from there! He couldn't stay next to you!" I was aghast. "Only joking"—he laid a hand on mine—"he has a room of his own, I'll tell you where." "There's not much point, is there?" "None at all," he said complacently. "You're clearly a very attractive family," I pressed on. "Come with me," he said, and led me through a door into the shop's back room—bare bulbs, a sink, a white work-table, clothes pinned and chalked for alteration.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I was a few minutes late myself, delayed perhaps by unease about this meeting as much as by tiredness and a light hangover and the magnificent shock of last night. It made me feel like a kid again, going to call on Dawn's parents, when the outrageous fact of what we did together seemed to bulge upwards like some monstrous erection under the tea-table—one saw the cups begin to tilt . . . I was imagining the weeks to come, the shabby little subterfuges Luc and I would be put to. I thought he'd probably be better at it than me: it was part of his daily reckonings with his mother, whereas I flinched guiltily from cheating her. I followed her into the kitchen. "Where has he gone?" I asked. I'd wanted him to be there as I arrived, very much. "He stayed overnight with the Dhondts, their boy Patrick is a great friend of Luc's from school." A capable subterfuge already. "Oh yes, I've met him. I ran into them at the Town Baths one morning." "It was a rare chance, then. Luc normally hates swimming. He doesn't like anything where you have to take your clothes off. He was so tall as a little boy, and ashamed of being skinny." "I hadn't thought of him as being skinny," I said, as if willing to entertain the idea, still feeling his warm dips and curves in my palms. It was clear to me the whole preoccupation with fatness and weight was the mother's not the son's. "I'm making some coffee, just as usual," she said. Then, "So are you pleased with his progress?" "Oh, he's terribly good," I said. "I'm sure he's right just to concentrate on the Dorset English exam—I know you were worried about it, but I can promise you he'll do well. He's going to do his first big essay for me this week, on Wordsworth and childhood." I beheld its careful pages already, and myself correcting them firmly, reluctantly. "He's so wild sometimes." She had her lost look. "He's crazy keen to get away from here. And I suppose I must. . . help him to escape! Of course I love the old town. You know his family have lived here since the twelfth century?" "I knew they went back quite some way." "I wish he showed more interest in the church. I don't think young Patrick Dhondt is a very good influence, he's quite a rough noisy boy with a terrifying little car which I'm always afraid he will crash and kill them both. Luc seems to be devoted to him. I think it must be a sort of hero-worship, you must have come across it. He spends as much time with Patrick Dhondt as possible." "I see." " Of course the father, Roger Dhondt, is a famous ornithologist. But he's always stalking about with his binoculars. I don't think he's got much time for anything that can be seen with the naked eye."

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "You must have other things to do," I said. "I can't spend every moment with you—much as I'd like to" (words hardly voiced). I saw a string of obvious questions coming, the painful catechism of reassurance—we had been through it several times this week, with tears on one occasion and his insistence I was the first person he had really loved. I couldn't bear it—either for itself, or for its perverse requirement that I keep swearing to something I was more and more keen not to mention at all. "Do you want a drink?" I said, and set about unpacking the laundry into the cupboards. "We haven't got any," he muttered. "I'd have drunk it if we had." I reached to the back of the sock shelf and brought out a hidden quarter of brandy. "There you are." He grabbed it and huddled back in the chair, taking nips from the bottle as if he'd just been rescued. It wasn't as if I'd been with another man, or only with dear old Paul, I didn't see why I should have to cajole him back into humour, but his suspicion stuck to me and wakened some vaguer guilt. Still, it seemed I was off the hook. When the questions started they were lugubriously tarty. "Edward?" "Mm." "Do you think I'm too fat?" "I don't mind how fat you are. Let me have men about me that are fat. Anyway, I can hardly talk." I went over to the window and looked into the murk below—a gleam on the canal from a light on the bridge, the school weekend-dark. "Edward?" "I am the only person here . . ." "I know, but, Edward? What do you think of my tuyau d'incendie?" (his own vainglorious euphemism). "I think it's, um, admirable." I badly wanted to be somewhere else. It would have been a relief to see Matt, to spend a night or two in illusionless infidelity, but there had been no sign of him since my return from England. I wondered how Luc was spending his evening. I realised that since our aborted lesson, the lesson of the cold, I had unconsciously swung round to my old view that Luc and Sibylle were, well, lovers. Perhaps I was just rationalising my sense of rejection—though it wasn't honestly as decisive, as dramatically cogent as rejection: it was the awareness, late in the day, that I had made no impression, that I simply didn't figure with him, that I hadn't yet even become a thing to reject. "You should see my brother," Cherif was saying; "he's got a much bigger one." "Really, darling, I'm quite satisfied with yours. Anyway you haven't got a brother. You've got four sisters, remember? you send them all your money."

