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 Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995)

  She laughed aloud, then caught herself. That wasn’t fair. She really was grateful for Lolo’s solicitude toward me. He wouldn’t have treated his own son very differently. She knew that she was lucky for Lolo’s basic kindness. She set her papers aside and watched me do push-ups. He’s growing so fast, she thought. She tried to picture herself on the day of our arrival, a mother of twenty-four with a child in tow, married to a man whose history, whose country, she barely knew. She had known so little then, she realized now, her innocence carried right along with her American passport. Things could have turned out worse. Much worse. She had expected it to be difficult, this new life of hers. Before leaving Hawaii, she had tried to learn all she could about Indonesia: the population, fifth in the world, with hundreds of tribes and dialects; the history of colonialism, first the Dutch for over three centuries, then the Japanese during the war, seeking control over vast stores of oil, metal, and timber; the fight for independence after the war and the emergence of a freedom fighter named Sukarno as the country’s first president. Sukarno had recently been replaced, but all the reports said it had been a bloodless coup, and that the people supported the change. Sukarno had grown corrupt, they said; he was a demagogue, totalitarian, too comfortable with the Communists. A poor country, underdeveloped, utterly foreign—this much she had known. She was prepared for the dysentery and fevers, the cold water baths and having to squat over a hole in the ground to pee, the electricity’s going out every few weeks, the heat and endless mosquitoes. Nothing more than inconveniences, really, and she was tougher than she looked, tougher than even she had known herself to be. And anyway, that was part of what had drawn her to Lolo after Barack had left, the promise of something new and important, helping her husband rebuild a country in a charged and challenging place beyond her parents’ reach. But she wasn’t prepared for the loneliness. It was constant, like a shortness of breath. There was nothing definite that she could point to, really. Lolo had welcomed her warmly and gone out of his way to make her feel at home, providing her with whatever creature comforts he could afford. His family had treated her with tact and generosity, and treated her son as one of their own.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  The archaeological record, however, does not confirm this story. There is no evidence of the mass destruction described in the book of Joshua and no indication of a powerful foreign invasion.7 But this narrative was not written to satisfy a modern historian; it is a national epic that helped Israel create a cultural identity distinct from her neighbors. When we first hear of Israel in a nonbiblical source, coastal Canaan was still a province of the Egyptian Empire. A stele dating from c. 1201 mentions “Israel” as one of the rebellious peoples defeated by Pharaoh Merneptah’s army in the Canaanite highlands, where a network of simple villages stretched from lower Galilee in the north to Beersheba in the south. Many scholars believe that their inhabitants were the first Israelites.8 During the twelfth century, a crisis that had long been brewing in the Mediterranean accelerated, perhaps occasioned by sudden climate change. We have no record of what happened to wipe out the region’s empires and destroy the local economies. But by 1130 BCE, it was all over: the Hittite capital in Mitanni was in ruins, the Canaanite ports of Ugarit, Megiddo, and Hazor had been destroyed; and desperate, dispossessed peoples roamed through the region. It had taken Egypt over a century to relinquish its hold over its foreign provinces. The fact that Pharaoh Merneptah himself had been forced to fight a campaign in the highlands at the turn of the century suggests that even by this early date the Egyptian governors of the Canaanite city-states were no longer able to control the countryside and needed reinforcements from home. During this lengthy, turbulent process, one city-state after another collapsed.9 There is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest that these cities were destroyed by a single conqueror. After the Egyptians had left, there may have been conflict between the city elites and the villages or rivalries among the urban nobility. But it was during this period of decline that settlements began to appear in the highlands, pioneered perhaps by refugees fleeing the chaos of the disintegrating cities. One of the very few ways in which peasants could act to better their lot was simply to decamp when circumstances became intolerable, leave their land, and become fiscal fugitives.10 At a time of such political chaos, the Israelite peasants had a rare opportunity to make an exodus from these failing cities and establish an independent society, without fear of aristocratic retaliation. Advances in technology had only recently made it possible to settle in this difficult terrain, but by the early twelfth century, it seems that the highland villages already housed some eighty thousand people.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  Then he yelled did I have some kind of weapon up in that tree, and Babby Carter dropped her pot and ran crying back to the road with Philip right behind her. Shirley took out running too. Her flip-flops slapped against her bare feet till she jumped the ditch and hit asphalt on the other side. Rickey put his hands on his hips like he was pissed off, but he stepped sideways so that his daddy stood between him and my chinaberry tree. You pussy , I thought, as if Rickey’s not wanting to get shot were a defining mark against his manhood. Mr. Carter screamed to get down from there, that I could put somebody’s eye out with a pellet gun. And I came back with a reply that the aging mothers in that town still click their tongues about. It was easily the worst thing anybody in Leechfield ever heard a kid say. “Eat me raw, mister,” I said. I had no idea what this meant. The phrase had stuck in my head as some mild variant on “Kiss my ass,” which had been diluted from overuse. I stayed clueless a long time, even after Daddy had been phoned and ratted to, even after he’d spanked me with Grandma Moore’s old homemade leather horse quirt, itself an insult. I may have actually cried. The next day, I planned to picket the Carters’ driveway, believing kids from union families wouldn’t cross such a line to play with them. With Mother’s oil paints, I wrote placards for Lecia and me to carry. Mine read, prosaically enough, “Down with the Carters”; Lecia’s, “The Carters Fight Unfair.” But Lecia talked me out of it. My morning as sniper won me a grudging respect. Kids stopped mouthing off about Mother. The anti-Carter campaign had brought me activity, and a parcel of relief. Without them to plot against, I sank back into my lonesomeness for Mother. Daddy had only one Liars’ Club story that told me about his own momma’s meanness, and that dealt with the blistering quality of her whippings, which were such that he bragged about having stood them. “The old lady would stripe my ass too. Don’t think she wouldn’t. Just as quick as Poppa would.” We’re cleaning ducks—Daddy and I, and the other fellows. By nine this morning, we’d bagged our limit. I’m scooping the guts out of a little teal duck, and Daddy is pulling feathers from the huge slackened body of our only Canadian goose. With one swipe of his hand he clears a wide path in the feathers. “Momma was tough as a wood-hauler’s ass,” he says, and that’s high praise. Back in the logging camp, wood haulers drove mule-drawn wagons of raw lumber. Since their butts rubbed up against unstripped pine all day, they became badges of toughness. “How many eggs ya’ll want?” Ben wants to know. Everybody says three. He slides a big slab of Crisco into the black skillet.

