Loneliness

Passages

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

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• From The Folding Star (1994)

  At the end the older man shot off up Rose's leg and you saw the milky drops hang and trickle among the thick hairs of his calf. Rose himself didn't come, and the camera drifted off in a cliche pan to distance that went out of the open window. It was night now, and for a few seconds we saw from above the shadow and flare of a city, the walkway lights of high-rise housing echoed further off by the ribbons of light on ships in dock, and between them a network of streets, pulsating and nameless. I felt the greatest reluctance to take my clothes off and hurried into bed in shirt and trousers. I pulled the blankets around me and when Matt got in, shivering and excited, I hugged him like an old wrestler, so that he could hardly breathe. By the time he had started snoring I was boiling hot and had to get out of bed to strip. I stood there wretchedly, eyes half-closed with fatigue, unbuttoning my shirt. As I fumbled with my jeans there was a clatter that made me jump and fall over, and a voice close behind me, intimate and unwelcome. "Hi, you've reached Chad Masters, I guess you've seen me around . . ." I strolled across the empty arena of the Grote Markt and stood to admire, or at least acknowledge, its weathered self-acclaim. I felt alone, like a survivor in a city visited by a curse—and nervous about how long I could hope to carry on myself, pitted and limping as I was. I turned up the collar of Cherif’s coat and raised my head to scan the belfry, which seemed to curve and topple against fast-moving cloud. When I looked down I was giddy almost as if I'd been up there—it was steadying to hear my name called out. I turned and there was Patrick coming quickly towards me, half-smiling, glancing away. There was something free and yet formal in our coming together at the centre of this great square, and I spread my arms to gesture at the scale of it, though he may have thought that I expected to embrace him. He was vividly conspicuous in a pink skiing-jacket over a green tartan shirt that as usual hung out at the front. I thought how good-looking he was, and then saw the disquiet and resolve of someone who brings bad news. We shook hands and frowned and stamped as if waiting for others to turn up, the rest of the routed Three perhaps: I saw that Patrick and I only had a friend in common, we weren't friends ourselves. "Do you want to go for a coffee?" he said.

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

  She explained, “I feel like a stranger at his place. I don’t feel comfortable there. I have no friends and there’s nothing for me to do.” “Why do you go?” I asked, trying to find out what she had been told and what she understood about the purpose of her bimonthly trips. “Because I have to,” she replied. “Why do you have to?” “I don’t really know,” Joan said. “Some silly judge said that I had to. I have to go two weekends every month and all July.” “Does your father want to see you?” “I don’t think so.” She frowned. “He doesn’t love me. People who love people respect them. He never asks me whether I want to come or what I want to do. He never gives me permission not to come. He was different when he lived with us.” I admit that I found her protest both rational and convincing. Since she had been given no say over her free time, how could she think differently? She was keenly aware that none of her friends had such obligations. I was also concerned by the strength of her feeling that her father and “some silly judge” had treated her unjustly. As a young teenager, she was trying to establish her own ideas and values, yet the adults who held authority over her life set a questionable example. “What happens when you ask him if you can go to a weekend school activity?” Tears welled in Joan’s eyes. “He won’t let me change. I tried. He says that’s his time.” She shook her head sadly. Then in a rush she added, “When summer comes, all the other kids in my class look forward to it. I dread it. I hate July. It’s terrible for me. Last July I cried the whole month and thought, why am I being sentenced? What crime did I commit? I was so lonely and I missed my friends. Paula and I would cry ourselves to sleep every night. I felt like a second-class citizen. ” After this interview, I worried about Joan. Surely her conclusion that she was being sentenced by the court, like someone who had broken the law, to spend lonely summers with her father was hurtful to her and would not contribute to her loving or respecting him then or in the future. Her phrase “second-class citizen” reverberated in my mind. For her part, Paula’s mom quickly came to appreciate the new freedom offered by two childless weekends per month. She could spend Friday nights in the city with her boyfriend and long weekends catching up on work, sleeping, and reading the Sunday paper.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘I’d have a shower, lads,’ said Bill professionally. Watching the lads undress I felt, as perhaps Bill always felt too, not only randy curiosity but a real pang of exclusion, in every way outside their world. The shower was a perfunctory business and soon Alastair was back by us, towelling himself with surprising unselfconsciousness for a sixteen-year-old. I realised why it was, when, after tucking his long-skinned dick into cheap red knickers, and pulling on a grey jersey and those baggy, splotch-bleached jeans which look as though a circle of kids have jacked off all over them, he said to Bill: ‘I got to go and see my girlfriend.’ Bill grinned at him wretchedly. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ he said. 7At my prep school the prefects (for some errant Wykehamical reason) were called Librarians. The appellation seemed to imply that in the care of books lay the roots of leadership—though, by and large, there was nothing bookish about the Librarians themselves. They were chosen on grounds of aptitude for particular tasks, and were known officially by the name of their responsibility. So there were the Chapel Librarian, the Hall Librarian, the Garden Librarian and even, more charmingly, the Running and the Cricket Librarians. My aptitude, from the tropically early onslaught of puberty forwards, had been so narrowly, though abundantly, for playing with myself and others, that it was only in my last term, as a shooting, tumid thirteen-year-old, that I achieved official status, and was appointed Swimming-Pool Librarian. My parents were evidently relieved that I was not entirely lost (urged absurdly to read Trollope I had stuck fast on Rider Haggard) and my father, in a letter to me, made one of his rare witticisms: ‘Delighted to hear that you’re to be Swimming-Pool Librarian. You must tell me what sort of books they have in the Swimming-Pool Library.’

