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 History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  examined myself, the sharper the stings with which my conscience was pricked, so that the only solace which remained to me was to delude myself by obliviousness. Still, as nothing better offered, I continued the course which I had begun, when, lo! a very different form of doctrine started up, not one which led us away from the Christian profession, but one which brought it back to its fountain-head, and, as it were, clearing away the dross, restored it to its original purity. " ’Offended by the novelty, I lent an unwilling ear, and at first, I confess, strenuously and passionately resisted; for (such is the firmness or effrontery with which it is natural to men to persist in the course which they have once undertaken) it was with the greatest difficulty I was induced to confess that I had all my life long been in ignorance and error. One thing, in particular, made me averse to those new teachers, viz. reverence for the Church. " ’But when once I opened my ears, and allowed myself to be taught, I perceived that this fear of derogating from the majesty of the Church was groundless. For they reminded me how great the difference is between schism from the Church, and studying to correct the faults by which the Church herself was contaminated. They spoke nobly of the Church, and showed the greatest desire to cultivate unity. And lest it should seem they quibbled on the term Church, they showed it was no new thing for Antichrists to preside there in place of pastors. Of this they produced not a few examples, from which it appeared they aimed at nothing but the edification of the Church, and in that respect were similarly circumstanced with many of Christ’s servants whom we ourselves included in the catalogue of saints. " ’For inveighing more freely against the Roman Pontiff, who was reverenced as the Vicegerent of Christ, the Successor of Peter, and the Head of the Church, they excused themselves thus: Such titles as those are empty bugbears, by which the eyes of the pious ought not to be so blinded as not to venture to look at them and sift the reality. It was when the world was plunged in ignorance and sloth, as in a deep sleep, that the pope had risen to such an eminence; certainly neither appointed head of the Church by the Word of God, nor ordained by a legitimate act of the Church, but of his own accord, self- elected. Moreover, the tyranny which he let loose against the people of God was not to be endured, if we wished to have the kingdom of Christ amongst us in safety. " ’And they wanted not most powerful arguments to confirm all their positions. First, they clearly disposed of everything that was then commonly adduced to establish the primacy of the pope.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  situation as a matter of fact, the biblical text seeks to explain it by laying the blame on human beings. In part, the problem is disobedience to the divine command. More broadly, however, one could say that the problem is human overreaching. Like the heroes of Greek tragedy, Adam and Eve are guilty of hubris in their desire to be like God, knowing good and evil. One message of this story, which is a common message in ancient Near Eastern literature, is that human beings should know their place and stay in it. Theological Misconceptions More than most stories, these chapters of Genesis have been overlain with theological interpretations that have little basis in the Hebrew text. Since the time of St. Augustine, Christian theology has maintained the doctrine of original sin—the belief that human beings after Adam are born in a state of sin. There is a partial basis for this idea in the New Testament, where St. Paul asserts that “one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all” and “by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners” (Rom 5:18-19), but there is no suggestion of this in the text of Genesis. In the first century C.E., when Paul wrote, there was some debate in Judaism about the significance of Adam’s disobedience. This debate is reflected in apocalyptic writings from the end of that century. In 4 Ezra 7:48 [118] Ezra asks, “O Adam, what have you done? For though it was you who sinned, the fall was not yours alone, but ours also who are your descendants” (RSV). In the nearly contemporary apocalypse known as 2 (Syriac) Baruch, Baruch rejects this sentiment and takes a position that is more typical of Jewish tradition: “For though Adam first sinned and brought untimely death upon all men, yet each one of those who were born from him has either prepared for his own soul its future torment or chosen for himself the glories that are to be. . . . Thus Adam was responsible for himself only; each one of us is his own Adam” ( 2 Bar. 54:15, 19; trans. L. H. Brockington, in H. F. D. Sparks, ed., The Apocryphal Old Testament [Oxford: Clarendon, 1984]). The story of Adam is paradigmatic, insofar as the temptation to eat forbidden fruit is typical of human experience. One might also suppose that an inclination to sin is inherited

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  is assumed that the reason is not inadequate manpower or strategy, but the displeasure of the Lord. Sure enough, the Lord informs Joshua that Israel has broken the covenant by disobeying a commandment. The specific commandment in question is the ban, which Achan had broken by taking things for himself. The specificity of the commandment is not crucial, however. The point is that a commandment has been broken. After the perpetrator has been executed, the Israelites are able to capture Ai and destroy it. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the story is the sense of corporate responsibility. The Israelite army is defeated and some thirty-six people are killed because of the sin of one man. Moreover, not only is Achan executed, but also his sons and daughters and livestock, and even the goods that he had taken are stoned, burned, and buried under a heap of stones. There is a strong sense here that the family is a unit, but there is also a sense of defilement that has spread even to material objects. The story of Achan is all the more remarkable because Deut 24:16 says explicitly that “parents shall not be put to death for their children, nor shall children be put to death for their parents; only for their own crimes may persons be put to death.” The story of Achan is presumably older than the Deuteronomic law. According to Exod 20:5, the Lord punishes children for the iniquity of their parents even to the third and fourth generation, and this was the traditional idea in Israel, roughly down to the time of the Deuteronomic reform or the Babylonian exile. The doctrine of individual responsibility is an innovation in Deuteronomy 24. It is most strongly articulated in Ezekiel 18, in the context of the exile. The story of Achan provides incidentally a good description of the social structure of ancient Israel. When Joshua is trying to identify the culprit, he first identifies the tribe, then the clan, then the family, or father’s house. These were the different levels of kinship groups to which an individual belonged.

