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 Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Linked by their ardent anticommunism and cowboy conservatism, Reagan defended Goldwater’s promise of peace through strength and denounced those who sought a utopian peace without victory, proponents of “appeasement” who thought the enemy might “forget his evil ways and learn to love us.” Americans had “a rendezvous with destiny.” Either they would preserve for their children “the last best hope of man on earth,” meaning the American nation, or they would step into “a thousand years of darkness.”19 Reagan’s endorsement wasn’t nearly enough; Goldwater won only Arizona and five southern states, losing to Lyndon Johnson in one of the biggest landslides in American presidential history. Although fundamentalists and Sunbelt evangelicals were drawn to Goldwater’s politics, most northern evangelicals ended up voting for Johnson, even if they did so without much enthusiasm. Johnson knew that the evangelical vote was in play, and he worked hard to keep Billy Graham on his side. The two had struck up a friendship, and Graham supported Johnson’s Vietnam policy and his approach to civil rights legislation, even though he had declined to endorse the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yet Graham’s support was muted. He had in fact briefly toyed with running for president himself. In the end, most evangelicals outside the Sunbelt deemed Goldwater too radical. Goldwater’s defeat, however, masked a political realignment already under way. Although Graham refrained from supporting Goldwater in 1964, he claimed to have received “over one million telegrams” urging him to do so. Four years later, the choice would be easier.20 In 1968, Richard Nixon knew that conservative evangelicals could hold the key to his victory. A lapsed Quaker, Nixon wasn’t a particularly religious man, but he understood that anticommunism abroad and “moral values” and “law and order” politics at home could woo this coalescing voting bloc. And he knew that one man—Billy Graham—could help him win over this crucial component of his “great silent majority.” When Nixon had run against Kennedy in 1960, Graham had come close to endorsing him. He’d submitted an article to Life magazine praising Nixon, but after having second thoughts he requested that it not be published. When Nixon lost the election, Graham was tortured by this decision. This time around, Graham was ready to abandon the guise of neutrality.21 “There is no American that I admire more than Richard Nixon,” Graham proclaimed at one of his crusades that year. Although some rural Southern Baptists and Methodists were drawn to segregationist third-party candidate George Wallace, most evangelicals preferred Nixon, the more viable and respectable choice. By the late 1960s, even fundamentalist leaders like Billy James Hargis and John R. Rice thought it best to distance themselves from the overt racism of a man like Wallace, and Nixon’s “Southern strategy” helped draw former segregationists into the Republican Party. With Democratic administrations overseeing federally mandated desegregation efforts, and with Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act into law, the Republican Party’s defense of “states’ rights” appealed to southern whites.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  When June makes mistakes, my therapist observed, you don’t stop loving her, do you? Even when she acts in a way you don’t like, you never assume she’s “bad.” You separate her actions from the essence of who she is. What if you could do that for yourself? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] But did I deserve it? One afternoon while June was in school, Brandon came over to pick up something, and when he walked into the living room, he burst into tears. He threw himself face-first onto the sofa and wailed. He was taller than the sofa was long, so his sneakered feet hung off one end, shaking with each sob. I didn’t know what to do, so I went into the kitchen and started to scrub at a smear of something on the counter. I wanted him to leave, to go do it somewhere else. Did I deserve love? Did I deserve pleasure? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I wanted to learn how to date. Compared to women I knew, I had dated little in the years before I married. Mostly I was in a relationship, or I was not. I just wanted practice. I needed practice at being whatever I was. I didn’t want to think about love. I wanted to be fucking someone. A friend pressed into my hands a copy of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, and I covered it with Post-it flags. “I can remember, early on,” Nelson writes, “standing beside you . . . completely naked, . . . as you asked me to say aloud what I wanted you to do to me. My whole body struggled to summon any utterable phrase. I knew you were a good animal, but felt myself to be standing before an enormous mountain, a lifetime of unwillingness to claim what I wanted, to ask for it.”36 [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I wanted to live on my own terms. My terms were this: I was a newly queer woman and also a mother. Separated with fifty-fifty custody, I was set loose for half of each week, my tether reeled out as far as it could go. I knew I shouldn’t tell my married friends with full-time children how great this was; that would be cruel. I had a feeling I shouldn’t tell anyone how much I liked being a childless mother. As a mother, I was supposed to grieve every hour I was without my child. I got half of my own life back, with the added perspective of parenthood to throw it into brilliant relief. I could see what I had and appreciate it. And I would have to hang on tight to that feeling when it shimmered over me, because each time June cried and clung to me as I buckled her into Brandon’s car, each time she asked why we had to have two houses, I knew I was the cause of her grief.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Does she threaten your interests, get in your way, or behave in a manner that makes you think less well of yourself? If so, your dislike is probably based on the ego delusion we considered during the last step. There is nothing immutable or objective about friendship or enmity: nobody is born a friend or an enemy; last year’s friend can become next year’s enemy. She has good and bad qualities, just as you do. Like everybody else in the world, she longs for happiness and wishes to be free of pain. She suffers in ways that you will never know. How, therefore, can you single her out for your dislike and refuse to direct your feelings of friendship, compassion, joy, and even-mindedness to her? Be patient with yourself during this meditation; do not become irritated if you are distracted or discouraged if you seem to make no progress. Do not feel guilty if you are unable to overcome your feelings of aversion. Practiced over time, this meditation can make a compassionate groove in your mind. It should