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

  When his mother left the marriage, seven-year-old Larry was enraged and sought to restore the marriage with the collusive help of his father. I compare Larry’s life to the experiences had by Carol, a young woman whose parents engaged in lifelong violence with zero intention of ever separating. Larry and Carol shed light on the perceptions of children and adolescents raised in violent families and how these attitudes affect their adult lives. Part Three is about Paula, a young child who suffered intense loneliness after divorce when her mother had to go to school and work fulltime. In adulthood, Paula is herself a single parent who is starting over after a wild adolescence and an impulsive early marriage. Her story enables me to explore the long-term effect of court-ordered visiting, joint custody, and other court policies that shape children’s lives and attitudes toward their parents. No person in our comparison group suffered an experience equivalent to Paula’s sudden loss of a loving protective environment, and so they are not included in this section. Part Four is about Billy, a child who was born with a congenital heart condition and who had special needs that prevented him from adapting to his parents’ new lives. Divorce is particularly challenging for such vulnerable children who are not able to handle change very well. In this section, I also explore the issue of who pays for college when obligatory child support stops at age eighteen. Part Five is about Lisa, who was raised in a family where every effort was made to keep the peace. She grew up in comfortable surroundings with the support of two loving parents and an affectionate stepmother. Nevertheless, when Lisa entered adulthood she encountered serious problems in trusting men. She struggled with feelings that stemmed from the long ago divorce. Compared to Betty, who was raised in a very happy intact family, Lisa is not sure that she can find a life partner, raise children, and trust in the institution of marriage. In telling these stories, I realized that adults raised in divorced families carry within them a unique kind of history. They are the product of two distinct families and the transition between them. Their lives begin within an intact family that one day vanishes. This is replaced by a series of upheavals that leave them confused and frightened. The next chapters of their lives occur within the postdivorce family, which can take many forms. The family can expand to include a new cast of characters—other adults or children who are temporarily or permanently a part of their lives—or it can contract into a diminished version of the predivorce household. And it can be everything in between. These disparate parts of their histories continue to occupy their minds as they mature. At each new developmental stage, they assess anew what they have lost or gained from the divorce.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I felt trapped in the house, but didn't want to miss a phone-call if it came. We had a smart, trilling phone but it was on a party-line, and I imagined Dawn baffled and kept at bay by the engaged tone as our talkative neighbours (whom we knew only from the inane fragments of chat that obstructed us when we tried to ring out) were maundering on. I began to hallucinate the cheep of the phone in the routine undertones and overtones of the house—in the burble and chink of the fridge, inside the dreary howl of the hoover, in the tinkling drops of a filling cistern. Perhaps I was going mad with desolation. I lay on the floor a lot, gazing across the landing to where the sunlight slanted along the carpet of the front bedroom, showing up various boxes that had been stowed away beneath the bed. Once when everyone was out, I went into the sitting-room and stormed up and down on the piano, which I had refused to learn, with clumsy ferocity—Sibelius standing thoughtfully beside me, as if ready to turn the page. Those were rare moments of faute de mieux togetherness with the dog, which otherwise owed all its loyalty to my parents, and still if I took him for a walk would run away. Sometimes a postcard came from holidaying friends and I examined the grim communality of the beaches with burning interest. That lad in black trunks, half a centimetre high in the middle distance at Rapallo or Cagnes-sur-Mer, looked pretty hot. It was so sexy there. Here there were only some beery lads on the grass, or old gents with their shirts off sitting on benches, listening to the cricket on tiny trannies. In town I found things taking on an absurd sexual significance: I tramped round and round on imaginary errands so as to see a butcher's boy with a spot-crossed full-mouthed face joking in the doorway with his workless mates. I knew where in Digby's the second-hand manuals of photography and volumes of obsolete sexology were shelved. Even the square-jawed beige mannequins in an outfitters' window, with a generalised mound between the legs, possessed a certain power of suggestion, as did the surreal cross-sections used to display underwear, as if the erogenous zones had been cast life-size in milk chocolate. Being in love seemed to license and heighten random desire all around; I felt guiltily untouched by the conventional wisdom of never looking at another man.