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  may have been many acts of bloodshed at Jezreel during the time of the Jehu dynasty. The most conspicuous one, however, was the bloody coup that involved the murder of Jezebel. According to 2 Kings, Jehu acted with the sanction of the prophet Elisha, but his bloodshed nonetheless warranted punishment in the eyes of Hosea. The second child is named lo’ ruchamah, which may be translated “not pitied” or “not loved” (the name is related to the Hebrew word for womb, rechem ). The point is that Israel will no longer be pitied. The third child receives an even harsher name, lo’ ‘ammi, “not my people.” The phrase echoes the common formula for divorce (“she is not my wife”) and reverses the common formula for marriage. The optimistic conclusion to the chapter is surely supplied by an editor. Hosea, unlike Amos, prophesied salvation on occasion, but in this case the prophecy undermines the symbolism of the children’s names, or rather puts it in the wider perspective of ongoing Judean history. The way in which Hosea uses his wife and children as props for his message is troubling for the modern reader. Neither their welfare nor indeed the prophet’s own is treated as of any consequence. We are given the impression of a prophet who is completely obsessed with his message, so that it takes over his whole life. In general, the Hebrew Bible is far more concerned with the welfare of the people as a whole than with that of the individual. The use of the marriage as metaphor for the relationship between God and Israel raises again the question of the covenant. It is clear that Hosea, like Amos, saw this relationship as conditional. It entailed certain ethical and cultic requirements. If Israel failed to comply, the relationship could be broken off. All of this corresponds to the understanding of the Mosaic covenant that we have seen in the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy. Yet it is also clear that the people addressed by the prophets did not share that understanding, and so the question remains whether the prophets were invoking a traditional understanding of the covenant that had been neglected, or were shaping the idea of covenant in new ways. Hosea notably does not use the analogy of international treaties in the developed way that we find in Deuteronomy, although some of his references to covenant may have had political treaties in mind (we shall return to this point

• From Introduction to the Hebrew Bible and Deutero-Canonical Books (2018)

  Ahaziah is told incidentally (2 Kgs 9:27). In Chronicles it is the main focus of the story: “It was ordained by God that the downfall of Ahaziah should come about through his going to visit Joram” (2 Chron 22:7). After the death of Ahaziah, his mother Athaliah, daughter of Ahab, seized power in Judah. According to 2 Kgs 11:1-3 (and 2 Chron 22:10-12), she tried to destroy all the royal family, but the king’s son Jehoash (Joash) was rescued and hidden. In the seventh year, a priest named Jehoiada organized a coup to put Joash on the throne. The account in Chronicles differs mainly in the new prominence given to the Levites as the bodyguards of the new king. Joash is praised in both Kings and Chronicles, although Kings notes that the high places were not dismantled. He is credited with carrying out repairs in the temple. The older history notes, however, that he had to give all the votive gifts from the temple and all the gold to the king of Aram (Syria) to induce him to withdraw from Jerusalem. Chronicles gives a more elaborate account of the change in this king’s fortunes. After the death of Jehoiada, the officials of Judah persuaded Joash to abandon the house of the Lord and serve idols. This led to a prophetic rebuke from Zechariah, son of Jehoiada. Joash, we are told, did not remember the kindness of Jehoiada, but killed his son. It was after this that the king of Aram came up against Joash. After the Arameans had withdrawn, Joash was killed by his servants (2 Chron 24:25-27; cf. 2 Kgs 12:19-21). The murder of the prophet provides a more satisfactory theological explanation for the downfall of Joash than was found in 2 Kings. For this very reason, we must suspect that the Chronicler invented the story. From Amaziah to Ahaz (2 Chronicles 25–28) Like Joash, Amaziah initially served the Lord but later fell from the true way, with disastrous results. The main deviation in Chronicles from the account in Kings is that Amaziah is said to have hired warriors from Israel early in his career. For this he was rebuked by a man of God, “for the L ORD is not with Israel —all these Ephraimites” (2 Chron 25:7). Later he did battle with the northern kingdom and lost, and he was eventually killed in a coup.