become part of your daily practice throughout the remaining steps. It should be a relaxed, ruminative process. It need not—indeed, should not—take hours of your time. But if practiced faithfully, it will help you develop two new tools: a capacity for inwardness and the ability to think of others in the same way as you think of yourself. Only practice makes perfect, just as it takes years for a dancer to turn a perfect pirouette. As you conclude the meditation, make a resolution that today you will translate these good thoughts into a small, concrete practical act of friendship or compassion to one of your three people, if you have the chance. If you do not see them, reach out to somebody else who needs a helping hand or a friendly word. THE THIRD STEP Compassion for Yourself T he late rabbi Albert Friedlander once impressed upon me the importance of the biblical commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 1 I had always concentrated on the first part of that injunction, but Albert taught me that if you cannot love yourself, you cannot love other people either. He had grown up in Nazi Germany, and as a child was bewildered and distressed by the vicious anti-Semitic propaganda that assailed him on all sides. One night, when he was about eight years old, he deliberately lay awake and made a list of all his good qualities. He told himself firmly that he was not what the Nazis said, that he had talents and special gifts of heart and mind, which he enumerated to himself one by one. Finally, he vowed that if he survived, he would use those qualities to build a better world. This was an extraordinary insight for a child in such circumstances.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  From a different book in the stack I would soon learn that the strategy we’d used to present our separation to June is often referred to, scornfully, as “the real estate explanation.” The complaint is that it’s not an explanation, that it obscures what it seeks to clarify. But we didn’t want to obscure the truth, I silently insisted: we wanted to be clear, and also age-appropriate. June was a month out from her fourth birthday. She didn’t yet know that there was anything abnormal about her family’s living arrangements. She didn’t know the words separation or divorce. We would create this experience for her, and it would not be accomplished with a single conversation. We would take it one step at a time, explain with greater depth and sophistication as she lived into it, asked questions, observed. We agreed that we would not lie to her or refuse her questions. If she was sad or upset or missing one of us, we would not try to paper over it. Planning our end, we sometimes felt like a we. We divvied up the furniture and June’s clothes and toys. Our friends helped Brandon move. He told me he plied them with good beer. Did anyone offer a toast? I tried not to imagine what the day looked like. Brandon’s parents had sent a play kitchen for June’s “room” at the apartment, and my cousin shipped a box of Playmobil hand-me-downs. The apartment had old wood floors and a bank of windows at one end, and even with furniture, it echoed. I gave him two philodendrons I’d propagated the previous winter. Whenever I visited, I watered them. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] There was never a question as to how we would handle custody. We would share it jointly, fifty-fifty. I had been the primary parent—had put June to bed almost every night, had bought the clothes and made the appointments and knew what was happening when—but Brandon was her father, and I knew he was a good father. He just worked a lot. He had never meant for me to be the primary parent, and now he—we—had an opportunity to change that. He wanted a fuller relationship with June, and I wanted him to have it. I wanted her to have more of him, not less. Now we had at least a shot at equal time and responsibility. The corollary: if we were going to co-parent the way we wanted to, we would have to confront our crap. For two people who rarely did conflict well, we set lofty goals. We were both perfectionists of long standing. Brandon had spent years obsessing over making the best pizza, and I had spent years obsessing over everything.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  He was working hard, and I knew it. Every time we argued, we wound up here: I felt mean, cruel. I didn’t want to be cruel. I didn’t want to be crazy. I wanted to be reasonable. He was running Delancey and now Essex too, which was barely off the ground. We shouldn’t have rushed to open it before the baby came. It had been bad advice. We had three babies: Delancey, Essex, and June. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] At my six-week postpartum checkup, the doctor peered closely at my perineum. You can hardly even see a scar, he announced. It’s healed beautifully! I could hear the grin even with his face out of sight. Elation swelled my chest. He had expected this, but I hadn’t believed him. Now I lay on the exam table, heels in the cold plastic cups of the stirrups, and looked at June in her car seat on the floor, asleep in a green fleece hat. My body, I reeled, did all this. In my senior year of college, I’d taken a class about the ethics of medical interventions, and for it I’d written an essay about my irregular periods and probable infertility. I was stunned by how little it seemed we knew about bodies, despite centuries of scientific research and study. Female bodies, in particular, remain barely within our comprehension, because the majority of studies have been on male bodies, white male bodies.26 I’d assumed that my body was one way, that it was empty. Now its tally of amazements was growing in plain sight. What birth control do you plan to use? my doctor asked matter-of-factly, peeling off his gloves. My eyes snapped to his face. Oh, I squeaked. I haven’t even thought about it. Condoms? Have you and Brandon thought about having sex? he asked. I shook my head. Well, you’re healed enough now to get back to it. You can have sex anytime you’d like. Okay, I said. I didn’t expect to want it soon, but okay. I know everything is different, he said, and that caring for a baby is hard work. But you should think about it soon—you know, get back on the horse. Hadn’t this man just been examining my injured vagina? Now we were talking about intercourse, and he was urging me to have it. Sex is vital to a relationship, he pronounced. If it’s not reestablished, the relationship can suffer. Sometimes a husband will look elsewhere. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I remember the night it started. It was November 13, 2012, and June was nine weeks old. That night she slept from seven to seven with only one waking, our best night yet. I was awake for most of it.