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

  And it’s hard because, like, I have friends at my school but they can’t come to my dad’s house. And there are some kids I play with when I’m at my dad’s but I only see them when I’m there. And a lot of the time they don’t remember that I’m going to be there and they’ve made plans to play with someone else. So I don’t have anyone to play with when I go there. And when I’m at my mom’s the kids have made plans I don’t know about. Sometimes you feel like a rubber band. And,” here Racer looked very solemn, “if this boy likes to play baseball tell him he’ll probably miss some games and maybe some practices—that’s what happens. I hope his coach understands.” “Your mom told me you play baseball. She said you liked to pitch.” (This was an understatement. Racer is passionate about baseball but his parents have trouble getting him to practices and games with one home in Berkeley and one in San Jose.) “Yeah, I like to play a lot,” Racer told me. “Our team has the best record. We’re going to be in the championships. And the coach told me that I could pitch in the play-offs. But only if I’m there for the rest of the season.” Racer looked worried. “Have you talked to your parents about this? It’s so important to you.” “They said they’d try to work it out to get me to all the rest of the games, but I don’t know.” Racer scowled. “They say that a lot, but things don’t work out.” “If you could change something, what would it be? ” “Going back and forth bugs me. Like me and my friends are playing and then it’s time to leave right when we’re into a game. And I have things I really want to do on weekends, like baseball, and I miss important stuff.” “Could you be on a baseball team in San Jose, where your dad lives?” Racer looked at me as if I’d taken leave of my senses. “That wouldn’t solve anything.” His tone was a mixture of condescension and irritation. “It’d just make everything worse. Then I’d have two teams that I couldn’t make it to the games for and two coaches who’d be mad at me.” “Of course; I see exactly what you mean.” I hastened to regain lost ground. “It’s a problem.” “A big problem,” Racer emphasized. “Their houses are too far apart. I wish they would get together.” As Racer walked out the door, I thought to myself that this was certainly a mixed review of joint custody by the young expert I had consulted. He complained of fatigue, which is unusual among children his age. Could Racer be describing the strain he’s under as fatigue? Was he having trouble sleeping?

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  And among the red-nosed Brueghel boys with bicycles there were others who looked bored and stylish and desirable. I found myself marvelling that they lived here. I saw five rooms in all, but chose without hesitation. The others were such vessels of loneliness, or else too pinned and stifled with rules and considerations for someone who had finally left home. I had a horror of lying there, forbidden to smoke, listening to the cistern filling overhead. It was usually a housewife, garrulous and noncommittal, who would let me in and take me up, observing resentfully as I felt the bed or opened the hanging cupboard. In two of the houses other pallid lodgers were caught on their way between bedroom and lavatory and given a warning. I hardly saw Cherif as a welcome regular in such a place, or the romance of my new life unfurling under such surveillance. The room I chose was so hidden away that it gave me the sensation of having entered, with dreamlike suddenness, into the secret inner life of the city. On the street it was a doctor's establishment, a bare white house with a brass plate polished almost flat. At the side a gated passage led through into a shallow courtyard: the doctor's residence backed on to a far older range of buildings—rough pink brick, steep roofs with the high-up doors and hoists of warehouse attics. Like a tiny Cambridge college, it had two stairways, one at either end, leading up to disused workshops, storerooms, and, on the second floor, two sets of rooms that were let. One had just been taken by some Spanish girls; the other, which was cheap but primitive, was mine; the old doctor (who still saw a few patients in his retirement) told me in French how pleased he was to have an Englishman there. All down one side of the room ran unusually deep cupboards, each with an enamel number, and a door that shut with a boom. I could only occupy them all by putting underpants in one, shoes in two, jerseys in number three; when number four was opened my leather jacket was revealed like a historic vestment in a cathedral treasury, flanked by the monstrances of my special bottles and jars. Each shelf had been neatly lined with old newspaper, held in place by drawing-pins; I turned my head sideways to scan the time-silvered sports news and antique auto-tests.