• From My People (2022)

  And while, they said, many of those who were not members sympathized, there were others who would not have anything to do with them. Then Joe said: “You see, there’s a basic division between those students who come from predominantly black schools and people who went to a white high school. The ones who went to a white high school are more willing to relate.” “Still,” Russell interjected, “even those who participate are, at best, being tolerated. Those are the ones who catch it from both ends.” It was clear that my luncheon companions had no plans to get involved in university life or activities. I asked why. They all started to speak at once. Joe, who emerged strongest, said, “We tried it, but after all this time, we still feel like aliens in a strange land.” They explained that the BSU was formed in 1967 because of that. “At first,” Joe continued, “it just provided a social outlet—black-oriented functions. We would all meet at Bob Benham’s house and party. It got to be known as ‘the Black House.’” Benham, now in his last year of law school, had been president of the BSU when it presented a list of twenty-two demands to the university—the first step the BSU took after its members realized that “partying all the time wasn’t going to lead to any change in our lives within the university.” “The first year, we were concerned with getting a fair break,” Joe explained. “We asked for things like an end to discrimination in housing—black people always ended up in the same rooms—and an end to discrimination in employment—as usual, they try to token you to death. We asked for a wider range of things because the whole idea was not just to represent the militants, but to represent a wide range of political opinion. Like, I’m not interested in fraternities, but the brother here is.” In that connection they asked for a ban on racist fraternities—specifically KA. “There are still incidents in front of that house,” they told me. “Black women are constantly subjected to all kinds of verbal abuse and getting things thrown at them.” During the next year, an expanded set of demands was presented to the university—some in the same vein as the previous year, but some more militant. Some of their optimism had waned. A young freshman from Atlanta, James Hurley, had gone out for football. He made the freshman team, the Bullpups, but as the year wore on and he began looking with anticipation toward playing with the Bulldogs, a sympathetic coach called him aside one day and told him that Georgia would probably dress him, but that if he was really serious about playing foot ball, he’d better look elsewhere. (Subsequently, Vanderbilt offered him a scholarship—and a chance to play—and he took it.) Among the new demands that year was one for the establishment of a black dormitory.

• From Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (2014)

