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 Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)

  Would the students who reported many dates say that they were happier than those with fewer dates? Surprisingly, no: the correlation between the answers was about zero. Evidently, dating was not what came first to the students’ minds when they were asked to assess their happiness. Another group of students saw the same two questions, but in reverse order: How many dates did you have last month? How happy are you these days? The results this time were completely different. In this sequence, the correlation between the number of dates and reported happiness was about as high as correlations between psychological measures can get. What happened? The explanation is straightforward, and it is a good example of substitution. Dating was apparently not the center of these students’ life (in the first survey, happiness and dating were uncorrelated), but when they were asked to think about their romantic life, they certainly had an emotional reaction. The students who had many dates were reminded of a happy aspect of their life, while those who had none were reminded of loneliness and rejection. The emotion aroused by the dating question was still on everyone’s mind when the query about general happiness came up. The psychology of what happened is precisely analogous to the psychology of the size illusion in figure 9. “Happiness these days” is not a natural or an easy assessment. A good answer requires a fair amount of thinking. However, the students who had just been asked about their dating did not need to think hard because they already had in their mind an answer to a related question: how happy they were with their love life. They substituted the question to which they had a readymade answer for the question they were asked. Here again, as we did for the illusion, we can ask: Are the students confused? Do they really think that the two questions—the one they were asked and the one they answer—are synonymous? Of course not. The students do not temporarily lose their ability to distinguish romantic life from life as a whole. If asked about the two concepts, they would say they are different. But they were not asked whether the concepts are different. They were asked how happy they were, and System 1 has a ready answer. Dating is not unique. The same pattern is found if a question about the students’ relations with their parents or about their finances immediately precedes the question about general happiness. In both cases, satisfaction in the particular domain dominates happiness reports. Any emotionally significant

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Reese had already diagnosed her own problem. She didn’t know how to be alone. She fled from her own company, from her own solitude. Along with telling her how awful her cheating men were, her friends also told her that after two major breakups, she needed time to learn to be herself, by herself. But she couldn’t be alone in any kind of moderate way. Give her a week to herself and she began to isolate, cultivating an ash pile of loneliness that built on itself exponentially, until she was daydreaming about selling everything and drifting away on a boat toward nowhere. To jolt herself back to life, she went on Grindr, or Tinder, or whatever—and administered ten thousand volts to the heart by chasing the most dramatic tachycardia of an affair she could find. Married men were the best for fleeing loneliness, because married men also didn’t know how to be alone. Married men were experts at being together, at not letting go, no matter what, until death do us part. With the pretense of setting the boundaries of “just an affair,” Reese would swan dive super deep, super hard. By telling herself it would just be a fling, she gave herself permission to fulfill every fetish the guy had ever dreamed of, to unearth his every secret hurt, to debase herself in the most lush, vicious, and unsustainable ways—then collapse into resentment, sadness, and spite that it had been just a fling, because hadn’t she been brave enough and vulnerable enough to dive super deep, super hard? She saw herself as attractive, round face and full figure, but she didn’t pretend that she stopped traffic; nor did she frequently note people standing around to admire the harvests of her brain. But with the right kind of man, she bore a genius for drama. She could distill it and flame it like jet fuel when solitude chilled her bones. Her man this time was similar to her others. A handsome, married alpha-type who put her on a leash in the bedroom. Only this one was better, because he was an HIV-positive cowboy-turned- lawyer. He had a thing for trans girls and had seroconverted while cheating on his wife with a trans woman, and the wife had stayed with him, and now he was at it again with Reese. Wheeeee! “Did you bottom or something?” Reese had asked on their first date. “Fuck no,” he said. “My doctors said I had a one in ten thousand chance to contract it from getting head. You figure that at least ten thousand blow jobs are happening every minute, but that one in ten thousand was me. Also, she gave me a lot of blow jobs.”