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

  Although Lisa’s message was troubling, her directness was utterly appealing. I felt on safe enough ground to ask, “You don’t think you would enjoy marriage?” Lisa snapped back, “That’s not it!” These young people almost always correct me when I don’t get their meaning straight. “I’d like to get married but I don’t think that I ever will, not ever.” She shook her head vigorously. “When I was just out of college and my friends started to get married I’d think, Oh my God, there is no way I could ever be in something that would work like this. For a few years I was envious. And now I just don’t care anymore.” “Are you dating anyone?” “Well, maybe you could call it that. A few months ago, John moved into my house. We’d been seeing each other for about six months and decided that we didn’t like sleeping in two places. He’s a nice guy, Judy. He likes me a lot. He’s going to be forty-two next month. We’ve decided to live together but we’re never going to get married or anything. He’s gone through two divorces and he’s had enough. We’re not planning on having any children together, unless you count our golden retrievers as ersatz kids.” She laughed at the very thought. “So to anticipate your next question, yes, I’ve pretty much decided to remain single for the rest of my life. John treats me well, but to be totally honest with you, I’m not in love with him. He keeps me from being lonely.” Lisa looked away, as if embarrassed by this confession. “Sometimes I think it would be the most wonderful thing in the world to love somebody one hundred percent with my whole heart and soul. But that’s never going to happen to me. It’s a far-fetched dream. Living with John is a lot easier and pleasanter than any alternatives that I know. Love a man and expect to cry has become my mantra. Last Valentine’s Day he gave me a diamond ring in a weak moment but I had the good sense to turn him down. ‘Thanks but no thanks,’ I told him. ‘It’s better for both of us not to go down that road. But it’s a neat ritual. You can propose to me once a year. It’s a no-risk proposition.” “What does that mean?” I was mystified by her comment.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Though I felt happy for my sister, her new life heightened my sense of separation. For my entire existence, we had lived under the same roof, but now she lived in Middletown, and I lived with Ken about twenty miles away. While Lindsay built a life almost in opposition to the one she left behind—she would be a good mother, she would have a successful marriage (and only one)—I found myself mired in the things that both of us hated. While Lindsay and her new husband took trips to Florida and California, I was stuck in a stranger’s house in Miamisburg, Ohio. Chapter 9Mamaw knew little of how this arrangement affected me, partly by design. During a long Christmas break, just a couple of months after I’d moved in with my new stepfather, I called her to complain. But when she answered, I could hear the voices of family in the background—my aunt, I thought, and cousin Gail, and perhaps some others. The background noise suggested holiday merriment, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her what I had called to say: that I loathed living with these strangers and that everything that had made my life to that point tolerable—the reprieve of her house, the company of my sister—had apparently vanished. I asked her to tell everyone whose voice I heard in the background that I loved them, and then I hung up the phone and marched upstairs to watch TV. I had never felt so alone. Happily, I continued to attend Middletown’s schools, which kept me in touch with my school friends and gave me an excuse to spend a few hours at Mamaw’s. During active school sessions, I saw her a few times a week, and every time I did, she reminded me of the importance of doing well academically. She often remarked that if anyone in our family “made it,” it would be me. I didn’t have the heart to tell her what was really happening. I was supposed to be a lawyer or a doctor or a businessman, not a high school dropout. But I was much closer to dropping out than I was to anything else. She learned the truth when Mom came to me one morning demanding a jar of clean urine. I had stayed at Mamaw’s the night before and was getting ready for school when Mom walked in, frantic and out of breath. She had to submit to random urinalyses from the nursing board in order to keep her license, and someone had called that morning demanding a sample by the end of the day. Mamaw’s piss was dirtied with a half dozen prescription drugs, so I was the only candidate. Mom’s demand came with a strong air of entitlement. She had no remorse, no sense that she was asking me to do something wrong. Nor was there any guilt over the fact that she had broken yet another promise to never use drugs. I refused.