  In the trenches, however, volunteers discovered that far from escaping industrialization, they were entirely dominated by it. Like a sinister religious revelation, the war laid bare the material, technological, and mechanical reality that twentieth-century civilization concealed.158 “Everything becomes machine-like,” one soldier wrote; “one might almost term the war an industry of professionalized human slaughter.”159 It is a telling indictment of the loneliness and segmentation of modern society that many of these soldiers never forgot the profound sense of community they experienced in the trenches. “There enwrapped us, never to be lost, the sudden comradeship of the ranks,” T. E. Lawrence recalled.160 One of Simone de Beauvoir’s professors “discovered the joys of comradeship which overcome all social barriers” and determined never again to submit to “the segregation which in civil life separates young middle-class men from working chaps … something he felt like a personal mutilation.”161 Many found that they could not even hate the invisible enemy and were shocked when they finally saw the people they had been shelling for months. “They were showing themselves to us as they really were, men and soldiers like us, in uniform like us,” an Italian soldier explained.162 This secular war for the nation had given some of the participants experiences associated with the religious traditions: an ekstasis, a sense of liberation, freedom, equanimity, community, and a profound relationship with other human beings, even the enemy. Yet the First World War heralded a century of unprecedented slaughter and genocide that was inspired not by religion as people had come to know it but by an equally commanding notion of the sacred: men fought for power, glory, scarce resources, and above all, their nation. 11 [image file=image_rsrcDZB.jpg] Religion Fights BackDuring the twentieth century, there would be many attempts to resist the modern state’s banishment of religion to the private sphere. To committed secularists, these religious efforts seemed like so many efforts to turn the clock back, but in fact all were modern movements that could have flourished only in our own time. Indeed, some commentators have seen them as postmodern, since they represented a widespread dissatisfaction with many of the canons of modernity. Whatever the philosophers, pundits, or politicians claimed, people all over the world expressed a wish to see religion playing a more central role in public life. This type of religiosity is often called fundamentalism—an unsatisfactory term because it does not translate easily into other languages and suggests a monolithic phenomenon. In fact, though these movements share certain family resemblances, each has its own focus and trigger. In almost every region where a secular government has been established, a religious countercultural protest has developed as well, similar to the Muslim and Hindu reform movements that had emerged in British-controlled India. The attempt to confine religion to the individual conscience had originated in the West as part of Western modernization, but to others it made no sense. Indeed, many would find the expectation unnatural, reductive, and even damaging.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  Sexual fantasies are a great leveler among women. It’s a shame women can’t speak to one another as directly or be as honest about themselves in reality as they are in their fantasies. In fantasy, everyone speaks the same language because everyone wants the same thing. I sometimes think that’s what men essentially get out of their sessions in the clubhouse locker room: there, stripped of everything, they can talk of everything without pretense or bullshit, slipping each other a little sexual identification they find nowhere else. Who knows? Through this book women may also lose some of their feelings of sexual isolation, may find some mutual identification, perhaps even a sense of female camaraderie. Sure they’re “dirty” thoughts, but we all have them, men and women, and what makes them “dirty” anyway, except possibly their secretiveness? This secretiveness is one thing women do share, and it’s nowhere more apparent than in their fantasies. Deprived of any real feeling of sexual identification with other women, they resort to solitary exploration within their individual fantasy worlds. Having looked to literature for insights and answers to their own deepest desires and sexual reactions, women have found that most of literature’s insightful revelations have been directed at men by men, and when the same men try to tell how it is for women, no one knows more quickly than a woman how far off the mark they are. Even the new women-for-women’s books talk around it but not of it—as if the necessary vocabulary didn’t exist; meanwhile, women continue to sigh and say, “No one has ever really described ‘it.’” Is it so surprising that in exploring the mysterious “it” in fantasy, that they employ the strongest, crudest, most “pornographic” terms and imagery to make real, emotionally, something they’ve never had defined and which they know to be just as potent and earthshaking as every pornographic description they’ve ever heard or read of the male “it”? The gutsiness of female imagery may belie the beautifully turned brims on their Adolfo hats, or the pencil pleats in their Villager calico dirndls, but the images and the words are universal and classless—only incidental grammar and place names give any identity away. But where in the world, Pretty Lady, sitting in your high-rise flat surrounded by diapers, or behind the tinted glass of your Rolls Royce, did you get an idea like that? Those lips that never swore an oath, much less caressed a man’s cock, and that neat little mind that “seems” to dwell on the children’s education, the new job, or an even newer summer outfit, where oh where did you get the idea? And as often as not, should the lady deign to answer, the reply would be, “Why, from when I was a little girl and just happened to see…”

• From Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (2014)

  That last line is my attempt to get some sympathy—a chance for him to say that, oh, things aren’t that bad, and he’s sure that some people here like me. Instead, he nods in agreement. “Hmm,” he says, with a sympathetic expression on his face, as if to say that he knows how hurtful this must be, and he’s really sorry that he has to be the one to tell me. “Who did you ask?” I say. “Which two people?” “I can’t say,” he says. “The reviews have to be confidential.” Then, after a pause, he says, “Well, one of them was Tracy.” Tracy is the vice president of brand and buzz, the woman who had Keytar Bear playing at her birthday party. She’s a tiny woman in her thirties, with jet- black hair. She sits three desks away from me, and I really like her. I consider her a friend. I cannot believe she would refuse to comment for my review. Somehow this gets to me. The low scores I can deal with. But this bit of information really stings. Until now I’ve been laughing up my sleeve at this charade. I was able to not take it personally. But now that’s changed. As much as I want this not to hurt, it does. I’m upset in part because of what Trotsky is saying to me—but more so because I’ve put myself in this position in the first place. What was I thinking when I took this job? Why have I subjected myself to this for so long? How have I ended up trapped in a room with this tattoed sadist, playing out this psychology experiment? Like an idiot, I start talking. I babble. I spill my guts. I tell Trotsky how disappointing this is, how nothing like this has ever happened to me before, and by this I mean the whole thing, the whole shitty year and a half at HubSpot. For twenty-five years my career went up and up. I went from one job to a better job. I got promotions, and raises. And I was happy! I loved my work. I made good friends—lifelong friends, people I still talk to all the time. “Maybe I’m not cut out to work in marketing,” I say. “That’s fine. But I’ve never worked in a place where I didn’t make friends. I’ve never been in a place where everyone makes it so clear that they don’t like me, or want me around. Some jobs you like better than others, but I’ve never felt lonely at work. That’s how I feel here.” I’ve gone through my entire life feeling that I am basically a likeable person, someone who can make friends and fit in. But here I have stumbled into a world where I am really and truly not wanted.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  CHAPTER 10 One Sunday after Hector came, Lecia and I walked down to the stable and found the tack room still locked up, though the sun was high enough to show behind the mountains. Somebody had been and gone already. The stalls were all mucked out, with clean straw strewn around. And there were oats in the bins and fresh water in the troughs. But the McBrides’ truck wasn’t parked in the dirt driveway in front of their trailer. Banging on their aluminum screen door brought no face to stare down at us. I crossed the bridge and peeked in the café window. Not a soul perched on a single counter stool. I told Lecia it was like that Twilight Zone episode where space guys had kidnaped everybody on the planet except this grouchy old teacher, who wound up being sad that she’d always been such a jackass to everybody. We sat on the cinder blocks in front of the café. The owner had lined those blocks up there to stop drunk folks from plowing straight through the plate glass. Lecia pulled our sandwiches out of a paper bag. Bologna on Wonder bread—mine with mustard, hers with mayo. Going home wasn’t an option. Mother and Hector had tried one on (that’s how we heard the phrase “tied one on”) the night before. They’d doubtless either still be passed out or coping with the morning whirlies. Hector had concocted a hangover remedy involving raw eggs, vodka, and Pepto-Bismol. I called it a Dismal Flip. The very sight of it tipping up to his lips sent Mother scurrying to the bathroom with the projectile heaves. So mornings with the newlyweds were something we tended to miss. In fact, since Hector’s Florsheim shoes first crossed our threshold, we hadn’t piled into that bed a single morning to watch the bears. I know for my part, I wouldn’t have gone into Mother’s room before noon on a dare. I ate only the middle of my sandwich, in a nibbled circle that pissed Lecia off. She hated me doing anything eensy. She said that was how squirrels ate, and then she pitched my leftover crust at the sparrows. Not a car passed while they pecked it up. The sun got a notch higher. Otherwise, nothing. After a while, we gave up hoping the McBrides would pull up to unlock our saddles. We played a primitive form of kickball with the wadded lunchbag across the bridge and back to the stable. Lecia found a pair of hackamores hanging from a nail, and we took our horses for a short lope along a narrow, roller-coaster length of trail with a dip in it that made your stomach drop toward the end. The horses got lathered doing it. We walked them in figure eights through the corral, then brushed and watered them. We killed the rest of the morning snake-hunting in the field behind the stable.