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I saw the folly in Sister Catherine’s prudish dictates and in her sequestering of any emotion bordering on romance. There was no tug of conscience when I chose to see the movie A Man and a Woman , the Claude Lelouch production that scandalized many who weren’t even Catholic. I thought it beautiful, artistic, and erotic. However, there was one holdover from my indoctrination at the Center. For eighteen years, I had absorbed the hateful rhetoric espoused by both Father and Sister Catherine that the Jews were a cursed race for having killed Jesus. Somehow (although they never explained why) that sin transmogrified the entire Jewish race into an amoral, money-grubbing, not-to-be trusted people. While still at the Center, I questioned (to myself only) how it was that two thousand years after Jesus was put to death the Jews could still be tainted with His death. No rationale was offered, and it was one of those issues that was easier to accept than to challenge. It was not surprising then that I left the Center wary of anyone who was Jewish. But a year later, I came to know several Jewish brokers at Ladenburg Thalmann. One was a pleasant man in his early thirties, the proud father of three young daughters, whose framed pictures covered his desk. When I asked him about the one with Santa Claus, he laughed and said, “My girls love Santa Claus. We have a menorah and a Christmas tree. Anything for my girls.” I took his words to heart. This was a good man, I thought, not an evil Jew. Still I harbored an instinctual bias, until some years later when, now in my late twenties, I was playing hostess one weekend at my boyfriend’s house in East Hampton to a couple of young creative geniuses from the London office of Ogilvy & Mather. One was the epitome of proper English breeding. His associate was a tall, gangly, bespectacled fellow whose perpetual attire was black on black (long before it was all the rage in Hollywood). He had an easy laugh, a brilliant sense of humor, a kindly manner, and an extraordinary mind. With his beguilingly charming and self-deprecating humor, he made endless fun of his orthodox Jewish upbringing. His gentle humanity left me with a raw sense of guilt over my bigotry. I was miraculously cured; my prejudice was gone, and with it any instinct to distrust Jews simply because they were Jews. After six years of what seemed like married life, my lover abruptly left me for someone younger than I. It would take nearly a year before I was able to re-engage with him and carry on as friends. This we did for the next twenty years, as he became increasingly frail, afflicted by the ravages of Parkinson’s disease. He had been the only person outside my immediate family with whom I had shared my life’s story.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  her. Given her own life, lived daringly and openly as a lesbian in the literary and cultural mecca of post–World War II Paris, she would most likely have lent a tolerant ear and provided words of support and wisdom. * * * Within a year of leaving the Center, I had shed much of the yoke of puritanism that had been engrained in me for nearly eighteen years. I saw the folly in Sister Catherine’s prudish dictates and in her sequestering of any emotion bordering on romance. There was no tug of conscience when I chose to see the movie A Man and a Woman, the Claude Lelouch production that scandalized many who weren’t even Catholic. I thought it beautiful, artistic, and erotic. However, there was one holdover from my indoctrination at the Center. For eighteen years, I had absorbed the hateful rhetoric espoused by both Father and Sister Catherine that the Jews were a cursed race for having killed Jesus. Somehow (although they never explained why) that sin transmogrified the entire Jewish race into an amoral, money-grubbing, not-to-be trusted people. While still at the Center, I questioned (to myself only) how it was that two thousand years after Jesus was put to death the Jews could still be tainted with His death. No rationale was offered, and it was one of those issues that was easier to accept than to challenge. It was not surprising then that I left the Center wary of anyone who was Jewish. But a year later, I came to know several Jewish brokers at Ladenburg Thalmann. One was a pleasant man in his early thirties, the proud father of three young daughters, whose framed pictures covered his desk. When I asked him about the one with Santa Claus, he laughed and said, “My girls love Santa Claus. We have a menorah and a Christmas tree. Anything for my girls.” I took his words to heart. This was a good man, I thought, not an evil Jew. Still I harbored an instinctual bias, until some years later when, now in my late twenties, I was playing hostess one weekend at my boyfriend’s house in East Hampton to a couple of young creative geniuses from the London office of Ogilvy & Mather. One was the epitome of proper English breeding. His associate was a tall, gangly, bespectacled fellow whose perpetual attire was black on black (long before it was all the rage in Hollywood). He had an easy laugh, a brilliant sense of humor, a kindly manner, and an extraordinary mind. With his beguilingly charming and self-deprecating humor, he made endless fun

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I saw the folly in Sister Catherine’s prudish dictates and in her sequestering of any emotion bordering on romance. There was no tug of conscience when I chose to see the movie A Man and a Woman , the Claude Lelouch production that scandalized many who weren’t even Catholic. I thought it beautiful, artistic, and erotic. However, there was one holdover from my indoctrination at the Center. For eighteen years, I had absorbed the hateful rhetoric espoused by both Father and Sister Catherine that the Jews were a cursed race for having killed Jesus. Somehow (although they never explained why) that sin transmogrified the entire Jewish race into an amoral, money-grubbing, not-to-be trusted people. While still at the Center, I questioned (to myself only) how it was that two thousand years after Jesus was put to death the Jews could still be