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Midwest, Amy read the weather instinctively. She could smell the wind and know whether it had come in West from the plains, or bore the bite of Northern ice. She could spot iron banks of thunderheads in the distance and know exactly how long she had before they arrived. She could watch the vividness increase in the hue of a flower to sense a tornado brooding. The clouds and sky yielded their information to her willingly. In New York, however, nature offered her senses only an exhausted soup. She assumed that natives read the weather off the Hudson as easily as she could read the Great Lakes. But she couldn’t stir herself to care about New York. She lived there because it was a place to live, a place that offered the opportunities and resources of a metropole, not because it awoke her soul. Rhapsodizing over New York was for overly romantic foreigners. Your Irish novelists. Your French theorists. Your Chilean poets. What was there to say about New York that anyone from the Midwest in possession of a television hadn’t heard or seen thousands of times before? The cultural shadow of New York stretched its cloak beyond the Mississippi. The Midtown skyscraper occupied a place in her psychic heritage beside the strip mall. In high school, she heard about the gold-lamé-clad hipsters flocking to a Bulgarian bar before she heard about the club that attempted to copy that fad, which opened two miles from her house. New Yorkers were only unique in one regard: their audacity to recognize their own provincialism, yet still persist in foisting it upon the rest of the nation. She had been intimate with New York and gotten over New York long before she arrived there. Reese’s R and Amy’s location practically overlapped on her phone’s map. “Here, I need to get out here,” Amy blurted to her driver, though she spotted no one who looked like Reese. In the park, a group of softball players had halted play and conferred, their hesitant heads tilting back to guess whether the sky meant to rain in earnest. Her driver pointed to a fire hydrant’s no-parking zone. “I'll drop you there.” But when he braked to a brief stop behind a black Explorer, Amy popped open the door. “Careful!” he shouted, but she was already out. The sound of what he said next got cut off by the door closing with a luxuriant thunk. He would understand. Sensitive missions require evasive maneuvers.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  I looked to Pam for reassurance. She put her fingers to her lips, took my hand, and we crawled to the other end of the bed, where our brothers slept. She shook Randall’s shoulder. He pushed her away and sat up, wiping the sleep from his eyes with his fist. Gary startled awake. I put my arm around him and rocked him against me. The four of us said nothing, hoping, I think, to keep the forlornness of this place from hardening into a more solid reality.Sister Waters rolled into the doorway. “Y’all going to sleep all day?”When people said Sister Waters was half-Hi-waiian, I always imagined a little line drawn down the center of her. This split somehow explained her dual personality. The Waters was two women: the one who smiled and told our mamas how much she loved us, and the one who grabbed and twisted and pulled at us till it hurt when they were not looking. It was the mean Waters with whom we now found ourselves living. The mean Waters who explained that we were so much trouble our parents had sent us to live with her, without saying good-bye , so they could preach the gospel without having to stop and tend to us every five minutes. The mean Waters who huffed down the hallway of her shotgun house every night, grabbed Gary from the bed, and kicked him to the john, saying it was time he learned to pee in the pot, while Pam, Randall, and I wound ourselves around her legs and begged her to stop.I spent most days waiting for Pam and Randall to come home from school. The Waters often locked me out of the house when they left in the morning and didn’t open the door again until they returned. If it rained, I sat in a corner of the porch and watched the water pour from the sky. When the rain stopped, I set my naked one-armed baby-doll adrift in a mud puddle and played out the Moses story. I sat on the front porch steps and turned the knobs of the Etch A Sketch until I became the darkened endpoint that moved across the light-gray slate, creating a world of lines and boxes and losing myself in that world. I tried not to think about food because most days there was nothing between breakfast and dinner. Sometimes I dug turnips from an abandoned vegetable plot to eat, and when I was thirsty I put my mouth over the water hydrant at the side of the house. If I needed “to go,” I went to the old outhouse in the field. Having no idea I was a poverty-stricken kid, I pretended to be poor. I didn’t feel mistreated. I felt fortunate. Gary was too little to play outside all day and had to stay inside with Sister Waters. I wasn’t sure why I had to stay outside and didn’t want to risk asking.