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  People often ask: “How do we start?” The demands of compassion seem so daunting that it is difficult to know where to begin—hence this twelve-step program. It will immediately bring to mind the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. We are addicted to our egotism. We cannot think how we would manage without our pet hatreds and prejudices that give us such a buzz of righteousness; like addicts, we have come to depend on the instant rush of energy and delight we feel when we display our cleverness by making an unkind remark and the spurt of triumph when we vanquish an annoying colleague. Thus do we assert ourselves and tell the world who we are. It is difficult to break a habit upon which we depend for our sense of self. As in AA, the disciplines learned at each step in this program have to become a part of your life. I wrote the first version of these twelve steps as a “vook,” a cross between a video and a book, to be read electronically. The printed book, however, is a very different medium, and I have been able here to explore these themes in more detail and at greater depth. In the vook, I was encouraged to keep historical reference to a minimum and concentrate on the present. But I am a religious historian, and it is my study of the spiritualities of the past that has taught me all I know about compassion. I think that in this respect the faith traditions still have a great deal to teach us. But it is important to say that the twelve-step program does not depend on supernatural or creedal convictions. I am in agreement with His Holiness the Dalai Lama that “whether a person is a religious believer does not matter much. Far more important is that they be a good human being.”24 At their best, all religious, philosophical, and ethical traditions are based on the principle of compassion.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Then Mademoiselle spoke at great length of her aunt, and of Maman who had also passed on into glory; Maman, who had had her chicken on Sunday right up to the very last moment, Dieu merci! Even when her teeth had grown loose in the gums, Maman had asked for her chicken on Sunday. But alas, the poor sister who once made little bags out of beads for the shops in the Rue de la Paix, and who had such a cruel and improvident husband—the poor sister had now become totally blind, and therefore dependent on Mademoiselle Duphot. So after all Mademoiselle Duphot still worked, giving lessons in French to the resident English; and sometimes she taught the American children who were visiting Paris with their parents. But then it was really far better to work; one might grow too fat if one remained idle. She beamed at Stephen with her gentle brown eyes. ‘They are not as you were, ma chère petite Stévenne, not clever and full of intelligence, no; and at times I almost despair of their accent. However, I am not at all to be pitied, thanks to Aunt Clothilde and the good little saints who surely inspired her to leave me that money.’ When Stephen and Puddle returned to their stalls, Mademoiselle climbed to a humbler seat somewhere under the roof, and as she departed she waved her plump hand at Stephen. Stephen said: ‘She’s so changed that I didn’t know her just at first, or else perhaps I’d forgotten. I felt terribly guilty, because after you came I don’t think I ever answered her letters. It’s thirteen years since she left. . . .’ Puddle nodded. ‘Yes, it’s thirteen years since I took her place and forced you to tidy that abominable schoolroom!’ And she laughed. ‘All the same, I like her,’ said Puddle. 3Mademoiselle Duphot admired the house in the Rue Jacob, and she ate very largely of the rich and excellent dinner. Quite regardless of her increasing proportions, she seemed drawn to all those things that were fattening. ‘I cannot resist,’ she remarked with a smile, as she reached for her fifth marron glacé. They talked of Paris, of its beauty, its charm. Then Mademoiselle spoke yet again of her Maman and of Aunt Clothilde who had left them the money, and of Julie, her blind sister. But after the meal she quite suddenly blushed. ‘Oh, Stévenne, I have never inquired for your parents! What must you think of such great impoliteness? I lose my head the moment I see you and grow selfish—I want you to know about me and my Maman; I babble about my affairs. What must you think of such great impoliteness? How is that kind and handsome Sir Philip? And your mother, my dear, how is Lady Anna?’

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] I was supposed to be writing. I got pregnant in the early stages of writing my second book, Delancey. Then Tina got sick. Then the shop next door to Delancey moved out, and Brandon leapt at the chance to take over its lease and build a bar there. I did not leap with him. I didn’t want another business. But I also knew that, poor timing aside, the bar would probably turn out to be a smart business decision. I let him leap. He worked at Delancey by night and on plans for the bar, to be called Essex, during the day. With six weeks until my due date, I finished the manuscript. Three weeks later, he opened Essex. Three weeks after that, on September 9, 2012, I gave birth to our daughter, June. We closed Delancey and Essex for two weeks, so that Brandon could stay home with us. Then we reopened, as if nothing had happened. Sometimes I hear myself tell people that our marriage was pretty ordinary. It was happy and unhappy in ordinary ways. Ours is the story of a set of circumstances that were tolerable in isolation, that felt normal and reasonable as we encountered them. It was only with time, and accumulation, that they became intolerable. It was okay until it wasn’t. I don’t remember much about opening Essex. I remember that the Japanese anemones in our yard had started to bloom, pink and droopily cheerful, their heads swaying on thin necks in the breeze. That was the year that I learned their name. I’d never cared about flowers, but this was different. Here was a flower that bloomed in time with our baby. No, I don’t remember much about opening Essex. The opportunity arose and was taken. A business-owner friend who already had children gave Brandon some advice: Open Essex before the baby comes, he said, even if you’ve got to rush. The idea was that after the baby was born, we wouldn’t be able to get anything done for months, and then we’d be paying rent on unused space. So Brandon rushed. The whole process happened in four months, start to finish. Then we had two businesses and a baby. There are ways of living that you can live with, until you can’t. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Can I be someone who can live with this? A quieter corollary: Who is that someone? Who was I, to ask for something other than everything I’d been given? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Sometimes I hear myself say that Brandon and I always had the same big-picture vision for our lives, the same end goal. We just had different ideas about how to get there. We had different maps to the same destination. But, writes Annie Dillard, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”16 Did we really want the same thing at all?