tainted with His death. No rationale was offered, and it was one of those issues that was easier to accept than to challenge. It was not surprising then that I left the Center wary of anyone who was Jewish. But a year later, I came to know several Jewish brokers at Ladenburg Thalmann. One was a pleasant man in his early thirties, the proud father of three young daughters, whose framed pictures covered his desk. When I asked him about the one with Santa Claus, he laughed and said, “My girls love Santa Claus. We have a menorah and a Christmas tree. Anything for my girls.” I took his words to heart. This was a good man, I thought, not an evil Jew. Still I harbored an instinctual bias, until some years later when, now in my late twenties, I was playing hostess one weekend at my boyfriend’s house in East Hampton to a couple of young creative geniuses from the London office of Ogilvy & Mather. One was the epitome of proper English breeding. His associate was a tall, gangly, bespectacled fellow whose perpetual attire was black on black (long before it was all the rage in Hollywood). He had an easy laugh, a brilliant sense of humor, a kindly manner, and an extraordinary mind. With his beguilingly charming and self-deprecating humor, he made endless fun of his orthodox Jewish upbringing. His gentle humanity left me with a raw sense of guilt over my bigotry. I was miraculously cured; my prejudice was gone, and with it any instinct to distrust Jews simply because they were Jews. After six years of what seemed like married life, my lover abruptly left me for someone younger than I. It would take nearly a year before I was able to re-engage with him and carry on as friends. This we did for the next twenty years, as he became increasingly frail, afflicted by the ravages of Parkinson’s disease. He had been the only person outside my immediate family with whom I had shared my life’s story.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  It turned out to be the start of a long career as a nurse. She admitted to me (years later) that it took her a number of months to get over her guilt about leaving religious life. She feared that God might strike her dead for betraying her vows to Him. I asked her about her eating problems and how it was that they suddenly seemed to disappear when she was about fifteen years old, not long before I left. She told me that, in a moment of furor over what she felt was an unfair grade on one of her exams, she bolted into Sister Catherine’s office and laid out her grievance. Sister Catherine heard her and reassured her that she would take matters into her own hands. “I found I had a voice,” Cathy said, “that I had power, that I could fight back. That discovery gave me back the control I had lost when we were taken away from our parents.” The family was made whole when twenty-year-old Margaret Mary left the Center three months later. Peggy—that’s what she became the moment she rejoined the family, a name we had jokingly whispered as her nickname for years at the Center. By far the most easygoing, happy-go-lucky of the five of us, she harbored not a grudge in the world about her years as a nun. Tall and lithesome, she started almost immediately to take dancing lessons—a far cry from her prior routine of selling books and cooking meals for a community of one hundred. Now a couple of months later, as the seven of us ate steamed lobsters, corn on the cob, and fresh tomatoes, we extended our glasses as our dad poured the wine. It was as though we’d been a family uninterrupted by years of separation. The past was behind us, the future held promise—we were together once again.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  of his orthodox Jewish upbringing. His gentle humanity left me with a raw sense of guilt over my bigotry. I was miraculously cured; my prejudice was gone, and with it any instinct to distrust Jews simply because they were Jews. After six years of what seemed like married life, my lover abruptly left me for someone younger than I. It would take nearly a year before I was able to re- engage with him and carry on as friends. This we did for the next twenty years, as he became increasingly frail, afflicted by the ravages of Parkinson’s disease. He had been the only person outside my immediate family with whom I had shared my life’s story. The next time I would do so was with the man who would become my husband. Not long after our breakup, and following a few interim dalliances, I found love again, this time with a man with whom I had been working for nearly two years, without the remotest interest in him. Over a simple lunch, we ended up discovering that each of us was in essence single—I recently ditched and he in the midst of a divorce after eighteen years of marriage and three children. We dated for some months before I felt comfortable telling my story for only the second time in my life. John had grown up in Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, in an era of debutante balls and society dances, and his instinctual reaction to my tale was one of disbelief at the life I had missed, one he had taken for granted. As I shared my story with him, I found myself laughing and using one of my favorite expressions, from the then famously popular song in the Broadway musical, Evita, “Don’t cry for me, Argentina.” Three years later, almost to the day, we became husband and wife in an intimate ceremony that included only our closest family. The fact that he was divorced made it impossible for us to be married in the Catholic Church, which disappointed me but not him. He, an Episcopalian, liked to call me kiddingly a “mackerel snapper.” For my part, I told him (in good humor) that his religion was based on the selfish whim of the Catholic King Henry VIII. If he hadn’t demanded a divorce from his wife because she couldn’t produce a son, there’d be no Episcopal Church. My parents voiced no objection to our mixed marriage, for which I was enormously grateful. In truth, they thought the world of my husband and were more than happy to remain silent on the matter of religion. However, the depth of my own concern about what my Center family might think of my getting married outside of the Catholic Church was revealed to me