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  No hard feelings.When Gary and I saw Sister Waters at revivals in later years, we ran to her and she gathered us with those big soft arms and brought us to her breasts.“My kids, my kids,” she said.We kissed her sweaty neck and told her we loved her, and it was true, in a way. I had not forgotten how she had treated us, but I had set aside those memories in favor of the kind, sweet woman who seemed so happy to see us. Then Pam reminded me one day of all that had happened during our time with The Waters, and I never loved the woman again. Chapter FourteenMAMA EXITED THE FREEWAY AND GUIDED THE FORD INTO A LABYRINTH of suburban streets. Gary and I bounced up and down on the front car seat. “We’re here. We’re in Houston.”My mother was a self-described high-strung woman. Put her in a car with two attention-starved kids for five-hundred-plus miles and those strings were ratcheted about as tight as they could go. Each time she stopped the car in the middle of the street and consulted the directions she had scribbled on the corner of a page she had torn from a phone book, she breathed a little harder. She backed up and turned onto another street that led nowhere.“Oh, sh-i-t.”Gary and I stopped bouncing and looked intently up and out the front window. He pointed at an airplane low in the sky without saying anything. I nodded. Mama said she had been here once before, last month, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember how she got to the house; besides, all these streets looked the same. A few more stops and starts and she pulled into a driveway, turned off the engine, and let go a long sigh.“Finally.”Our house—we claimed it as ours at once—was a slightly run-down replica of all the other houses in that unfinished but slightly run-down neighborhood of chain-link fences and dead-end streets. It was a rental with dark brown trim and, as my mother pointed out, “a real picture window” that looked out on the field across the street. I flung open the car door and Gary and I ran to the front door.Mama stood on the stoop and fumbled through her keys, trying one, then another. “This one? No. Maybe this one. That looked like the one, no, must be the other one. I know it’s one of these.”Gary and I twitched and shuffled until the key clicked and we stumbled through the front door. It was clean and modern with dark paneled walls, avocado-colored drapes, and a breakfast counter. We rushed to the gold sofa and honey-colored end tables, then down the hall to the two bedrooms, one with a double bed, the other with two singles.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  I stood in the hallway, stretched my legs and arms as far apart as they would go, and touched my fingers to the doorways of both bedrooms, ours and Mama’s.Gary ran back to the living room and looked out the big window. “It’s got everything, even airplanes.”I threw myself on the couch. “Where did all this stuff come from? Is it ours?” I wanted it to be ours.Mama stood in the middle of the living room and looked around. “Belongs to the landlord.” Her voice trailed off the way it did when she had something else to say.“Where’s the table?” I pointed to the space under the hanging wagon-wheel light.“We’ll have to get one later. Right now, we have these.” Mama walked over to the pantry in the corner of the kitchen and pulled out metal trays with stands. “TV trays.”“TV?” Gary looked around.“She said TV trays. ” There was a peace about our early days in Houston that I found unnerving. I missed the chaos and the closeness of Pam and Randall. They had been a part of our lives for almost as long as I could remember, and there was too much room, literally and figuratively, without them. Mama assured me they were no longer living with Sister Waters; they were with their mother, she said. I hoped so, for their sakes. I never told her about life with Sister Waters, and she never asked. The quiet immobility of our new life made me jumpy. I missed the sound of car wheels moving on blacktop. When the sun went down in Houston, I begged my mother to take us for a drive on the freeway.“Let’s leave the windows down like we used to. It’s warm enough.”My request brought long strange looks from Mama, as if she were trying to figure out what kind of kid would ask such a thing. But I think my mother understood my loneliness for our old life, because on some nights, she put us in the car and we drove all over Houston without saying much of anything.From my bed at night I watched my mother’s fish-belly-white legs lying inert on top of her blue-and-white bedspread, illuminated by the dim light cast from her bedside lamp. Her feet pointed straight up at the ceiling. I couldn’t see the top half of her body, but I knew she was propped up on pillows, reading her Bible. When Gary or I woke in the night, she was by our beds before we could call out. She sat beside my brother on the tub while he soaked his flat feet in warm water and Epsom salt. She massaged away the growing pains in my legs. Every morning I padded into the living room, flopped on the couch, and watched dust mites slide down the shafts of light that streamed through the picture window.