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  I trust you do not mind my writing to you and I do think you may be surprised that there are some men who encourage their wives to fantasize while making love. It certainly enriched my life, and how lonely these last five years have been. [Letter] 7.QUICKIESThis is as far as some women got in telling me their fantasies… just a fleeting thought or two off the top of their heads. …I imagine I am at the shore with the water running out from under my feet. The dizziness and the feeling of flight are overwhelming. I am being sucked out to sea. It is incredible… …I am being raped by a Harlem gang, or seduced by my boyfriend’s roommate, or I am seducing a virgin myself, or being filmed for a porno flick, or being discovered in bed by my parents or younger brother, or being in bed with other couples (that act works wonders!)… …I think of my lover as a madman… or conversely as a virgin… …I pretend that my lover is the boy I loved and wanted to marry when I was sixteen and we were separated… …just knowing that this lover controls my life, since becoming pregnant again was something my doctor warned me not to consider… …in my fantasies I always have my clothes on. I’m sure it has to do with rape, or why else would I be dressed? Having my clothes on adds to the urgency; there is no time for preliminaries, or even time to think. But it’s the most exciting sexual image I have… me dressed and being totally and fantastically raped by some unknown man, who will then disappear into the night, leaving me wonderfully satisfied and yes, dressed. …I fantasize very typical stuff… our running through the fields, making love at the beach, whispered talks in bed, his asking to marry me… …I discovered the existence of sex through a chance encounter with mating guinea pigs and was then filled in on the human details by a girl three embarrassing years younger than I. Once I knew the act existed, I did everything to try and visualize it: stuffing Kleenex up my vagina, then sitting down to watch hours of television, wondering if it felt like that. Picturing some crew-cut boy looking at me naked (he’d undoubtedly have been repelled by my almost non-existent breasts) and wondering what we’d do from there. Trying to imagine the actual penetration—painful? disgusting? joyous? I really couldn’t picture it. When I tried, it seemed so intimate you could only do it with someone you really… cared for. But if you really cared for someone, how could you do such a terrible thing? It was a dilemma, and nearly stopped all my sexual fantasies… until I fell in love at sixteen…

• From My Secret Garden (1973)

  When we met, I learned the rest: She is from Wales, as is her husband; both their fathers were coal miners. But they met in London and decided to marry when they learned Hannah was pregnant. She had half wanted to have an abortion, but Harry had strong feelings against it. “He never knew I was bisexual before we were married,” says Hannah. “In fact, I never knew it myself, except that I knew I had these kinky thoughts now and then. About other girls.” After they were married, Harry and Hannah fell in with a group of young London people who regularly went to parties where sexual partners were exchanged. (“Wife-swapping” would be a provincial description of these parties, since most of the participants, living together or not, were not married.) “It was at one of these parties that I discovered I was bisexual,” Hannah said. “While Harry would only get excited when we’d get home and he’d make me tell him about what other men were like, when he opened a bedroom door once and found me with another girl, he blew up. The idea of other men never made him jealous, only excited. But the idea of competing with a woman drove him up the wall.” She left him, and they’ve been separated for several months. » I mostly have these daydreams when I’m alone. It puts me off even to have the baby in the room with me. I discovered this when I used to leave her with my mum when J wanted to go away for a weekend. When I got back home, suddenly my whole little flat was different. Just being alone in it made it all so sexy. It’s strange, isn’t it? After all, what can an infant only a few months old know or see? They don’t understand anything yet. But there it was. When I’m alone in the flat is almost my favorite time in the world. I sometimes think I like it so much that I never want to live with a man again. With anyone. What I like to do is when I come home at night from work, I pull the curtains so that I feel really alone. I turn the radio on to Radio One—the pop station—and I imagine it’s a man in the other room, talking to me while he’s putting different records on my machine. When I found photos of the best-looking disc jockey in magazines, I’d cut them out and put them in the edge of my mirror. This helps me imagine the man in the next room.