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I had no idea that, behind the scenes, the adults—meaning Mamaw on the one hand and Uncle Jimmy and his wife, Aunt Donna, on the other—were debating whether I should move permanently to California. Mom flailing and screaming in the street was the culmination of the things I hadn’t seen. She’d begun taking prescription narcotics not long after we moved to Preble County. I believe the problem started with a legitimate prescription, but soon enough, Mom was stealing from her patients and getting so high that turning an emergency room into a skating rink seemed like a good idea. Papaw’s death turned a semi-functioning addict into a woman unable to follow the basic norms of adult behavior. In this way, Papaw’s death permanently altered the trajectory of our family. Before his death, I had settled into the chaotic but happy routine of splitting time between Mom’s and Mamaw’s. Boyfriends came and went, Mom had good days and bad, but I always had an escape route. With Papaw gone and Mom in rehab at the Cincinnati Center for Addiction Treatment—or “the CAT house,” as we called it—I began to feel myself a burden. Though she never said anything to make me feel unwanted, Mamaw’s life had been a constant struggle: From the poverty of the holler to Papaw’s abuse, from Aunt Wee’s teenage marriage to Mom’s rap sheet, Mamaw had spent the better part of her seven decades managing crises. And now, when most people her age were enjoying the fruits of retirement, she was raising two teenage grandchildren. Without Papaw to help her, that burden seemed twice as heavy. In the months after Papaw’s death, I remembered the woman I found in an isolated corner of Deaton’s funeral home and couldn’t shake the feeling that, no matter what aura of strength Mamaw projected, that other woman lived somewhere inside her. So instead of retreating to Mamaw’s house, or calling her every time problems arose with Mom, I relied on Lindsay and on myself. Lindsay was a recent high school graduate, and I had just started seventh grade, but we made it work. Sometimes Matt or Tammy brought us food, but we largely fended for ourselves: Hamburger Helper, TV dinners, Pop-Tarts, and breakfast cereal. I’m not sure who paid the bills (probably Mamaw). We didn’t have a lot of structure—Lindsay once came home from work to find me hanging out with a couple of her friends, all of us drunk—but in some ways we didn’t need it. When Lindsay learned that I got the beer from a friend of hers, she didn’t lose her cool or laugh at the indulgence; she kicked everyone out and then lectured me on substance abuse. We saw Mamaw often, and she asked about us constantly. But we both enjoyed the independence, and I think we enjoyed the feeling that we burdened no one except perhaps each other.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  This was one of her most important rules of fighting: Unless someone really knows how to hit, a punch in the face is no big deal. Better to take a blow to the face than to miss an opportunity to deliver your own. Her second tip was to stand sideways, with your left shoulder facing your opponent and your hands raised because “you’re a much smaller target that way.” Her third rule was to punch with your whole body, especially your hips. Very few people, Mamaw told me, appreciate how unimportant your fist is when it comes to hitting someone. Despite her admonition not to start fights, our unspoken honor code made it easy to convince someone else to start a fight for you. If you really wanted to get into it with someone, all you needed to do was insult his mom. No amount of self-control could withstand a well-played maternal criticism. “Your mom’s so fat that her ass has its own zip code”; “Your mom’s such a hillbilly that her false teeth have cavities”; or a simple “Yo’ mama!” These were fighting words, whether you wanted them to be or not. To shirk from avenging a string of insults was to lose your honor, your dignity, or even your friends. It was to go home and be afraid to tell your family that you had disgraced them. I don’t know why, but after a few years Mamaw’s views evolved on fighting. I was in third grade, had just lost a race, and felt there was only one way to adequately deal with the taunting victor. Mamaw, lurking nearby, intervened in what was certain to be another schoolyard cage match. She sternly asked whether I had forgotten her lesson that the only just fights are defensive. I didn’t know what to say—she had endorsed the unstated rule of honor fighting only a few years earlier. “One time I got in a fight and you told me that I did good,” I told her. She said, “Well, then, I was wrong. You shouldn’t fight unless you have to.” Now, that made an impression. Mamaw never admitted mistakes. The next year, I noticed that a class bully had taken a particular interest in a specific victim, an odd kid I rarely spoke to. Thanks to my prior exploits, I was largely immune to bullying, and, like most kids, was usually content to avoid the bully’s attention. One day, though, he said something about his victim that I overheard, and I felt a strong urge to stick up for the poor kid. There was something pathetic about the target, who seemed especially wounded by the bully’s treatment. When I spoke to Mamaw after school that day, I broke down in tears. I felt incredibly guilty that I hadn’t had the courage to speak up for this poor kid—that I had just sat there and listened to someone else make his life a living hell.