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  After a moment I might say, “Oh, we moved around,” or “We lived all over,” which led to questions about whether my “stepfather” was in the military. If I felt brave, I laughed and said, “Oh, something like that,” and made a fast getaway. Most times I stammered and shifted my eyes until the conversation limped off in another direction. The question of where I came from struck me as a paradox. I had not lived anywhere long enough for a place to stamp itself upon my psyche in the cozy shape of a Monopoly house. Brother Terrell’s ministry was the only home I had known, and that did not constitute an answer anyone could understand. I experienced myself as an exile, an orphan, a ghost girl, all of the above. There was the time I had passed through and the time I now inhabited. I had no way to connect the two. Until my sister’s telephone call and Randall’s funeral.Randall knocked on death’s door off and on for forty years. Maybe that’s why when the door finally opened and he slipped through, it came as a shock. With the help of his daddy’s prayers, he had spent most of his life proving doctors wrong, and I guess some of us thought he always would. One of his sisters sobbed, “I thought he was going to get a miracle.” All the hemorrhages and death sentences he had survived didn’t count.On the night prior to the funeral, family members gathered in the funeral home in Brownwood, the largest town close to Bangs, and greeted one another with exclamations of surprise at how long it had been since we last saw one another. The old animosities no longer held. Betty Ann gave me a long hug and said, “How’s your mama? Tell her I love her.” Only my mother and brother were missing; they had begged off, saying neither of them felt up to it. Betty Ann drew my sisters to her and they clung to her like a long-lost aunt. The preacher woman’s daughter was there, laughing and talking with my sisters. I marveled at the banality of the scene. After all the lies and secrets, we were, finally, like any other family. Voices, soft and layered one upon the other—how you been, have you seen so and so, that’s her over there, her husband died ten years back, oh no, it’s been so long—all spoken in half whispers, as though we feared to wake the dead.At the edges of the crowd, the conversation was of an entirely different nature: Should Brother Terrell raise Randall from the dead? Maybe he should leave him in peace. He was so sick when he died. Well, God had promised Randall a miracle. But he had already been embalmed . Wasn’t that a problem? If only Randall hadn’t been sick so long. If only Brother Terrell had gotten to him before the mortician.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Yeah,” Reese agrees. “Although, maybe you have a talent for getting women to give you second chances.” The light changes and she slips past him, but he grabs her arm, and gives it a light squeeze to say goodbye. Across the street, it occurs to her that they did not kiss goodbye, not even a peck. This bothers her. She had years of habitual goodbye kisses with Amy. To leave without one makes her feel like she left something behind. Coming up from the train in Greenpoint, she surfaces to a light mist and gets a text from her cowboy, who wants to come over. Normally, this would be an easy yes. But this time she hesitates, considers ignoring him, standing up for herself. She is proud that this defiance lasts until she is at her place, at which point her loneliness gets the better of her, and she recalls that no one has yet complimented her in her Marchesa dress. Nonetheless, after her cowboy leaves, she finds that she does not resent him for leaving. Normally every one of his departures registers as a little failure on her part. But this time, as he shuts the door behind him, she experiences a moment of relief, luxuriating in the space to spread out in the cool of her own bed without his hot, hairy- legged, post-coitally-perspiring body beside hers. Most surprising of all, she discovers, as she drifts off to sleep, that her cowboy has faded from her mind almost entirely. Instead she is imagining life with Amy again. Weirder still, at the edge of the fantasy hovers Katrina. CHAPTER SIX Three years before conception QO NE OF REESE'S friends, a modestly successful designer, hooked her up with part-time work at a public relations firm that represented fashion brands. Reese quit the desultory waitressing to which she’d given the better part of a decade, though she kept a shift or two at the gym daycare, as it continued to put her in contact with kids and wealthy Manhattan mothers willing to pay outlandishly for a good babysitter. On Valentine’s Day, for instance, Reese could ask as much from mothers desperate for romance as her friends who worked as escorts could request from their regulars. Her new employment involved passing fashion samples to notable people in the hope that they would later be caught wearing the samples on their social media. Reese met the intended wearers only occasionally—usually, she’d just sit in the stockrooms of designers, waiting to pull product with a publicist, stylist, or entourage member.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Reese had already diagnosed her own problem. She didn’t know how to be alone. She fled from her own company, from her own solitude. Along with telling her how awful her cheating men were, her friends also told her that after two major breakups, she needed time to learn to be herself, by herself. But she couldn’t be alone in any kind of moderate way. Give her a week to herself and she began to isolate, cultivating an ash pile of loneliness that built on itself exponentially, until she was daydreaming about selling everything and drifting away on a boat toward nowhere. To jolt herself back to life, she went on Grindr, or Tinder, or whatever—and administered ten thousand volts to the heart by chasing the most dramatic tachycardia of an affair she could find. Married men were the best for fleeing loneliness, because married men also didn’t know how to be alone. Married men were experts at being together, at not letting go, no matter what, until death do us part. With the pretense of setting the boundaries of “just an affair,” Reese would swan dive super deep, super hard. By telling herself it would just be a fling, she gave herself permission to fulfill every fetish the guy had ever dreamed of, to unearth his every secret hurt, to debase herself in the most lush, vicious, and unsustainable ways—then collapse into resentment, sadness, and spite that it had been just a fling, because hadn’t she been brave enough and vulnerable enough to dive super deep, super hard? She saw herself as attractive, round face and full figure, but she didn’t pretend that she stopped traffic; nor did she frequently note people standing around to admire the harvests of her brain. But with the right kind of man, she bore a genius for drama. She could distill it and flame it like jet fuel when solitude chilled her bones. Her man this time was similar to her others. A handsome, married alpha-type who put her on a leash in the bedroom. Only this one was better, because he was an HIV-positive cowboy-turned- lawyer. He had a thing for trans girls and had seroconverted while cheating on his wife with a trans woman, and the wife had stayed with him, and now he was at it again with Reese. Wheeeee! “Did you bottom or something?” Reese had asked on their first date. “Fuck no,” he said. “My doctors said I had a one in ten thousand chance to contract it from getting head. You figure that at least ten thousand blow jobs are happening every minute, but that one in ten thousand was me. Also, she gave me a lot of blow jobs.”