• From Sexual Politics (1970)

  Beck is more sensually alive and would be delighted to take on John Graham, but of course she is not sufficiently young, beautiful, or socially prominent for his tastes. Real as her own sexuality is, she will gracefully acknowledge his rejection, and serenely carry on the business, while cheerfully stamping out the intrusion of the least hint of sex in any corner of her establishment. As the educator of young females, Madame Beck is a perpetual policewoman, a virtual forewoman of patriarchal society. No system of subjection could operate for two seconds without its collaborators, and Beck is a splendid example of the breed. Finally, there is Paulina Mary, the golden one, the perfect woman, John Graham’s pretty Polly, the apple of her daddy’s eye. Lucy had no father to dote upon her, nor any John to court her, and she is painfully aware that Paulina is lucky. Yet there is one flaw in this female paragon—she is a child of eight-delightful when she appears as Missy Home at the beginning of the book; clever, affectionate, precocious—but nauseating when she reappears as a woman of nineteen and still a mental infant. Paulina is well-meaning and well loved. Even Lucy is fond of her from time to time, but she is also appalled that society’s perfect woman must be a cute preadolescent. Having surveyed the lot, Lucy prefers to be like none of them. Looking over all the “role models” her world presents, the adoring mother, the efficient prison matron, the merciless flirt, the baby-goddess, Lucy, whose most genuine trial is that she has been born into a world where there are no adequate figures to imitate so that she is forced to grope her way alone, a pioneer without precedents, turns her back on the bunch of them. Better to go back to something solidly her own-deal with mathematics, Paul Emanuel, and the job. Lucy has watched men look at women, has studied the image of woman in her culture. There is probably nothing so subversive in the book as that afternoon in the Brussels museum when she scrutinizes the two faces of woman whom the male has fashioned, one for his entertainment, one for her instruction: Rubens’ Cleopatra and the Academician’s four pictures of the virtuous female. Lucy’s deliberately philistine account of Cleopatra is very entertaining:

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  CHAPTER 8 After they took Mother Away, I sank into a fierce lonesomeness for her that I couldn’t paddle out of into other things. Nor did anyone come into it looking for me. By this I mean that Daddy never mentioned the night of the fire. Nor did he say when Mother might come home, other than pretty soon. Maybe our own silence on the subject—Lecia’s and mine, for we didn’t bring it up either—was meant to protect him somehow, so as not to worry him overmuch. If we failed him by not telling him all about it, he sure as shit failed us by not knowing how to ask. At school, I cleaned up my act. There wasn’t cussing or fighting, and I won not a single exile to Frank Doleman’s office for chess. My final report card for second grade shows my getting “Satisfactory +” in both Conduct and Citizenship. Which was for me a first. No doubt, I was operating under the notion that being completely good in the eyes of all authorities might urge Mother back. At home, I also picked up my side of our bedroom, and grudgingly helped Lecia make our bed with military tucks on the sheet corners. There my housekeeping stopped, though she pulled off a whirlwind scrubbing of the whole house every Saturday, down to the insides of the toilets. She wrought particular hell on Daddy’s ashtrays. He couldn’t thump the ash off a Camel without her swooping down to wash and dry the ashtray before he got his hand drawn back good. Without real data on Mother’s psychic health (or lack thereof) Lecia and I cooked up some fairly worrisome scenarios about her. On TV one night, we watched a movie called The Snake Pit. It starred Olivia de Havilland as this fairly nice if somewhat highstrung lady who wore over-baroque brooches and belted dresses when vacuuming her house, but who, nevertheless, had a twitchy mouth early in the movie that foreshadowed her hellacious, capital-B Breakdown later. The film’s title captures how the mental ward got portrayed. There was an icy bathtub in which one maniac got dunked under wet canvas, and a description of shock treatment that went something like this: “Then the electrodes are fixed to the temples and ZZZZZZT—thousands of volts course through the brain!” Finally, poor Ms. de Havilland got locked in a padded room and belted into one of those long-armed straitjackets that forced you to hug yourself all day and besides which looked really hot. All the while she was hallucinating snakes crawling all over. That was the picture of mental-ward life for the full-blown Nervous that Lecia and I promptly settled on. It was all we had. The neighbor kids gave little comfort. Like us, they ran short on real data about psych wards, but they were very long on mean-assed idiom.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  JW: But I think that’s the universal quality of books written for teens up to young adults, is that idea…the universal. I remember reading A Wrinkle in Time and you know, my dad wasn’t a professor, but you identify with those kids. You identify with Charlie going into the chocolate factory. You become that character, and I think that’s what that book’s done so amazingly. I spoke at an alternative school, and the first question I get from this kid is, “Do you know Sherman Alexie?” “No, I never met him.” “That’s the only book I ever read; I love that book.” SA: [Laughs] JW: Again, here’s a kid with a tough childhood. That has to be a recurring theme you hear over the last ten years. SA: I mean, books saved me, so I think True Diary might be part of the emergency kit for a lot of students. One of the things I hear, too, now, is, “This book led me to become a writer. I’m in this MFA program because of Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.” JW: Do you remember when Arnold Spirit first, when that voice first…Books come in voices, and the voice here is so strong, I had to think that the voice is what popped in your head. SA: Well, it’s autobiographical, of course, but he’s a much more confident person than I was at the same age. And he’s really also kinder. JW: It’s funny, as I read it—you know, you had become a father—I thought you were looking at fatherhood through your boys’ eyes, both the kindness and the savvy of your two sons. SA: My sons are urban Indians, they are very much urban kids so they have urban skills and they’re also members of this generation who are much more self-aware and aware of the world, and they are kinder. My sons at the same age are far kinder than I was, partly because their survival is assured right now, and mine wasn’t. So I think Arnold Spirit Jr. has less of the cannibalistic instincts I did. It’s less Donner Party for him than it was for me. JW: I think sometimes my kids doubt the Lord of the Flies nature of the stories I tell. I mean, the bus stop was as horrifying a place as could exist. I mean, it was Dante’s fourth circle. SA: [Laughs] The public school bus stop. Yeah. JW: It is hard to get across. But it seems like the voice, while autobiographical, also does seem of itself. You have no doubt of who Junior is in this book. He seems fully realized from the beginning.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  “Well, this article said that over two hundred Mexican girls have disappeared in the last three years in that same part of the country. And nobody says much about that. And that’s racist. The guy who wrote the article says people care more about beautiful white girls than they do about everybody else on the planet. White girls are privileged. They’re damsels in distress.” “So what does that mean?” I asked. “I think it means you’re just a racist asshole like everybody else.” Wow. In his own way, Gordy the bookworm was just as tough as Rowdy. [image "An illustration of a person with short hair resting their chin on their hand, looking at an open book." file=image_rsrc4SR.jpg] Dance, Dance, Dance [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] Traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger. I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other. It was like being Indian was my job, but it was only a part-time job. And it didn’t pay well at all. The only person who made me feel great all the time was Penelope. Well, I shouldn’t say that. I mean, my mother and father were working hard for me, too. They were constantly scraping together enough money to pay for gas, to get me lunch money, to buy me a new pair of jeans and a few new shirts. My parents gave me just enough money so that I could pretend to have more money than I did. I lied about how poor I was. Everybody in Reardan assumed we Spokanes made lots of money because we had a casino. But that casino, mismanaged and too far away from major highways, was a money-losing business. In order to make money from the casino, you had to work at the casino. And white people everywhere have always believed that the government just gives money to Indians. And since the kids and parents at Reardan thought I had a lot of money, I did nothing to change their minds. I figured it wouldn’t do me any good if they knew I was dirt poor. What would they think of me if they knew I sometimes had to hitchhike to school? Yeah, so I pretended to have a little money. I pretended to be middle class. I pretended I belonged. Nobody knew the truth. Of course, you can’t lie forever. Lies have short shelf lives. Lies go bad. Lies rot and stink up the joint. In December, I took Penelope to the Winter Formal. The thing is, I only had five dollars, not nearly enough to pay for anything—not for photos, not for food, not for gas, not for a hot dog and soda pop. If it had been any other dance, a regular dance, I would have stayed home with an imaginary illness. But I couldn’t skip Winter Formal. And if I didn’t take Penelope then she would have certainly gone with somebody else.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  I was prone to grisly images at that time so it was no strain at all to picture Jayne Mansfield’s head—still wearing cat’s-eye sunglasses with rhinestones all around the edges—all lopped off at the neck and sailing up across the blue air like a fly ball. The image vaporized when Lecia shoved out the glass door into the sunlight. That big Coach bag over her shoulder bumped at her like a soldier’s duffel. For a week or so after mailing off the Father’s Day cards, Lecia and I stopped at the P.O. morning and evening looking for a letter back. She drew the mailbox key from the string around her neck to open the tiny brass door, whose actual number is nothing but a smudge in my memory. Daddy wasn’t much of a correspondent. It always sat empty as a little coffin. In all fairness to him, divorced men back then just surrendered their kids to the moms and forgot about it. Like a bad litter of puppies you’d tie in a potato sack and fling from your speeding Ford off the Orange Bridge, kids just got let loose. I wouldn’t have thought such a vanishing possible, not where Daddy was concerned. We’d shot too much pool together. We’d caught too many fish and eaten too many good gumbos. He always spouted stoical-sounding promises about his loyalty. At the first hint of lonesomeness for him, those promises could start zooming through my head like bad reverb: “I’m not a rich man, darling. But I can still walk. And when I walk, I walk heavy. And I swear to God, anybody messes with you, I’ll walk just as far and just as heavy as I ever did for the U.S. Army. I guarangoddamntee you that.” Sometime that summer, Lecia lost the mailbox key riding. Then it just seemed too much trouble for us to stand in line at the counter and ask for the mail twice a day. My final campaign to woo Daddy back that summer relied on the Green Stamps we’d never bothered to save before. Stores used to dole out these stamps according to the amount of money you’d just spent. Say you got twenty stamps for every dollar you paid for groceries, something like that. You then pasted the stamps in trading books, and took those books to a Green Stamp center to swap them for “free” stuff. The stamp product catalogue was thin, like the circular a hardware store might send out for its President’s Day sale. But it lacked order. Kid stuff got scattered in with flashlights; housewares, with fire extinguishers. For ten books of stamps you could get an off-brand of the Chatty Cathy Doll, one that would stop talking after a week of tugging on its string and just gibber a kind of high-pitched monkey language. A hundred books might get you camping gear or a croquet game that fit on a little wheely wooden cart.