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I spent two full days in the hospital as doctors emptied five bags of saline to rehydrate me and discovered that I had contracted a staph infection in addition to the mono, which explained why I grew so sick. The doctors released me to Mom, who wheeled me out of the hospital and took me home to recover. My illness lasted another few weeks, which, happily, coincided with the break between Ohio State’s spring and summer terms. When I was in Middletown, I split time between Aunt Wee’s and Mom’s; both of them cared for me and treated me like a son. It was my first real introduction to the competing emotional demands of Middletown in a post-Mamaw world: I didn’t want to hurt Mom’s feelings, but the past had created rifts that would likely never go away. I never confronted these demands head-on. I never explained to Mom that no matter how nice and caring she was at any given time—and while I had mono, she couldn’t have been a better mother—I just felt uncomfortable around her. To sleep in her house meant talking to husband number five, a kind man but a stranger who would never be anything to me but the future ex–Mr. Mom. It meant looking at her furniture and remembering the time I hid behind it during one of her fights with Bob. It meant trying to understand how Mom could be such a contradiction—a woman who sat patiently with me at the hospital for days and an addict who would lie to her family to extract money from them a month later. I knew that my increasingly close relationship with Aunt Wee hurt Mom’s feelings. She talked about it all the time. “I’m your mother, not her,” she’d repeat. To this day, I often wonder whether, if I’d had the courage as an adult that I’d had as a child, Mom might have gotten better. Addicts are at their weakest during emotionally trying times, and I knew that I had the power to save her from at least some bouts of sadness. But I couldn’t do it any longer. I didn’t know what had changed, but I wasn’t that person anymore. Perhaps it was nothing more than self-preservation. Regardless, I couldn’t pretend to feel at home with her. After a few weeks of mono, I felt well enough to return to Columbus and my classes. I’d lost a lot of weight—twenty pounds over four weeks—but otherwise felt pretty good. With the hospital bills piling up, I got a third job (as an SAT tutor at the Princeton Review), which paid an incredible eighteen dollars an hour. Three jobs were too much, so I dropped the job I loved the most—my work at the Ohio senate—because it paid the least. I needed money and the financial freedom it provided, not rewarding work. That, I told myself, would come later. Shortly before I left, the Ohio senate debated a measure that would significantly curb payday-lending practices.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  That she would ask me to move with her to Dayton, that she seemed genuinely surprised by my resistance, and that she would subject me to such a one-sided introduction to a therapist meant that Mom didn’t understand something about the way that Lindsay and I ticked. Lindsay once told me, “Mom just doesn’t get it.” I initially disagreed with her: “Of course she gets it; it’s just the way she is, something she can’t change.” After the incident with the therapist, I knew that Lindsay was right. Mamaw was unhappy when I told her that I planned to live with Dad, and so was everyone else. No one really understood it, and I felt unable to say much about it. I knew that if I told the truth, I’d have a few people offering their spare bedrooms, and all of them would submit to Mamaw’s demand that I live permanently with her. I also knew that living with Mamaw came with a lot of guilt, and a lot of questions about why I didn’t live with my mom or dad, and a lot of whispers from a lot of people to Mamaw that she just needed to take a break and enjoy her golden years. That feeling of being a burden to Mamaw wasn’t something I imagined; it came from a number of small cues, from the things she muttered under her breath, and from the weariness she wore like a dark piece of clothing. I didn’t want that, so I chose what seemed like the least bad option. In some ways, I loved living with Dad. His life was normal in precisely the way I’d always wanted mine to be. My stepmom worked part-time but was usually home. Dad came home from work around the same time each day. One of them (usually my stepmom but sometimes Dad) made dinner every night, which we ate as a family. Before each meal, we’d say grace (something I’d always liked but had never done outside of Kentucky). On weeknights, we’d watch some family sitcom together. And Dad and Cheryl never screamed at each other. Once, I heard them raise their voices during an argument about money, but slightly elevated volumes were far different from screaming. On my first weekend at Dad’s house—the first weekend I had ever spent with him when I knew that, come Monday, I wouldn’t be going somewhere else—my younger brother invited a friend to sleep over. We fished in Dad’s pond, fed horses, and grilled steaks for dinner. That night, we watched Indiana Jones movies until the early-morning hours. There was no fighting, no adults hurling insults at one another, no glass china shattering angrily against the wall or floor. It was a boring evening. And it epitomized what attracted me to Dad’s home. What I never lost, though, was the sense of being on guard. When I moved in with my father, I’d known him for two years.