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  You start,” and then the person says “Knock knock,” and then you say, “Who’s there?” and then the person realizes that they’ve been had, because one cannot start a knock-knock joke without knowing the end of the knock-knock joke. So when you say “Who’s there?” the other person has a little self-deprecating chuckle over not having realized from the beginning that they were going to end up in this pickle. I had all kinds of super symbolic reasons for this knock-knock joke about Alaska asking Pudge, “Who’s there?” and Pudge not being able to answer. It was about his failure to really know Alaska, and about how her air of mystery was mostly about him just not being very perceptive, but all of that stuff is irrelevant because no one gets the joke. What questions do you feel were answered for yourself through the experience of writing Looking for Alaska ? There were many times writing this book that I felt it was my only hope. I would say to my family or friends, “This novel is my only chance.” I couldn’t articulate it further than that—my only chance to what? My only hope of what? I didn’t know, and still don’t really. I just needed the story. I needed it to work. And that made me patient: I kept writing and kept revising. In the end, Alaska had to be pried out of my hands, basically. Looking back, I was really struggling in the years after college. I felt lost and intensely alone. And for me Alaska was a way to write about the feelings of abandonment and the challenges of living with ambiguity and regret. In that sense, it was a very personal novel, written not only toward the me I was in high school, but also the me who was writing it. When and how did you find your Great Perhaps? Oh, I think the pleasure is in the seeking. That’s what I eventually realized. What would you say, today, to a kid like Alaska? You are helpful, and you are loved, and you are forgiven, and you are not alone. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSIONLooking for Alaska is divided into “Before” and “After” and broken into a countdown of days instead of traditional chapters. How does that structure impact the story and the storytelling? How might a different approach have changed the book? The author notes that our stories and histories are often shaped around pivotal moments. Before and After. Why is this such a universal way to understand the events in our lives? How do choices like point of view shape a story? Miles tells the story in his own first-person voice. How might the book differ if it had been told in Alaska’s voice or the Colonel’s? Or in the voice of an omniscient narrator? The Colonel says “Everybody’s got a talent.” Do you agree? What’s your talent? Do you like Alaska? Is it important to like the characters we read about?