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

  I worked like a dog. I was exhausted most of the time. I came home and fell asleep. I sure drank more than was good for me. I taught myself to go without dinner because I was too upset and lonely when I had to eat alone. So I had breakfast and lunch at work and no supper. I had to get up at four so I had a good excuse to go to bed real early.” Passivity ALTHOUGH BILLY SUFFERED with special physical difficulties, his story is familiar. Many young men from divorced families enter adulthood feeling lonely and utterly unlovable. 1 They are not angry like Paula or Larry, or unable to separate like Karen, but instead they are depressed and defeated. Billy was a poster child for this group. “You said that you were worried about being betrayed? Has anyone ever cheated on you?” “When I was twenty-three, I met this woman who sort of asked whether she could stay with me. She wasn’t bad-looking so I said okay. We lived together for four months and I was getting to like her. Then one day I came home unexpectedly from a business trip. She had told me that she was going to be out with her girlfriends, but when I arrived, she was driving by, cute as a button, riding on the back of a guy’s motorbike.” “What did you do?” “Do?” Again that startled look. “Nothing. I didn’t even mention it. I just moved out three weeks later without saying a word. I left all my belongings. It took me two years to write to her but I didn’t mail the letter.” I was amazed at his reluctance to confront or even ask her. “Billy, why didn’t you mention it?” He looked sheepish and I decided to let it drop. But then with a passionate outburst, he let fly, “If I had mentioned it, what good would it have done? She would have said, ‘Get lost! I’m with him now.’ You’re probably going to ask me why I’m so cautious. It’s real simple. Name one thing I could have changed. Tell me one person who asked me. Did I want them to divorce? Did I like taking orders about all my chores from my stepfather? Did my dad want me around? Did my mother ask me before she got a whole new family? Did they ask me whether I wanted tuition money for college like the other guys? Who ever asked me anything? Who listened to me? Who helped me grow up? Life is the way it is. You know that Spanish expression? Qué será será, what will be, will be. Let me tell you something else while I’m spilling my guts. Say you came to see me or asked me like on a questionnaire or the phone (his voice rose to a quavering falsetto), ‘How are you doing, Billy?’ I would swear that I was fine.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  It was the middle of the evening, and not too late, I thought, to ring Charles up. I was amused to see that there were two C. Nantwiches in the directory, and that mine did not choose to distinguish himself from his namesake in Excelsior Gardens, SE 13. The phone was answered at once by a brusque-sounding man, evidently Lewis’s replacement; I was relieved that Charles had found someone and felt ashamed of my self-centred neglect of the old boy. ‘I’ll see if his Lordship’s in,’ said the man, which struck me as an especially absurd formula in this case. Charles came on almost immediately. ‘Hello! Hello!’ he was going. He had evidently started talking before picking up the receiver. ‘Charles! It’s William … William Beckwith.’ ‘My dear. How frightfully pleasant to hear you. Are you reading my stuff?’ ‘I certainly am. I was just ringing to say how terrific I think it is.’ ‘Are you enjoying it, then?’ ‘I think it’s wonderful. I’ve just read about you and Chancey Brough in the woods near Witney.’ ‘Oh …?’ I chose not to elaborate on something he appeared, at least, to have forgotten. But I was very struck that, as well as the Winchester stuff, which, despite its period, spoke for me too, down to the very details of places and customs, there was a much less expected fore-echo of my own life in the episode of the Old Castle. I had been to the same place, Pevsner in hand, on an architectural drive with my tutor. The end whose beginning Charles had witnessed over sixty years before was near at hand: the roof had fallen in, the stained-glass windows were boarded up, a barbed-wire fence surrounded the site and red and white signs said ‘Danger—Falling Masonry’. ‘And I also wanted to find out how you were.’ After a silence he said: ‘Are you coming to see me again?’ ‘Of course, I’d love to—there’s so much I want to talk to you about.’ ‘Don’t come tomorrow.’ ‘No, all right.’ ‘You’re pretty interested in my story, then, are you?’ he said with a chuckle. ‘Quite a tale, isn’t it?’ ‘It may be too much of a tale for me to tell …’ I said with pussyfooting kindness. ‘My dear, I think it would be a good thing,’ Charles pursued as if he had not heard (and perhaps he hadn’t), ‘if you went down to Stepney on Friday. Have a little parley with old Shillibeer at the Limehouse Boys’ Club. Friday’s the big night—it would save me telling you … so much. It’s a seven o’clock start, of course.’ ‘Er—yes, all right …’ I said. ‘And come and see me at the weekend? It’s lonely as bloody hell here’ (he whispered the last three words as if there had been ladies present). ‘My new man will have to meet you …’ Then the line went dead. He had simply, impractically, absent-mindedly, hung up.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘About love and sex and life in general.’ He put down his coffee mug as if it were a nuisance. ‘I don’t know, I just feel so out of it. I’m working so hard I can scarcely do anything I want—I never see anybody. Well, I see hundreds of people, but never anybody I want to see. When did we last meet, for instance? I know you’re busy with your boys and what have you—but I would like to see you darling a bit more often, you know? You are one of my oldest, dearest friends, fuck it.’ ‘I do feel the same, James. I’m always thinking of you and having conversations with you in my head and imagining what you would say about things. You’re my most constant companion, even though I’m so pathetic and never get in touch with you.’ He smiled: ‘You see, just talking to you now makes me feel better. Which proves we should meet more often.’ He turned away. ‘How’s it going with Phil?’ I wasn’t sure if he wanted the gratifying news that it was all over, a mere flash amid the long day of our relationship, or the mortifying assurance that it was all going fine. ‘I must say, we do rather adore each other,’ I offered, with a modesty that may have sounded like bragging. ‘He’s really cuddly.’ ‘That’s it,’ James said, with nodding recognition. ‘It’s cuddling I want really as much as everything else. It’ll sound stupid to you, Willy, but over the last few weeks I’ve just felt … so out of it. I’ve gone so long without love and I’ve become simply so accustomed to it all, as if that’s how life is and evermore shall be—death—horror—amen. It struck me that I’ve turned into the archetypal middle-class intellectual out of touch with everything, just like someone in a Forster novel, and that was eighty years ago … It’s all very well being ironic, but then it keeps coming over me that no one wants me, the summer’s burning away, and no one makes a move for me, I don’t preoccupy anyone …’ He wailed a little but was unable to cry. I went over and held him. ‘Darling heart, of course people want you. You’re so adorable.’ I kissed away the tears that weren’t there. I found him very slightly repellent. ‘They don’t. No one ever wants to fuck me.’ I chuckled almost. ‘I’ll fuck you—here and now, if that’s what you want,’ and I let my hand drift down his back and over his big schoolboy bum. He smiled shyly. ‘That would never do,’ he said. It wouldn’t of course. I held him away from me, looked at him frankly. ‘Last night,’ I reminded him.