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  twin beds, and anchored between them was a piece of plywood the length of the beds and five feet tall.” “You’re not serious?” I said. “Dead serious.” “As though you couldn’t pop into one twin bed together?” I howled with laughter. “Who do you think did it?” “I’m sure Brother Henry ordered it done,” she said. “Of course,” I replied. “Carrying out orders from on high” was the way my mother phrased it. It all seemed so counter-Catholic to me, and I asked my parents why they thought Father and Sister Catherine took such a radical step. They admitted that rumors abounded—one being that thirty-nine children were becoming a financial burden. But my mother said she had an alternate theory, which she based on a conversation she had had with Sister Catherine in Still River, long after the separation had taken place. “She told me that her wedding night was the worst day of her life. And so she asked Hank [her husband] to agree to a life of chastity between the two of them. I think she abhorred the whole notion of sex and procreation. She was a prude at heart.” I nodded and took this in. The fact that Sister Catherine’s two children were adopted suddenly made sense. It was heading toward midnight, and I changed the subject. “What did you think when you found out that we were being beaten all those years?” I was referring to a time not long after Sister Catherine died, when turmoil roiled the Center and, in a moment of near revolution, the children told their parents about the beatings with the Big Punisher that were meted out at the whim of an Angel for infractions often created out of whole cloth. My mother rushed to answer. “We were shocked. Sister Catherine had always told us how wonderful you children were, how good, how obedient and holy. We knew you could get into trouble, but there was never an inkling of physical abuse. I feel terrible to this day and will until I die. To have trusted my children to her and then to discover the treatments they received—for that I can never forgive myself.”

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I took full responsibility for what happened that day, a brazen and reckless decision that might have ended catastrophically. But a far more heinous incident would occur the following year, when I was not yet twenty-two years old. It would take me many years to forgive myself and decades before I was able to recount the event to others. My firm was expanding and a number of new brokers had been hired, each with a secretary or two. One new employee was a broker with a rollicking sense of Irish humor, a long client list (generating lots of commissions), and a hail- fellow-well-met attitude. He was given a large office, an obvious indication of his stature as a producer, and his desk was peppered with pictures of his third wife and their three children. Handsome he was not, with his Coke-bottle eyeglasses encased in thick black rims, and a figure that could at best be called portly. His secretary was a charming English girl, a few years older than I was. She and I shared the same sense of humor and were kindred spirits on account of each of us having recently broken up with a boyfriend. Her boss had a way of inviting us for drinks after work at the 99 Club, a pub frequented by Boston’s equivalent of Wall Street traders. It was a pleasant way to end the day before I headed to my evening classes at Boston University, where I was now enrolled. One afternoon, as he was leaving the office, he asked in an offhand way, “Want to catch a drink at the 99?” “Sure,” I replied, thinking I could have one quick drink before evening school.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  When I am eating a meal, I have no sense of portion control. I am a completist. If the food is on my plate, I must finish it. If there is food left on the stove, I must finish it. Rarely do I have leftovers. At first, it feels good, savoring each bite, the world falling away. I forget about my stresses, my sadness. All I care about are the flavors in my mouth, the extraordinary pleasure of the act of eating. I start to feel full but I ignore that fullness and then that sense of fullness goes away and all I feel is sick, but still, I eat. When there is nothing left, I no longer feel comfort. What I feel is guilt and uncontrollable self-loathing, and oftentimes, I find something else to eat, to soothe those feelings and, strangely, to punish myself, to make myself feel sicker so that the next time, I might remember how low I feel when I overindulge. I never remember. This is to say, I know what it means to hunger without being hungry. My father believes hunger is in the mind. I know differently. I know that hunger is in the mind and the body and the heart and the soul. 57I have chronic heartburn because I used to make myself throw up after I ate. There’s a word for this, “bulimia,” but it always feels strange to use that word with regard to myself. For a time, I did try to become that girl I envy, the one with the discipline to disorder her eating. I didn’t do it for that long, I tell myself. That’s not really the truth. I did it for about two years, which isn’t that long but is long enough. Or, maybe I don’t want to use the word because it was so long ago, which is absolutely not the truth. I stopped making myself throw up about four years ago. And sometimes, I relapse. Sometimes, I just want to rid myself of all the food in my body. I want to feel empty.