• From The Liars' Club: A Memoir (1995)

  One finally dropped down and wobbled near a petri dish of blood in the center of the display. He seemed so awkward trying to arrange his frail-looking wings that I kept thinking of a broken umbrella. Lecia moved from window to window, looking at owls and opossums and the other nocturnals—she wanted to be a vet back then, or a nurse. Mother sat on a stone bench under the red EXIT sign, smoking. I got hypnotized waiting for the clumsy bat to drink the blood. I tapped the glass pointing it out, but he never did. By dusk we were on the spaghetti freeways looking for Highway 73 home, and I kept cutting my eyes between my window, where the new glass skyscrapers going up just slid past, and the small rearview mirror, where Mother’s eyes were still eerily blank. Nothing showed in those eyes but the road’s white dashed lines, which seemed to be flying off the road and into the darkest part of her pupils, where they disappeared like knives. After the amputation and that trip to Houston, we didn’t see Mother much. She either came home from the hospital briefly in the mornings to change clothes before heading back, or she returned after we were in bed. I would wake to her weight tilting our mattress, her Shalimar settling over me when she leaned in to kiss me and pull up the chenille bedspread, which had a nubble like braille under my hands. A few times, she would sit on my side of the bed all night smoking, till the yellow light started in the windows. She had a way of waving away the smoke from my face and making a pleasant little wind in the process. I kept my eyes closed, knowing that if I roused she’d leave, and I wanted nothing more from her on those nights than to let me lie in the mist of that perfume I still wear and to imagine the shapes her Salem smoke made. Inside the great deep pit that I had already begun digging in my skull, I had buried the scariness of Grandma’s hacked-off leg and Mother’s psychic paralysis at the zoo. So I did not long to talk of those things or to hear her reassurances about them. (Children can be a lot like cats or dogs, sometimes, in how physical comfort soothes them.) I could feel through the bedspread the faint heat of her body as she sat a few inches from where I lay, and that heat was all I needed. Except for these apparitions of Mother, we were left the rest of the summer in Daddy’s steady if distracted care. At some point, the men of the Liars’ Club arrived with their pickups and toolboxes to turn our garage into an extra bedroom for my parents, who had been sleeping on a pull-out sofa in the living room during Grandma’s visit.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Okay, so Gordy was a human lie detector machine, too. “All right, I lied,” I said. “What is a tautology?” Gordy sighed again. I HATED THAT SIGH! I WANTED TO PUNCH THAT SIGH IN THE FACE! “A tautology is a repetition of the same sense in different words,” he said. “Oh,” I said. What the hell was he talking about? “It’s a redundancy.” “Oh, you mean, redundant, like saying the same thing over and over but in different ways?” “Yes.” “Oh, so if I said something like, ‘Gordy is a dick without ears and an ear without a dick,’ then that would be a tautology.” Gordy smiled. “That’s not exactly a tautology, but it is funny. You have a singular wit.” I laughed. Gordy laughed, too. But then he realized that I wasn’t laughing WITH him. I was laughing AT him. “What’s so funny?” he asked. “I can’t believe you said ‘singular wit.’ That’s sounds like fricking British or something.” “Well, I am a bit of an Anglophile.” “An Anglophile? What’s an Angophile?” “It’s someone who loves Mother England.” God, this kid was an eighty-year-old literature professor trapped in the body of a fifteen-year-old farm boy. “Listen, Gordy,” I said. “I know you’re a genius and all. But you are one weird dude.” “I’m quite aware of my differences. I wouldn’t classify them as weird.” “Don’t get me wrong. I think weird is great. I mean, if you look at all the great people in history—Einstein, Michelangelo, Emily Dickinson—then you’re looking at a bunch of weird people.” “I’m going to be late for class,” Gordy said. “You’re going to be late for class. Perhaps you should, as they say, cut to the chase.” I looked at Gordy. He was a big kid, actually, strong from bucking bales and driving trucks. He was probably the strongest geek in the world. “I want to be your friend,” I said. “Excuse me?” he asked. “I want us to be friends,” I said. Gordy stepped back. “I assure you,” he said. “I am not a homosexual.” “Oh, no,” I said. “I don’t want to be friends that way. I just meant regular friends. I mean, you and I, we have a lot in common.” Gordy studied me now. I was an Indian kid from the reservation. I was lonely and sad and isolated and terrified. Just like Gordy. And so we did become friends. Not the best of friends. Not like Rowdy and me. We didn’t share secrets. Or dreams. No, we studied together. Gordy taught me how to study. Best of all, he taught me how to read. “Listen,” he said one afternoon in the library. “You have to read a book three times before you know it. The first time you read it for the story. The plot. The movement from scene to scene that gives the book its momentum, its rhythm. It’s like riding a raft down a river. You’re just paying attention to the currents. Do you understand that?”