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

  In high school and as young adults they are kindred souls who can share complaints about their past, specifics about custody or visiting arrangements, and how they put up with parents’ problems. During adolescence especially, they hang out in packs, providing each other with the support and comfort they don’t get at home. They take care of each other with money, sympathy, and a place to crash. I have seen several ersatz families, some in elegant neighborhoods, where the young people have left home or been ejected or the parent has walked away. As these children mature, they are drawn together by common worries about the future, concern for and resentment of parents, and their pervasive loneliness. They desperately need to tell their story, but agemates who have not lived through divorce are not all that sympathetic. So they look for and find someone who can listen and understand. It’s natural that Billy and Debbie would find each other. Unfortunately, their union was in peril from the start. Each brings a heavy load of distrust and fear to marriage. Each brings a great need for sympathy and comforting, which they hope the other person will provide in full measure. But if both people need to be nurtured who will provide what they both crave? Both have many past hurts that need to heal. They want and need the partner to be patient, loving, and forgiving. They are both vulnerable, easily hurt, and afraid of being unheard and unloved. And they are, as we have seen, quick to put the worst face on the other’s behavior. But I don’t want to give the impression that these marriages cannot work or are doomed to end in divorce. In our society, with its growing number of children from divorce, these marriages will inevitably multiply. That said, some good marriages I have seen are between children from divorced families. Many of these marriages work for the very reason that each spouse is aware of the difficulties they face and resolve to help each other grow and change. They understand each other’s history and are profoundly sympathetic to the other’s fears of conflict and expectation that the marriage might fail. Such marriages provide a healing experience and restore each person’s faith that they can find love and constancy in a troubled world. Karen’s ability to hope and trust is restored by her marriage to a loving man who wants to undo her childhood deprivations by teaching her to lighten up. Larry learns to forgive himself for his earlier behavior by marrying a woman who, in his words, “brought love and laughter into my life.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I went to the front window and watched Marcel emerge into the yard below and break into a heavy run as if, sedentary and breathless though the boy was, he could hardly wait to reach the gate and be free of me. I knew instinctively the freedom that he wanted—not freedom to do some challenging thing, but to do almost nothing, to wander homewards through the mild afternoon . . . I stayed with my forehead to the windowpane and within ten seconds there was the slap of the wicket again, and back came the curly-haired boy Matt and I had seen earlier. He had been to the big supermarket and swung a carrier with a loaf and a bunch of flowers sticking out of it. He disappeared into the Spanish girls' staircase and something told me that in the bulky lower part of the bag were cheesy nibbles, Cokes and Sprites and a beer or two for the boys. The girls were out now, as far as I could tell, but when they got back they were going to have a party! For a moment my gloom swallowed up my envy. I opened the hanging cupboard and got into it, tussling lightly with my raincoat and leather jacket and jangling the unused hangers on the rail. I had a fatalistic need to know what I was in for, what crass intrusions of noise I was going to tolerate; as well as a complete curiosity about the boy, who seemed to me unswervingly beautiful and sexy just then in contrast to the shrouded and ambiguous merits of Luc, who was never interested in girls. But after ten minutes with my ear pressed receptively to the wooden partition, I had picked up nothing beyond the snap of a ring-top can, a few words, half-said, half-sung, and a smug reverberant burp. At last I thought I heard a gently rhythmic noise, and had him frowningly exploring himself, until I realised it was the shushing of the pulse in my ear. I edged back into the room and shut the door. My route to the Town Baths was vague enough in my mind to take in the street where Luc lived without forcing, but when I came past the house I looked down nervously, and only glanced for a second searchingly into the ground-floor windows. Evening was coming on, and I could see nothing in the front rooms beyond the heavy swags of Mrs Altidore's curtains. And on the first floor, something else, the gleam of a disc, like a lens, suspended just inside the glass and catching the light with a flash of animation. Better not to see him just now.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Time was tearing along, but it would never be morning. Cherif had gone off somewhere—to Rotterdam so Ivo, the camp and caring barman, said, though Cherif in his blunt, hurt way had said nothing to Matt or me. I should perhaps have been worried, but his absence seemed to offer one of those undeserved respites from guilt and obligation. Then I noticed that it left me feeling lonely; Matt was lean and fit and fierce, I liked the gymnastic sex that had me sweat-soaked and out of breath; but when I woke to his rattling snores I began to think back tenderly to Cherif’s comfortable hug. I was writing a long and often interrupted letter to Edie, saying how Cherif had said he loved me and how I missed his dusty clothes and serious kissing. I was too self-absorbed to realise at first just how criminal Matt was. The little raid on the pantry should perhaps have alerted me; and later in the week, when he went in to find an electric fire to allay the new coolness of the nights, his landlady's back could be seen through the kitchen door as she washed up and dotingly harangued her cats. He was in love with his own boldness; when he came back with the fire I could see his cock was half-hard in his jeans—and in his face I saw bravado suppressed by the con-artist's cynical and touchy blankness. Then one evening when I came round I found him folding dirty underpants in tissue-paper and putting them in a batch of Jiffy bags with address-labels printed in capital letters. I made no comment on this and played up my latest Luc news in a show of blind infatuation which easily screened the fact that I had noticed. Not that Matt hid what he was doing: he was a competent operator. The whole thing stirred long-forgotten anxieties, uptight disapproval fighting with randy, craven admiration. My news was fairly momentous too. By now I always took in Luc's street in my walks across town and went past the house fast but brazenly, with a look of friendly expectancy that would have appeared slightly potty to another passer-by. I saw how my routes for simple errands were tugged into wide and tiring loops by the pull of that street and that house. The cheery tourist map was traversed by new trails, and a new and unsuspected shrine had been drawn in.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He swung into the seat behind me, and I felt his casual presence there as we trundled from stop to stop past churches and canals; when he whistled a little tune his breath stirred the hairs on the back of my neck. I thought, these are the evening routines which will soon be mine, the tug of an unknown suburb, or a bar, or a lover. I turned to ask him a further question I'd been nurturing, but it was just at the moment the tram seemed to lose its current and came to rest. A Young woman was waiting, smoking, and gave a contented wave. My friend jumped off and trotted her away under his arm, whilst the doors folded to with a sigh. I went on out, beyond the Stock Markets, hardly noticing, wondering what it was I had expected. For two or three stops I had the car to myself; I sensed the driver's puzzlement, and stared determinedly through the window at the featureless district we were passing through; then I panicked and rang the bell. When the tram moved off I found myself alone, and knew suddenly, as I had not done at the station or the hotel, that I had arrived in a strange city, in another country. Part of me shrank from the simple change of place. There was no one else in the street that led up to the church, no one in the shabby square that its tower overhung. St Vaast: an ugly old hulk, with a porch tacked on, all curlicues and dropping yellow stucco, with a nest-littered pediment above. It was locked, of course: no last light glimmering from a vestry window—no choral society meeting after work to rehearse their director's own Te Deum or some minatory Flemish motets. I went on with a shiver. From the further side of the square a lane led out to a still bleaker area. The street-lamps flickered into pink as I approached, but nothing else responded. The buildings were grandiose, like cinemas gone dark, the lower windows boarded up and plastered with posters for rock groups and the dud grins of politicians in the previous year's elections. The names of newspapers, printing works, engineering firms, in forward-looking Deco script, could still be read above the padlocked entrance grilles. There was a sense that cacophonous all-night business had been done here, and that the city, with a certain unflustered malevolence, had chosen its moment, and stilled it, and reasserted its own dead calm. At the street's end was the long vulgar front of a hotel, the Pilgrimage and Commercial, still with its brass entrance rail and the red and blue badges of motoring clubs. I climbed the steps, among the ghost-throng of arrivals, and peered through the splendid glass doors on to a shadowy half-acre of mud and rubble.