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  immediate images forcing their way out of him, but once he had woken he could recall scarcely any of them even in outline. I realized then, he said, how little practice I had in using my memory, and conversely how hard I must always have tried to recollect as little as possible, avoiding everything which related in any way to my unknown past. Inconceivable as it seems to me today, I knew nothing about the conquest of Europe by the Germans and the slave state they set up, and nothing about the persecution I had escaped, or at least, what I did know was not much more than a salesgirl in a shop, for instance, knows about the plague or cholera. As far as I was concerned the world ended in the late nineteenth century. I dared go no further than that, although in fact the whole history of the architecture and civilization of the bourgeois age, the subject of my research, pointed in the direction of the catastrophic events already casting their shadows before them at the time. I did not read newspapers because, as I now know, I feared unwelcome revelations, I turned on the radio only at certain hours of the day, I was always refining my defensive reactions, creating a kind of quarantine or immune system which, as I maintained my existence in a smaller and smaller space, protected me from anything that could be connected in any way, however distant, with my own early history. Moreover, I had constantly been preoccupied by that accumulation of knowledge which I had pursued for decades, and which served as a substitute or compensatory memory. And if some dangerous piece of information came my way despite all my precautions, as it inevitably did, I was clearly capable of closing my eyes and ears to it, of simply forgetting it like any other unpleasantness. Yet this self-censorship of my mind, the constant suppression of the memories surfacing in me, Austerlitz continued, demanded ever greater efforts and finally, and unavoidably, led to the almost total paralysis of my linguistic faculties, the destruction of all my notes and sketches, my endless nocturnal peregrinations through London, and the hallucinations which plagued me with increasing frequency up to the point of my nervous breakdown in the summer of 1992. I cannot say exactly how I spent the rest of that year, said Austerlitz; all I know is that next spring, when there was some improvement in my state of health, on one of my first ventures into the city I visited an antiquarian bookshop near the British Museum where I regularly went in search of architectural engravings. Absentmindedly, I leafed through the various boxes and drawers, staring sometimes for minutes on end at a star-shaped vault or diamond frieze, a hermitage, a monopteros or a mausoleum, without knowing what I was looking at or why. The owner of the bookshop, Penelope Peacefull, a very beautiful woman whom I had admired for many years, was sitting where she always sat in the mornings, slightly to one side of her desk with its load of books and papers, solving the crossword puzzle on the back of the Telegraph

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] The last day of May, Nora sends me a text. She’s in my part of town; how about she stops by? It’s such a nice day. I close the laptop. Brandon’s at the restaurant. Nora is on the stoop with a spray of tea roses. We drop onto the sofa and make out for a while. We’ve been dating for five weeks. Lying beneath her, I rub the collar of her white button-down between my thumb and index finger. I tell her I’m falling in love with her. She smiles, bashful. I can tell she isn’t ready to say it, but I know well enough how she feels. Over on the table my phone rings, and I let it. A few minutes later, it rings again. Maybe ten minutes and then it rings again, a third time. I should get it. Nora sits up, and I roll off the couch. The caller’s name is lit up: it’s the school. It’s 3:47. I was supposed to pick up June at three. I’ve been in a meeting, I stammer, choking back a sob. Oh god, I’m so sorry! I lost track of time. June is fine, says her teacher. No worries! She’s in the aftercare room. Come when you can. June is fine, but I am not. I’m so far from fine that I’ll lie to Brandon about it that night, tell him I was reading on the sofa and fell asleep, didn’t wake up until the phone rang. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Before I spent a night at Nora’s, Brandon and I set parameters: what time I’d go, when I’d be back, what to tell June. I’d been away from her for work trips and a couple of family things, so we decided to keep it simple, tell her this was like that. I’d be back first thing in the morning. We consoled her with a special treat, something my parents had let me do when I was a kid and one of them was traveling: June could have a “slumber party” with Brandon in our bed. It was disorienting at Nora’s, sleeping in my city but in someone else’s bed. Sleep was halting. It couldn’t possibly be okay to be here. I was sure I’d be in trouble somehow. I wanted to be in Nora’s bed, wanted to be drunk on her, wanted to feel the way I had in the coffee shop, when she told me she’d had a crush on me too and I almost passed out at the sound of it. Instead I lay in her bed, across town from our bed, where June sleepwalked her small, meaty, sweet-smelling feet across Brandon’s back, and I felt like I was cleaving in two. [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Brandon and I had committed ourselves to empathy and clear communication. But our efforts at talking often devolved into yelling. The arrangement was still new, but these didn’t feel like growing pains. It felt like we were falling apart.