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  If I must share my story, I want to do so on my terms, without the attention that inevitably follows. I do not want pity or appreciation or advice. I am not brave or heroic. I am not strong. I am not special. I am one woman who has experienced something countless women have experienced. I am a victim who survived. It could have been worse, so much worse. That’s what matters and is even more a travesty here, that having this kind of story is utterly common. I hope that by sharing my story, by joining a chorus of women and men who share their stories too, more people can become appropriately horrified by how much suffering is born of sexual violence, how far-reaching the repercussions can be. I often write around what happened to me because that is easier than going back to that day, to everything leading up to that day, to what happened after. It’s easier than facing myself and the ways, despite everything I know, in which I feel culpable for what happened. Even now, I feel guilt not only for what happened, but for how I handled the after, for my silence, for my eating and what became of my body. I write around what happened because I don’t want to have to defend myself. I don’t want to have to deal with the horror of such exposure. I guess that makes me a coward, afraid, weak, human. I write around what happened because I don’t want my family to have these terrible images in their heads. I don’t want them to know what I endured and then kept secret for more than twenty-five years. I don’t want my lover seeing only a moment from my assault when they look at me. I don’t want them to think me more fragile than I am. I am stronger than I am broken. I don’t want them, or anyone, to think I am nothing more than the worst thing that has ever happened to me. I want to protect the people I love. I want to protect myself. My story is mine, and on most days, I wish I could bury that story, somewhere deep where I might be free of it. But. It has been thirty years and, inexplicably, I am still not free of it. I all too often write around my story, but still, I write. I share parts of my story, and this sharing becomes part of something bigger, a collective testimony of people who have painful stories too. I make that choice.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  The second to last woman I loved during my twenties, Fiona, finally made the grand gesture I always wanted her to make after I moved on or convinced myself I had moved on, because she would never give me what I needed—commitment, fidelity, affection. We were still friends, but I was seeing someone else, Adriana, who was beautiful and kind and crazy, though we too would ultimately be incompatible. Adriana lived across the country and was visiting me in the Midwest. We were having a good time. We did not yet know the worst things about each other. As these things seem to go, something about Adriana’s temporary presence in our city made Fiona realize I was almost beyond her grasp. My relationship with Fiona had been largely unspoken. We spent all our time together. Sometimes we were intimate. We knew each other’s families. She was single and developed infatuations and sometimes relationships with other women, and still, I was there. We were there. It was enough until it wasn’t. And there was Adriana. She wanted to give me more and I let her even though I didn’t have enough to give her. During Adriana’s visit, Fiona kept calling me. There was an urgency in her voice I had always wanted to hear. She needed me and I was in a complicated place where being needed was very attractive. At one point during her visit, I dropped off Adriana at a bookstore and ran to Fiona’s house because she said she simply had to see me. I don’t even remember what we talked about, but I do remember that when I went to pick up Adriana, I felt guilty, couldn’t look her in the eye. I had gotten in the habit, you see, of dating women who wouldn’t give me what I wanted, who couldn’t possibly love me enough because I was a gaping wound of need. I couldn’t admit this to myself, but there was a pattern of intense emotional masochism, of throwing myself into the most dramatic relationships possible, of needing to be a victim of some kind over, and over, and over. That was something familiar, something I understood.