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  This is one of the hardest types to seduce, not only because they are suspicious but because their minds are burdened with cares and responsibilities. They have less mental space for a seduction. You will have to be patient and clever, slowly filling their minds with thoughts of you. Succeed, though, and you can gain great power in turn, for in their loneliness they will come to depend on you. 160 • The Art of Seduction The Floating Gender. All of us have a mix of the masculine and the feminine in our characters, but most of us learn to develop and exhibit the socially acceptable side while repressing the other. People of the Floating Gender type feel that the separation of the sexes into such distinct genders is a burden. They are sometimes thought to be repressed or latent homosexuals, but this is a misunderstanding: they may well be heterosexual but their masculine and feminine sides are in flux, and because this may dis-comfit others if they show it, they learn to repress it, perhaps by going to one extreme. They would actually love to be able to play with their gender, to give full expression to both sides. Many people fall into this type without its being obvious: a woman may have a masculine energy, a man a developed aesthetic side. Do not look for obvious signs, because these types often go underground, keeping it under wraps. This makes them vulnerable to a powerful seduction. What Floating Gender types are really looking for is another person of uncertain gender, their counterpart from the opposite sex. Show them that in your presence and they can relax, express the repressed side of their character. If you have such proclivities, this is the one instance where it would be best to seduce the same type of the opposite sex. Each person will stir up repressed desires in the other and will suddenly have license to explore all kinds of gender combinations, without fear of judgment. If you are not of the Floating Gender, leave this type alone. You will only inhibit them and create more discomfort. Most of us understand that certain actions on our part will have a pleasing and seductive effect on the person we would like to seduce. The problem is that we are generally too self-absorbed: We think more about what we want from others than what they could want from us. We may occasionally do something that is seductive, but often we follow this up a with a selfish or aggressive action (we are in a hurry to get what we want); or, unaware of what we are doing, we show a side of ourselves that is petty and banal, deflating any illusions or fantasies a person might have about us. Our attempts at seduction usually do not last long enough to create much of an effect.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  “Yeah,” Reese agrees. “Although, maybe you have a talent for getting women to give you second chances.” The light changes and she slips past him, but he grabs her arm, and gives it a light squeeze to say goodbye. Across the street, it occurs to her that they did not kiss goodbye, not even a peck. This bothers her. She had years of habitual goodbye kisses with Amy. To leave without one makes her feel like she left something behind. Coming up from the train in Greenpoint, she surfaces to a light mist and gets a text from her cowboy, who wants to come over. Normally, this would be an easy yes. But this time she hesitates, considers ignoring him, standing up for herself. She is proud that this defiance lasts until she is at her place, at which point her loneliness gets the better of her, and she recalls that no one has yet complimented her in her Marchesa dress. Nonetheless, after her cowboy leaves, she finds that she does not resent him for leaving. Normally every one of his departures registers as a little failure on her part. But this time, as he shuts the door behind him, she experiences a moment of relief, luxuriating in the space to spread out in the cool of her own bed without his hot, hairy- legged, post-coitally-perspiring body beside hers. Most surprising of all, she discovers, as she drifts off to sleep, that her cowboy has faded from her mind almost entirely. Instead she is imagining life with Amy again. Weirder still, at the edge of the fantasy hovers Katrina. CHAPTER SIX Three years before conception QO NE OF REESE'S friends, a modestly successful designer, hooked her up with part-time work at a public relations firm that represented fashion brands. Reese quit the desultory waitressing to which she’d given the better part of a decade, though she kept a shift or two at the gym daycare, as it continued to put her in contact with kids and wealthy Manhattan mothers willing to pay outlandishly for a good babysitter. On Valentine’s Day, for instance, Reese could ask as much from mothers desperate for romance as her friends who worked as escorts could request from their regulars. Her new employment involved passing fashion samples to notable people in the hope that they would later be caught wearing the samples on their social media. Reese met the intended wearers only occasionally—usually, she’d just sit in the stockrooms of designers, waiting to pull product with a publicist, stylist, or entourage member.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  My intention was for it to be a complicated mess that was totally impossible to parse, just like real romantic interactions between teenagers in high school. (And also adults after high school.) I don’t think we feel only one thing in our lives. I don’t think it’s as simple as either (a) being in love or (b) not being in love. I think our feelings for each other are really complicated and motivated by an endless interconnected web of desires and fears. I wanted to reflect that as best I could. Pudge seems to lack any agency over his actions. Every hang-out and prank is planned by others, the Colonel gives him his nickname, etc. Is this intentional? Pudge starts to affect the action in the second half of the novel, but he is very conscious of this passivity. (He calls himself drizzle to Alaska’s hurricane, and the tail to his friends’ comet.) This inability to act is part of what keeps him from following Alaska out to the pay phone, a