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The Golden Rule requires self-knowledge; it asks that we use our own feelings as a guide to our behavior with others. If we treat ourselves harshly, this is the way we are likely to treat other people. So we need to acquire a healthier and more balanced knowledge of our strengths as well as our weaknesses. As we work through this step, we should all do what Rabbi Friedlander did that night and make a list of our good qualities, talents, and achievements. We recognize flaws in some of our closest friends, but this does not diminish our affection for them. Nor should it affect the way we value ourselves. Before we can make friends with others, we have to make a friend of our own self. Without denying your faults, remember all the people you have helped, the kind things you have done that nobody noticed, and your successes at home and at work. A sense of humor is also important: we should be able to smile wryly but gently at our failings, in the same way as we tease a friend. It is essential to be aware of our misdeeds and take responsibility for them. But we should also realize that the rage, fear, hatred, and greed that make us behave badly derive from the brain we inherited from our reptilian ancestors. It is useless to castigate ourselves bitterly for feeling jealousy, anger, and contempt, as that will only lead to self-hatred. Instead, we should quietly but firmly refuse to identify with them, saying with the Buddha: “This is not mine; this is not what I really am; this is not my self.”4 It will not be easy, because the emotions of the old brain are powerful and automatic, but we can learn to distance ourselves from them by the practice of mindfulness, which we shall discuss when we come to the fifth step.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  On an episode of Dear Sugar, Cheryl Strayed posits that wanting to leave a relationship is enough reason to do it. You have to be brave enough to break your own heart, she says. What about my child’s heart? I want to shoot back: What if I break that too? [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] When I was a teenager in my parents’ house, there was a chair in front of my bedroom window, but I never used it. The only time I remember sitting there was the day before I left for college, as I folded a pile of clean laundry. My father stood in the doorway of my room, one shoulder against the frame, keeping me company while I packed. I was tired and on edge, anxious about leaving, though I wouldn’t say it out loud. Instead I heaved a series of showy sighs. How’re you holding up? my father asked, taking the bait. This is too hard, I moaned. There’s too much to do. You mean packing? he asked. But you’re almost done. I mean everything. I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this! I slumped over my thighs, really going for it. Now his voice came out stony and strange: You’d better get used to it, he said. This is how it is. Life is hard. The change was so abrupt, I thought surely he was ribbing me. A humming quiet filled the air. I looked up, expecting a smile. Instead he shoved off the doorjamb, walked across the hall, and shut his door. I was about to turn nineteen, and I had a plane ticket to Northern California, where I would in theory start my life. My father was sixty-eight. He was in good health, though probably, unbeknownst to all of us, carrying around the cache of faulty cells that would kill him five years later. He was still seeing patients in his oncology practice, living in the house that he and my mother had always dreamed of. He was happy. But the man wasn’t young. Born in 1929, my father was the oldest son of a family of Jews who’d recently immigrated from Poland to Canada. As a teenager, he watched the Holocaust from an ocean away, witnessed the German government kill six million people like him, including his extended family. He dragged around all the aches, sorrows, and piles of personal garbage that a human accumulates over seven decades of living. When Schindler’s List came out, he took me to see it. Afterward, in the orange light of the cinema hallway, I noticed that his eyes were a paler shade of blue than normal, like shallow sea-water. He was crying. That was the only film I ever went to with him; he said he didn’t like going to the movies.

• From The Fixed Stars: A Memoir (2020)

  Much of the early research around divorce was published in the 1960s and ’70s. Much of it measured the well-being of a group of people who were dealing with tremendous social stigma—and whose marriages must have been so bad that the stigma of divorce was preferable to staying. Back then, courts often awarded sole custody to mothers, who were both single and earned little, so children were left with few resources.56 My divorce, too, would present some financial hardship. I have had to lean regularly on savings; to budget closely, slashing items that once mattered to me; and to accept less stability than I previously had. But my divorce has not left me impoverished. More recent studies comparing sole-custody and joint-custody arrangements pull up more nuanced findings: that having close relationships with both parents is “the best predictor of future outcomes for the kids [of divorce].”57 In other words, if you’ve got to get divorced, yes, there will be pain and loss for everyone involved. But that’s not the final word, so long as we let the pain motivate us to love our children—and to let their other parent love them too.58 “It’s in the nature of the beast that no one gets out of a family unit whole or with everything they want,” writes Zadie Smith. “[T]he truth is ‘the family’ is always an event of some violence. It’s only years later, in that retrospective swirl, that you work out who was hurt, in what way, and how badly.”59 [image file=image_rsrc2FK.jpg] Of course, this looks good on paper, but it doesn’t stick, keeps sliding off. I brought June into this. I brought her into a marriage that had cracks early on, but we ignored them and had her anyway. She is now a child of divorce. But what’s the alternative? That she didn’t exist at all? My therapist gives me homework. Look in the mirror, he says. Really look at yourself. Make eye contact. And say, “I forgive you.” Do it every day until our next session. It’s like a prescription: take one tablet by mouth daily for fourteen days. Except that when a doctor writes me a prescription, I follow it exactly. This, I only manage to do twice, furtively, when no one else is around to hear.