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  23Throughout high school, I went through the motions, pretending to be the good student at school and the good daughter when I was talking to my parents, as my mind continued to splinter. With each passing year, I became more and more disgusted with myself. I was convinced that having been raped was my fault, that I deserved it, that what happened in the woods was all a pathetic girl like me could expect. I slept less and less because when I closed my eyes, I could feel boy bodies crushing my girl body, hurting my girl body. I smelled their sweat and beer breath and relived every terrible thing they did to me. I would wake up gasping and terrified and would spend the rest of the night staring at the ceiling or reading myself out of my body and out of my life and into something better. There was no rhyme or reason to what I read: lots of Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler for the pure escape they provided, Harlequin romances because they were so bountiful, whatever I could find in the campus library. During the day, I went to class, which was, in its way, another kind of escape. Academically, Exeter was intense, way more rigorous than my college classes would ever be. I loved my classes. In architecture, we had to build a vessel that would keep an egg safe if we dropped it from the roof of the building, but we could only use, like, Styrofoam and rubber bands. In an English class every Upper (or junior, to the rest of the world) had to write a Reporter at Large essay—an in-depth project for which we had to do research and interview sources and immerse ourselves in a topic that interested us. Back then I wanted to be a doctor, one of the Haitian-parent-approved professions, so I wrote about a surgeon who was my family’s next-door neighbor. He was patient with my questions and allowed me to observe a surgery over spring break. While I worked on my Reporter at Large, I felt like I was so much more than a lame high school student.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  When I am eating a meal, I have no sense of portion control. I am a completist. If the food is on my plate, I must finish it. If there is food left on the stove, I must finish it. Rarely do I have leftovers. At first, it feels good, savoring each bite, the world falling away. I forget about my stresses, my sadness. All I care about are the flavors in my mouth, the extraordinary pleasure of the act of eating. I start to feel full but I ignore that fullness and then that sense of fullness goes away and all I feel is sick, but still, I eat. When there is nothing left, I no longer feel comfort. What I feel is guilt and uncontrollable self-loathing, and oftentimes, I find something else to eat, to soothe those feelings and, strangely, to punish myself, to make myself feel sicker so that the next time, I might remember how low I feel when I overindulge. I never remember. This is to say, I know what it means to hunger without being hungry. My father believes hunger is in the mind. I know differently. I know that hunger is in the mind and the body and the heart and the soul. 57I have chronic heartburn because I used to make myself throw up after I ate. There’s a word for this, “bulimia,” but it always feels strange to use that word with regard to myself. For a time, I did try to become that girl I envy, the one with the discipline to disorder her eating. I didn’t do it for that long, I tell myself. That’s not really the truth. I did it for about two years, which isn’t that long but is long enough. Or, maybe I don’t want to use the word because it was so long ago, which is absolutely not the truth. I stopped making myself throw up about four years ago. And sometimes, I relapse. Sometimes, I just want to rid myself of all the food in my body. I want to feel empty.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  To make matters worse, I was still attracted to men, often intensely. In bed with my girlfriends, I sometimes pretended I was with someone else, someone with a body harder in certain places, leaner in others. I told myself it was enough. I told myself everyone has fantasies. I hated myself for wanting men when men had hurt me so badly. I told myself I was gay. I told myself this was all I could have so I couldn’t get hurt. I told myself I was stone. For quite some time, I touched but wouldn’t allow myself to be touched. I was stone and untouchable. I seethed. I was swollen with desire, with a desperate need to be touched, to feel a woman’s skin against my skin, to find release through pleasure. I withheld even that from myself. I punished myself. I was stone. I could not bleed. Years later, I realized that I could bleed and I could make others bleed. At the end of Adriana’s visit, I returned home after taking her to the airport, leaving her with the promise we would see each other again soon. It was a promise I kept before I broke another promise and then broke her heart. Fiona had written me beautiful letters telling me everything I always wanted to hear from her. I sat on my couch, reading her words over and over, shaking because, finally, I had everything I wanted from her in the palm of my hand, and because, even then, I knew I was going to push her away. All I needed to do was pick up the phone and dial a number. All I needed to do was say, “Yes.” 69For far too long, I did not know desire. I simply gave myself, gave my body, to whoever offered me even the faintest of interest. This was all I deserved, I told myself. My body was nothing. My body was a thing to be used. My body was repulsive and therefore deserved to be treated as such. I did not deserve to be desired. I did not deserve to be loved. In relationships, I never allowed myself to make the first move because I knew I was repulsive. I did not allow myself to initiate sex. I did not dare want something so fine as affection or sexual pleasure. I knew I had to wait until it was offered, each and every time. I had to be grateful for what was offered. I entered relationships with people who mostly tolerated me and occasionally offered me a trifle of affection. There was the woman who cheated on me and the woman who stabbed my favorite teddy bear with a steak knife and the woman who always seemed to need money and the woman who was too ashamed of me to take me to work parties. There were men too, but they were mostly unmemorable and, frankly, I expected them to hurt me.