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  “Wow,” I said. “That’s really cool. Thank you.” “You’re welcome,” she said and walked away. I was just going to let her go. But I had to say something memorable, something huge. “Hey!” I called after her. “What?” she asked. “It feels good, doesn’t it?” “What feels good?” “It feels good to help people, doesn’t it?” I asked. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it does.” She smiled. Of course, after that little moment, I thought that Penelope and I would become closer. I thought that she’d start paying more attention to me and that everybody else would notice and then I’d become the most popular dude in the place. But nothing much changed. I was still a stranger in a strange land. And Penelope still treated me pretty much the same. She didn’t really say much to me. And I didn’t really say much to her. I wanted to ask Rowdy for his advice. “Hey, buddy,” I would have said. “How do I make a beautiful white girl fall in love with me?” “Well, buddy,” he would have said. “The first thing you have to do is change the way you look, the way you talk, and the way you walk. And then she’ll think you’re her fricking Prince Charming.” Slouching Toward Thanksgiving [image file=image_rsrc4RJ.jpg] I walked like a zombie through the next few weeks in Reardan. Well, no, that’s not exactly the right description. I mean, if I’d been walking around like a zombie, I might have been scary. So, no, I wasn’t a zombie, not at all. Because you can’t ignore a zombie. So that made me, well, it made me nothing. Zero. Zilch. Nada. In fact, if you think of everybody with a body, soul, and brain as a human, then I was the opposite of human. It was the loneliest time of my life. And whenever I get lonely, I grow a big zit on the end of my nose. If things didn’t get better soon, I was going to turn into one giant walking talking zit. [image "An illustration of a skin cross-section showing a large pimple labeled ‘big zit’, with arrows pointing to ‘skin surface’ and ‘hair follicle.’" file=image_rsrc4SB.jpg] A strange thing was happening to me. Zitty and lonely, I woke up on the reservation as an Indian, and somewhere on the road to Reardan, I became something less than Indian. And once I arrived at Reardan, I became something less than less than less than Indian. Those white kids did not talk to me. They barely looked at me. Well, Roger would nod his head at me, but he didn’t socialize with me or anything. I wondered if maybe I should punch everybody in the face. Maybe they’d all pay attention to me then.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  His heart is as strong and mean as a snake, too. But he is my best human friend and he cares about me, so he would always tell me the truth. And he is right. Nobody would miss me if I was gone. Well, Rowdy would miss me, but he’d never admit that he’d miss me. He is way too tough for that kind of emotion. But aside from Rowdy, and my parents and sister and grandmother, nobody would miss me. I am a zero on the rez. And if you subtract zero from zero, you still have zero. So what’s the point of subtracting when the answer is always the same? So I gut it out. I have to, I guess, especially since Rowdy is having one of the worst summers of his life. His father is drinking hard and throwing hard punches, so Rowdy and his mother are always walking around with bruised and bloody faces. “It’s war paint,” Rowdy always says. “It just makes me look tougher.” And I suppose it does make him look tougher, because Rowdy never tries to hide his wounds. He walks around the rez with a black eye and split lip. This morning, he limped into our house, slumped in a chair, threw his sprained knee up on the table, and smirked. He had a bandage over his left ear. “What happened to your head?” I asked. “Dad said I wasn’t listening,” Rowdy said. “So he got all drunk and tried to make my ear a little bigger.” My mother and father are drunks, too, but they aren’t mean like that. Not at all. They sometimes ignore me. Sometimes they yell at me. But they never, ever, never, ever hit me. I’ve never even been spanked. Really. I think my mother sometimes wants to haul off and give me a slap, but my father won’t let it happen. He doesn’t believe in physical punishment; he believes in staring so cold at me that I turn into a ice-covered ice cube with an icy filling. My house is a safe place, so Rowdy spends most of his time with us. It’s like he’s a family member, an extra brother and son. “You want to head down to the powwow?” Rowdy asked. “Nah,” I said. The Spokane Tribe holds their annual powwow celebration over the Labor Day weekend. This was the 127th annual one, and there would be singing, war dancing, gambling, storytelling, laughter, fry bread, hamburgers, hot dogs, arts and crafts, and plenty of alcoholic brawling. I wanted no part of it. Oh, the dancing and singing are great. Beautiful, in fact, but I’m afraid of all the Indians who aren’t dancers and singers. Those rhythmless, talentless, tuneless Indians are most likely going to get drunk and beat the shit out of any available losers.

• From The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)

  Rowdy could be so crazy-funny-disgusting. The Reardan kids were so worried about grades and sports and THEIR FUTURES that they sometimes acted like repressed middle-aged business dudes with cell phones stuck in their small intestines. Rowdy was the opposite of repressed. He was exactly the kind of kid who would e-mail his bare ass (and bare everything else) to the world. “Hey,” Gordy said. “Is that somebody’s posterior?” Posterior! Did he just say “posterior”? “Gordy, my man,” I said. “That is most definitely NOT a posterior. That is a stinky ass. You can smell the thing, even through the computer.” “Whose butt is that?” he asked. “Ah, it’s my best friend, Rowdy. Well, he used to be my best friend. He hates me now.” “How come he hates you?” he asked. “Because I left the rez,” I said. “But you still live there, don’t you? You’re just going to school here.” “I know, I know, but some Indians think you have to act white to make your life better. Some Indians think you become white if you try to make your life better, if you become successful.” “If that were true, then wouldn’t all white people be successful?” Man, Gordy was smart. I wished I could take him to the rez and let him educate Rowdy. Of course, Rowdy would probably punch Gordy until he was brain-dead. Or maybe Rowdy, Gordy, and I could become a superhero trio, fighting for truth, justice, and the Native American way. Well, okay, Gordy was white, but anybody can start to act like an Indian if he hangs around us long enough. “The people at home,” I said. “A lot of them call me an apple.” “Do they think you’re a fruit or something?” he asked. “No, no,” I said. “They call me an apple because they think I’m red on the outside and white on the inside.” “Ah, so they think you’re a traitor.” “Yep.” “Well, life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.” Can you believe there is a kid who talks like that? Like he’s already a college professor impressed with the sound of his own voice? “Gordy,” I said. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to say to me.” “Well, in the early days of humans, the community was our only protection against predators, and against starvation. We survived because we trusted one another.” “So?” “So, back in the day, weird people threatened the strength of the tribe. If you weren’t good for making food, shelter, or babies, then you were tossed out on your own.” “But we’re not primitive like that anymore.” “Oh, yes, we are. Weird people still get banished.” “You mean weird people like me,” I said. “And me,” Gordy said. “All right, then,” I said. “So we have a tribe of two.” I had the sudden urge to hug Gordy, and he had the sudden urge to prevent me from hugging him. “Don’t get sentimental,” he said.