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It didn't seem to them to be all that long since I had left. To me it did, so that I was reluctant to go in, and then hurt at how little fuss was made of me. The deaths of our friends were in the smoke-soured air, of course; they were still being talked about with original shock, and with the occasional hilarity that came with shock and brought a tear to the eye that the indulgent reminiscences failed to raise. From time to time someone would have the muffled excitement of breaking the news to a new arrival who hadn't heard. I noticed how the story was changing as each teller patched it together. I bought lagers for my old chums Danny and Simon, who must have known me well, we had drunk so much together and talked so much, up and down the scale between murky confession and the permitted embellishments of tales of conquest, the two of them drily puncturing my more preposterous flights; but I had an eerie sense of having broken with them, of looking in with envy on their steady and self-sufficient affair. The utterly unchanged bar, some of the men I had slept with at one time or another, even Dawn himself, existed in earlier, closed-down precincts of my life. When Simon asked me some perfectly straightforward question, I felt it had been run through a scrambler. What was the scene like in Belgium? You mean the scene . . . in Belgium . . . ? I couldn't think of anything to say. Willie and Alison had given up expecting me by the time I made it out to their house. She appeared in her dressing-gown, holding the baby, little Ralphie, whom she had just fed into fat-faced sleep. Willie was hurrying about in his socks, holding chewed toys, a stained cot-blanket. I felt I was interrupting something arduous and intimate. "What sort of time do you call this?" he demanded cheerfully, and gave me a sympathetic kiss on the cheek. Actually it was only half past nine, a time at which I normally comforted myself with the certainty of hours of drink to come; but when you entered the lives of young parents you were in another time-zone, pale faces came to meet you in the half-light, abstracted with fatigue. "It's like some awful kind of training," Willie said, "where they wake you up at odd hours of the night, and you have to put an engine together, or defuse a bomb." "I didn't know they did that." "Don't they? I thought they did . . . " He yawned like a dog, with a whine too. Alison had gone upstairs and didn't re-emerge. I imagined she'd just fallen asleep where she was. Willie looked mildly bemused by the silence, the social call from the outside world. He was piecing together what it was one did. I said, "Would you rather I went?" He was dismayed.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  But she had in fact done something: In the minutes between my call to Mamaw and Mom’s arrival, the woman had apparently dialed 911. So as Mom dragged me to her car, two police cruisers pulled up, and the cops who got out put Mom in handcuffs. She did not go quietly; they wrestled her into the back of a cruiser. Then she was gone. The second cop put me in the back of his cruiser as we waited for Mamaw to arrive. I have never felt so lonely, watching that cop interview the homeowner—still in her soaking-wet bathing suit, flanked by two pint-sized guard dogs—unable to open the cruiser door from the inside, and unsure when I could expect Mamaw’s arrival. I had begun to daydream when the car door swung open, and Lindsay crawled into the cruiser with me and clutched me to her chest so tightly that I couldn’t breathe. We didn’t cry; we said nothing. I just sat there being squeezed to death and feeling like all was right with the world. When we got out of the car, Mamaw and Papaw hugged me and asked if I was okay. Mamaw spun me around to inspect me. Papaw spoke with the police officer about where to find his incarcerated daughter. Lindsay never let me out of her sight. It had been the scariest day of my life. But the hard part was over. When we got home, none of us could talk. Mamaw wore a silent, terrifying anger. I hoped that she would calm down before Mom got out of jail. I was exhausted and wanted only to lie on the couch and watch TV. Lindsay went upstairs and took a nap. Papaw collected a food order for Wendy’s. On his way to the front door, he stopped and stood over me on the couch. Mamaw had left the room temporarily. Papaw placed his hand on my forehead and began to sob. I was so afraid that I didn’t even look up at his face. I had never heard of him crying, never seen him cry, and assumed he was so tough that he hadn’t even cried as a baby. He held that pose for a little while, until we both heard Mamaw approaching the living room. At that point he collected himself, wiped his eyes, and left. Neither of us ever spoke of that moment. Mom was released from jail on bond and prosecuted for a domestic violence misdemeanor. The case depended entirely on me. Yet during the hearing, when asked if Mom had ever threatened me, I said no. The reason was simple: My grandparents were paying a lot of money for the town’s highest-powered lawyer. They were furious with my mother, but they didn’t want their daughter in jail, either. The lawyer never explicitly encouraged dishonesty, but he did make it clear that what I said would either increase or decrease the odds that Mom spent additional time in prison.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Mamaw hated Mom’s various love interests and allowed none of them in Kentucky. In Ohio, I had grown especially skillful at navigating various father figures. With Steve, a midlife-crisis sufferer with an earring to prove it, I pretended earrings were cool—so much so that he thought it appropriate to pierce my ear, too. With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who saw my earring as a sign of “girlieness,” I had thick skin and loved police cars. With Ken, an odd man who proposed to Mom three days into their relationship, I was a kind brother to his two children. But none of these things were really true. I hated earrings, I hated police cars, and I knew that Ken’s children would be out of my life by the next year. In Kentucky, I didn’t have to pretend to be someone I wasn’t, because the only men in my life—my grandmother’s brothers and brothers-in-law—already knew me. Did I want to make them proud? Of course I did, but not because I pretended to like them; I genuinely loved them. The oldest and meanest of the Blanton men was Uncle Teaberry, nicknamed for his favorite flavor of chewing gum. Uncle Teaberry, like his father, served in the navy during World War II. He died when I was four, so I have only two real memories of him. In the first, I’m running for my life, and Teaberry is close behind with a switchblade, assuring me that he’ll feed my right ear to the dogs if he catches me. I leap into Mamaw Blanton’s arms, and the terrifying game is over. But I know that I loved him, because my second memory is of throwing such a fit over not being allowed to visit him on his deathbed that my grandma was forced to don a hospital robe and smuggle me in. I remember clinging to her underneath that hospital robe, but I don’t remember saying goodbye. Uncle Pet came next. Uncle Pet was a tall man with a biting wit and a raunchy sense of humor. The most economically successful of the Blanton crew, Uncle Pet left home early and started some timber and construction businesses that made him enough money to race horses in his spare time. He seemed the nicest of the Blanton men, with the smooth charm of a successful businessman. But that charm masked a fierce temper. Once, when a truck driver delivered supplies to one of Uncle Pet’s businesses, he told my old hillbilly uncle, “Off-load this now, you son of a bitch.” Uncle Pet took the comment literally: “When you say that, you’re calling my dear old mother a bitch, so I’d kindly ask you speak more carefully.” When the driver—nicknamed Big Red because of his size and hair color—repeated the insult, Uncle Pet did what any rational business owner would do: He pulled the man from his truck, beat him unconscious, and ran an electric saw up and down his body.