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  This may have taken its cue from the ‘seven devils’ that Christ cast out of Mary Magdalen, according to the Gospel of Luke, though seven is always an attractive number for those seeking conceptual schemes. It provided a tidy and comprehensive basis for a new Western scheme of moral regulation, so that sin could now be sorted out as pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth. It is worth observing that only one of these seven directly concerns sex and sexuality. [14] Irish ascetics fighting demons in their windswept stone cells, as well as laypeople in their everyday lives, were set the task of identifying and dealing with the sins they committed. Their spiritual progress was a constant series of little setbacks, laboriously compensated for before the next little lapse; each time the Church would help its flock find an appropriate degree of sorrow and penitence. Out of this theology of moral struggle came a new practice of individual penance. Public penance as practised in the early Church had been a daunting, once-in-a-lifetime act witnessed by a congregation, and connected with adult baptism. [15] From the sixth century, clergy in Ireland and Wales pioneered a penitential practice of individual confession, based on the compilation of ‘tariff books’ or ‘penitentials’ to guide confessors in dealing with their flocks, whether monastic or lay. The penitentials were structured around the idea not only that sin could be atoned for through penance, but also that it was possible to work out exact scales of what penance matched which sin: tariffs of forgiveness. Clergy were armed with their books when they presided over ‘auricular confession’, a face-to-face personal encounter between

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  It would break me. This vida loca better last—or I'm fucked. WHAT YOU DIDN’T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT MAKING FOOD TELEVISION This was a much more honest piece than previous ones, when I was still representing myself as some kind of outraged working class hero. It's far more descriptive of what my life was really like (and still is) most of the time. Since the piece was written, I've left New York Times Television and ended relations with the Food Network. But I'm still together with Chris and Lydia, and many of the same shooters and editors who produced and made the first TV show. Only now, it's the Travel and Discovery Channels that are enabling my swinging new lifestyle. These days, we've got a bigger budget, more freedom, and more indulgent masters, but the day-to-day is the same. It's like traveling with a band, on constant international tour. I sold my soul to the television gods so that I might see the world and live out my childhood fantasies of faraway places. This is the way things are. I've become a character in Spinal Tap. WARNING SIGNS Anyone who's ever spent any amount of time in London knows exactly which chain I'm talking about here. Incredibly, they're still in business. MADNESS IN CRESCENT CITY I have no idea which of these places still exists after New Orleans was nearly wiped out by hurricane and flooding. I suspect many of the places mentioned are still trying to get back on their feet—if they can. I dearly hope that Snake and Jake's in particular returns, as there are few nobler establishments. This piece is a classic example of the kind of "triple dipping" I do these days. Here's how it works: First: Visit city on book tour. Inevitably, end up eating, bar-hopping, and getting trashed with all the local chefs. Second: Using all the valuable "insider" information accumulated during earlier book tour debauch, return to the same location to make a television show. Third: Using one's experiences during filming—and the handy production notes and videotape—write an article about the place for a magazine and get paid TWICE! A VIEW FROM THE FRIDGE Something of an apology here, to all the waiters I've been curt with or abusive to over the years. There really is nothing more loathsome or shameful than some miserable prick who walks into a restaurant determined to have a bad time, ready to lord over a relatively powerless server. Behaving like a mean, sarcastic, superior, and dismissive "boss" to your waiter should be a flayable offense. It really is in your interest—most of the time—to be nice to your waiter. It's also the decent thing to do. It's pretty much a relationship ender for me when a new friend behaves imperiously with a server, or makes ludicrous and unreasonable demands. I find it mortifying—and never repeat the experience. If you can't behave in a restaurant you can't be my friend. It's that simple. Bad behavior is for bars.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  The hand would be making an effort to fondle, and Stephen would be conscious of that effort. Then looking up at the calm, lovely face, Stephen would be filled with a sudden contrition, with a sudden deep sense of her own shortcomings; she would long to blurt all this out to her mother, yet would stand there tongue-tied, saying nothing at all. For these two were strangely shy with each other—it was almost grotesque, this shyness of theirs, as existing between mother and child. Anna would feel it, and through her Stephen, young as she was, would become conscious of it; so that they held a little aloof when they should have been drawing together. Stephen, acutely responsive to beauty, would be dimly longing to find expression for a feeling almost amounting to worship, that her mother’s face had awakened. But Anna, looking gravely at her daughter, noting the plentiful auburn hair, the brave hazel eyes that were so like her father’s, as indeed were the child’s whole expression and bearing, would be filled with a sudden antagonism that came very near to anger. She would awake at night and ponder this thing, scourging herself in an access of contrition; accusing herself of hardness of spirit, of being an unnatural mother. Sometimes she would shed slow, miserable tears, remembering the inarticulate Stephen. She would think: ‘I ought to be proud of the likeness, proud and happy and glad when I see it!’ Then back would come flooding that queer antagonism that amounted almost to anger. It would seem to Anna that she must be going mad, for this likeness to her husband would strike her as an outrage—as though the poor, innocent seven-year-old Stephen were in some way a caricature of Sir Philip; a blemished, unworthy, maimed reproduction—yet she knew that the child was handsome. But now there were times when the child’s soft flesh would be almost distasteful to her; when she hated the way Stephen moved or stood still, hated a certain largeness about her, a certain crude lack of grace in her movements, a certain unconscious defiance. Then the mother’s mind would slip back to the days when this creature had clung to her breast, forcing her to love it by its own utter weakness; and at this thought her eyes must fill again, for she came of a race of devoted mothers. The thing had crept on her like a foe in the dark—it had been slow, insidious, deadly; it had waxed strong as Stephen herself had waxed strong, being part, in some way, of Stephen. Restlessly tossing from side to side, Anna Gordon would pray for enlightenment and guidance; would pray that her husband might never suspect her feelings towards his child. All that she was and had been he knew; in all the world she had no other secret save this one most unnatural and monstrous injustice that was stronger than her will to destroy it.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  For now Stephen knew the cause of their quarrels, and she recognized the form of the shadow that had seemed to creep in between them at Christmas, and knowing, she stretched out her arms to Morton for comfort: ‘My Morton, where are you? I need you.’ Grim and exceedingly angry grew Puddle, that little, grey box of a woman in her schoolroom; angry with Anna for her treatment of Stephen, but even more deeply angry with Sir Philip, who knew the whole truth, or so she suspected, and who yet kept that truth back from Anna. Stephen would sit with her head in her hands. ‘Oh, Puddle, it’s my fault; I’ve come in between them, and they’re all I’ve got—they’re my one perfect thing—I can’t bear it—why have I come in between them?’ And Puddle would flush with reminiscent anger as her mind slipped back and back over the years to old sorrows, old miseries, long decently buried but now disinterred by this pitiful Stephen. She would live through those years again, while her spirit would cry out, unregenerate, against their injustice. Frowning at her pupil, she would speak to her sharply: ‘Don’t be a fool, Stephen. Where’s your brain, where’s your backbone? Stop holding your head and get on with your Latin. My God, child, you’ll have worse things than this to face later—life’s not all beer and skittles, I do assure you. Now come along, do, and get on with that Latin. Remember you’ll soon be going up to Oxford.’ But after a while she might pat the girl’s shoulder and say rather gruffly: ‘I’m not angry, Stephen—I do understand, my dear, I do really—only somehow I’ve just got to make you have backbone. You’re too sensitive, child, and the sensitive suffer—well, I don’t want to see you suffer, that’s all. Let’s go out for a walk—we’ve done enough Latin for to-day—let’s walk over the meadows to Upton.’ Stephen clung to this little, grey box of a woman as a drowning man will cling to a spar. Puddle’s very hardness was somehow consoling—it seemed concrete, a thing you could trust, could rely on, and their friendship that had flourished as a green bay-tree grew into something more stalwart and much more enduring. And surely the two of them had need of their friendship, for now there was little happiness at Morton; Sir Philip and Anna were deeply unhappy—degraded they would feel by their ceaseless quarrels. Sir Philip would think: ‘I must tell her the truth—I must tell her what I believe to be the truth about Stephen.’ He would go in search of his wife, but having found her would stand there tongue-tied, with his eyes full of pity. And one day Anna suddenly burst out weeping, for no reason except that she felt his great pity. Not knowing and not caring why he pitied, she wept, so that all he could do was to console her. They clung together like penitent children. ‘Anna, forgive me.’

• From The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones (2006)

  I still felt like a punk, guilty even, for not working as a chef anymore, for doing something as relatively easy as writing about myself and talking about myself—and getting paid for it. And I think the piece reflects that feeling of homesickness. Leaving day-to-day operations at Les Halles, I felt like a traitor; and by celebrating my old friends, my old life—and some of the less lovely practices of that life—I was revisiting it in my mind, seeking some kind of vicarious absolution. Non-cooks might not understand that when describing a steak caught "on the bounce" or finishing sliced gigot under a salamander, for instance, I was never "exposing" or looking to shock or inform. I recall all that nonsense now with warmth and affection. It makes me kind of sad rereading this piece. The yearning for something that even then I suspected I'd never get back, coupled with the growing realization that I would probably have a very hard time hacking it at this point, make me feel a million years older and many lifetimes removed from the person who put this on paper. THE EVILDOERS Damn, was I angry! This is one mean-spirited rant. I was spitting mad, having just endured a four-hour flight, economy class, on American Airlines where I'd found myself seated between two gigantic specimens of humanity. One of them, a woman of Jabba the Hutt proportions, literally took up half my seat in addition to her own, leaving me balanced on one butt cheek, leaning forward and against the seat back in front of me. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't sit back. I couldn't do anything but fume silently. Neither she nor the flight attendants ever acknowledged my obvious distress. For the duration of the flight, I tried to lull myself into a state of calm by focusing on the in-flight telephone against which my face was mashed, imagining what would happen if I wrapped the cord around my neck, leaned forward with my full body weight, and ended my life. That thought was what got me through. The notion that eating yourself up to five-hundred-pound weight class, requiring assistance to even drag yourself out of bed, is an "alternate lifestyle choice" deserving of respect and accommodation always struck me as disingenuous. And in the uncertain times during which the piece was written, it even seemed "wrong" to be so unapologetically huge, when (it appeared at the time) we might at any moment be called upon to flee a building or make our way quickly to an exit. Equating morbid obesity with a lack of patriotism was, I grant you, a bit of a stretch.