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  Then they would all laugh till the tears started running down. I wasn’t at all sure what was so funny, but I laughed anyway. I liked being one of the women with my aunts, liked feeling a part of something nasty and strong and separate from my big rough boy-cousins and the whole world of spitting, growling, overbearing males. Bastard Out of Carolina 7 “D on’t you ever let me catch you stealing,” Mama commanded in one of her rare lectures, after Cousin Grey got caught running out of the White Horse Winn Dixie with a bargain quart of RC Cola. “You want something, you tell me, and if it’s worth the trouble we’ll find a way. But I an’t gonna have no child of mine caught stealing.” I took Mama at her word and hung around with my cousins Garvey and Grey, planning not to get caught and not to tell Mama. But one afternoon after I produced Tootsie Rolls for Reese and me, Mama took my hands in hers like she was going to cry. “Where’d you get them?” “Uncle Earle,” I suggested. “No.” Mama dropped down a little so her face was close to mine. “Aunt Alma.” Carefully, I made my face a mask. “Don’t lie too.” The lines in her face looked as deep as the rivers that flowed south toward Charleston. “Tell me the truth.” I started to cry. “Downtown with Grey and Garvey this morning, at the Woolworth’s counter.” Mama used her forefinger to wipe the tears off my cheeks. She wiped her own. “Is this all of it? How many did you take?” “Two others, Mama. I ate one, gave Reese one.” Mama leaned back in her chair, dropping my hands. She shook a cigarette out of the pack and lit it carefully. I sat still, watching her, waiting. Tears kept collecting in the corners of my eyes, and I had to turn to wipe them away on my shoulder, but I kept watching Mama’s face as she sat and smoked without looking at me. The fingers of her right hand rubbed together steadily like the legs of grasshoppers I had seen climbing up the long grass at Aunt Raylene’s place. Her lips moved steadily too, as if she were sucking on her teeth or about to speak, but she was quiet a long time, just sitting there looking off through the open window smoking her cigarette. “You know your cousin Tommy Lee? Aunt Ruth’s oldest boy?” I frowned, trying to remember their names. There was Dwight, I knew, Lucius, D.W., Graham, yeah, Tommy Lee, and Butch.

• From Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

  It was dark, with dirty windows we had to scrub repeatedly to get clean. The only cheerful thing in the whole place was the blue-flowered wallpaper that set the kitchen area off from the rest of the front room. When I sat at the table to do my homework I always faced that wallpaper. I didn’t want to look at Reese, camped out in the bedroom with her coloring books and angry scowls, or at Mama, sitting wordless over on the couch, smoking, wiping her eyes, and listening to the radio. Mama had left the television set behind, left her washer, most of her furniture and dishes, and all of her knickknacks and good silverware. She had brought the sewing machine, the ironing board, our clothes, and most of hers. Since we hadn’t been there to help her pack, it was hard to figure out how she had decided what to take and what to leave, and since she clearly didn’t want to talk, it was impossible to ask. Reese complained about the television and her bicycle, but Mama just said she’d get us new ones in time. I didn’t question her, didn’t complain, barely spoke. It was my fault, everything, Mama’s silence and Reese’s rage. I lay in the bed with my hands clutched under my chin and my knees drawn up to my breasts. I kept remembering those last few days like a hurried, confusing dream, not Daddy Glen beating me but the morning Mama told me about Aunt Ruth, not the Woolworth’s robbery but talking to Butch, and not the noise and uproar when Benny, Aunt Fay, and Aunt Carr drove off to the hospital with Daddy Glen but those brief horrible moments when Aunt Raylene showed my thighs to Uncle Earle. I kept trying to figure out how I could have prevented it all from happening, not drunk that beer, not let anyone see, gone to Mama and made sure she knew that I had deserved that beating—kept everything smooth and quiet. That night at Ruth’s, Aunt Raylene had told me not to brood, that it would take time for Mama to forgive herself. For what? I wondered. Mama hadn’t done anything wrong. I was the one who had made Daddy Glen mad. I was the one who made everybody crazy. No, Raylene told me. I wasn’t to think that way. She had whispered in a rough, strained voice that Mama loved me, that she loved me, that Earle and my uncles loved me. She was insistent, holding me tight to her, but I didn’t listen. I clamped my teeth together and sucked my tongue up so tight to the roof of my mouth that my throat ached.