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

  Having spent the last thirty years of my life traveling here and abroad talking to professional, legal, and mental health groups plus working with thousands of parents and children in divorced families, it’s clear that we’ve created a new kind of society never before seen in human culture. Silently and unconsciously, we have created a culture of divorce. It’s hard to grasp what it means when we say that first marriages stand a 45 percent chance of breaking up and that second marriages have a 60 percent chance of ending in divorce. What are the consequences for all of us when 25 percent of people today between the ages of eighteen and forty-four have parents who divorced? What does it mean to a society when people wonder aloud if the family is about to disappear? What can we do when we learn that married couples with children represent a mere 26 percent of households in the 1990s and that the most common living arrangement nowadays is a household of unmarried people with no children? 1 These numbers are terrifying. But like all massive social change, what’s happening is affecting us in ways that we have yet to understand. For people like me who work with divorcing families all the time, these abstract numbers have real faces. When I think about people I know so well, including the “children” you’ve met in this book, I can relate to the millions of children and adults who suffer with loneliness and to all the teenagers who say, “I don’t want a life like either of my parents.” I can empathize with the countless young men and women who despair of ever finding a lasting relationship and who, with a brave toss of the head, say, “Hey, if you don’t get married then you can’t get divorced.” It’s only later, or sometimes when they think I’m not listening, that they add softly, “but I don’t want to grow old alone.” I am especially worried about how our divorce culture has changed childhood itself. A million new children a year are added to our march of marital failure. As they explain so eloquently, they lose the carefree play of childhood as well as the comforting arms and lap of a loving parent who is always rushing off because life in the postdivorce family is so incredibly difficult to manage. We must take very seriously the complaint of children like Karen who declare, “The day my parents divorced is the day my childhood ended.” Many years ago the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson taught us that childhood and society are vitally connected. But we have not yet come to terms with the changes ushered in by our divorce culture. Childhood is different, adolescence is different, and adulthood is different. Without our noticing, we have created a new class of young children who take care of themselves, along with a whole generation of overburdened parents who have no time to enjoy the pleasures of parenting.