• From From the Streets to the Sheets: Noire's Urban Erotic Quickies (2007)

  I got to Rasheeda’s apartment complex a little after midnight. After fishing for my cell phone under my car seat I checked my call log to ensure that she hadn’t called. She hadn’t. “Good,” I said aloud. I didn’t have to think of an excuse as to why I didn’t return her call. Some of the chicks on rotation had finally hit me back, so I called my voice mail to listen to my messages. As soon as I got past the automated voice mail message my phone beeped once loudly . . . very loudly . . . in my ear. “Fuck!” I exclaimed as I quickly moved the phone away from my ear. Two seconds later, the phone beeped loudly again and then promptly went dead. “Goddamn Sprint!” I cursed. Only Sprint would make a phone that gave you a low-battery warning right before the battery went dead. “’Bout time you got here,” Rasheeda said in a sleepy voice as the loud buzzer buzzed. She opened the door with a thin blanket wrapped around her and stared at me with a blank expression on her face. Her bone-straight hair was wound in a tight wrap, and her beautiful, juicy lips were poked out, making me want to rub my dick on them. Scanning her body, I tried to see what kinda sexy panties she had on but the damn cover was cock-blocking. My eyes traveled south to her legs. I smiled. She had oiled up all that good dark chocolate for me. Turning her back to me, Rasheeda walked into the apartment and disappeared around the corner. “Lock the door, Euftis.” Her words wafted around the corner. Stepping into the dimly lit apartment, I took off my shoes and held tight to the gym bag I’d brought along. Walking into the living room, a twinge of guilt assaulted me. She’d illuminated the room with scented candles and a romantic, crackling fireplace. A bottle of Pinot Grigio was on the table, and Rasheeda had uncovered her package. Her goodies peeked through a tight black lace teddy. I felt so damned guilty. Rasheeda had gone out of her way to get ready for me, and I’d just finished fucking a ho. Even worse, she was gonna suck my dick after it’d been all up in Kianna. I’d done some dirty shit in my life, but this was grimier by far. Rasheeda sat on the couch, then rolled onto her stomach, showing me that thick, oiled, dark chocolate ass. Tossing the bag, I unbuttoned my Rocawear jean shorts and let them fall to the floor, then pulled off my matching shirt. She smiled, flipped onto her back, and spun around with her feet facing me. Her little maneuver caused the bottom of her teddy to unsnap between her legs, revealing her thick bush. “Oops,” she exclaimed, spreading her legs, causing her lower lips to open.

• From The Girls (2016)

  It was surprising to think of him, of David, to remember a time when I imagined a life with another person. Not love, but the pleasant inertia that could substitute. The agreeable quiet that passed over us both in car rides. The way I’d once seen him look at me as we crossed a parking lot. But then it started—a woman who knocked on the apartment door at strange hours. An ivory hairbrush that had belonged to my grandmother went missing from the bathroom. I’d never told David certain things, so that whatever closeness we had was automatically corrupted, the grub twisting in the apple. My secret was sunk deep, but it was there. Maybe that was the reason it had happened, the other women. I had left open a space for such secrets. And how much could you ever know another person, anyway? —I’d imagined that Sasha and I would spend the day in courteous silence. That Sasha would be as hidden as a mouse. She was polite enough, but soon her presence was obvious. I found the refrigerator door left open, filling the kitchen with an alien buzz. Her sweatshirt thrown on the table, a book about the Enneagram splayed on a chair. Music came loud from her room through tinny laptop speakers. It surprised me—she was listening to the singer whose plaintive voice had been the perpetual aural backdrop for a certain kind of girl I remembered from college. Girls already swampy with nostalgia, girls who lit candles and stayed up late kneading bread dough in Danskin leotards and bare feet. I was used to encountering remnants—the afterburn of the sixties was everywhere in that part of California. Ragged blips of prayer flags in the oak trees, vans eternally parked in fields, missing their tires. Older men in decorative shirts with common-law wives. But those were the expected sixties ghosts. Why would Sasha have any interest? I was glad when Sasha changed the music. A woman singing over gothy electronic piano, nothing I recognized at all. —That afternoon, I tried to take a nap. But I couldn’t sleep. I lay there, staring at the framed photo that hung over the bureau: a sand dune, rippling with mint grass. The ghoulish whorls of cobwebs in the corners. I shifted in the sheets, impatient. I was too aware of Sasha in the room next door. The music from her laptop hadn’t stopped all afternoon, and sometimes I could make out scraps of digital noise over the songs, beeps and chimes. What was she doing—playing games on her phone? Texting with Julian? I had a sudden ache for the obliging ways she must be tending to her loneliness. I knocked on her door, but the music was too loud. I tried again. Nothing. I was embarrassed by the exposure of effort, about to scurry back to my room, but Sasha appeared in the doorway.