decision that he’ll have to live with for the rest of his life. It was important to me when writing the story that Pudge not be blameless. It’s natural to feel guilty in the wake of a friend’s death, but usually, you can eventually say to yourself, “You know what? This wasn’t actually my fault. There was really nothing I could’ve done.” But in Pudge’s, there is something he should’ve done. He should have followed her to the pay phone. He should’ve stopped her from leaving. He should have acted. And that’s a much more complicated kind of guilt to live with. Alaska’s death still isn’t his fault, of course. But he will always know he could’ve—and should’ve—stopped her. The question for me becomes whether you can find a way to live with yourself, whether forgiveness is still available to you even though the person you need to forgive you is gone. Alaska can never reconcile that question for herself with regards to her own mother. Pudge does eventually find an answer that brings him comfort, but along the way he has to become much more proactive about his life and his choices. Did you know when you started writing that Alaska would die, or did you realize it in the process of writing the book? Initially the book was about the death of a boy as narrated by a girl, but that switched very early on. I would say that had switched as early as maybe March of 2001. Much of what readers have responded to about Alaska—last words, the labyrinth of suffering, the Great Perhaps—came out in revision after I’d started working with my brilliant editor at Penguin, Julie Strauss-Gabel.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  Amy attached the socket and handed it to him. She noticed that he gripped the chain without regard for the grease getting all over his hands. So masculine. Last time she had seen him he had one of those ironic bowl cuts that queers inexplicably loved. Having worn that cut herself as a little child, Amy couldn’t quite shake her infantile associations with that look, the faded memory of sitting in a barber’s chair with a balloon-printed bib around her tiny neck, hair falling away from the sides of her head in tufts under the buzzer’s drone, while the barber called her “littke man” and her mom tutted “Handsome!” Still, she always complimented bowl cuts, because she’d made enthusiastic appreciation of queer style an important part of her social approach, regardless of her actual opinions. Since she’d last seen him, thank god, he had shaved off the bowl and left his hair and stubble the same length, which Amy could compliment with much more genuine gushing. “Reese doesn’t tell you what’s true,” Ricky concluded. “She tells you what you most need to hear. Stuff that you’d told yourself no one would ever understand about you—she figures it out and tells you. Tells you that the thing about you that you most want to be is exactly what she loves about you. It’s fucking intoxicating. It’s like drinking validation from some psychoactively seductive source. She loves being that source. She loves being the thing you need so bad. She means it all too, but only for the moment she’s directing her charm at you. Like the love and joy you feel on Molly or something, it’s real while you feel it, but only for that long.” He grimaced as he pried a bolt loose. “She’s not intentionally cruel. That’s why I say she’s just got, like, personality disorders. And she ends up hurting people, so then she’s alone, which makes her lonely enough to do it even more.” Amy didn’t know how much to believe. The tendency of lay queers to assign other people psychological pathologies struck her as boring and tautological: A certain person does a thing because that person is the type of person who is compelled to do that thing. No capacity for either change or responsibility or even a consideration of the why, much less the how, of a particular human. Why does the cat torture the injured mouse? Because the cat is a cat—and so shall it be forever. Besides, rumor was, famously stoic Ricky had gotten drunk and then loudly, inconsolably, and theatrically sobbed in the corner of a Hey Queen! party the night he discovered Reese had left him to move in with a finance guy. Maybe he had to pathologize Reese into a sociopathic, manipulative, emotional mastermind in order to explain his own vulnerability to heartbreak.

• From Detransition, Baby (2021)

  What else did Amy want to hear? She submerged back into the fantasy, like sinking into a pool. She was in Delia’s room. Delia was fucking her. Delia was grabbing her body. Telling her she was a hot little thing. And Amy was grabbing Delia’s body. Was fucking her. She tried to call Delia a hot little thing, but the words choked in her. “So hot,” she grunted. And back into the fantasy: Delia was calling her a slut, had a hand on her neck. Could she do that? “I wanna make you my slut,” Amy said. Delia looked up at her quizzically. “You like talking dirty,” Delia stated. “Do you like it?” Delia grinned. “Yeah.” Amy grabbed Delia’s hair. Pulled her around. “Can we do doggy?” Amy asked. “Yeah,” said Delia, and pushed Amy off, turned over. And then Amy was back in. Both into Delia and into the fantasy. In two places at once. Amy wanted her ass grabbed. She grabbed Delia’s ass. Delia moaned. She pictured Delia pinching her nipples, and reached around and pinched Delia’s tiny breasts. And then, without warning, Amy was coming. Not in the room with Delia, but in another similar room, where Delia was spanking her, where she was Delia’s little slut, where Delia had her captive, where she was Delia’s good girl, forever and ever. And then again, she was back in Delia’s actual room. She’d collapsed on top of Delia. “Wow,” said Delia, and it sounded genuine. Slowly she pulled herself off of Delia and Delia flipped over, and she nestled under Delia’s arm. Amazingly, Amy had the sense that she had done a good job, that she was a good lover. Wherever she had gone, Delia hadn’t noticed. And maybe that was how you have sex. Later, much later, she would learn the word for this: dissociation. She’d figured she had just been fantasizing. The word “dissociate” sounded pathologizing to her at first—why should she be accused of dissociating when normal people get to call it fantasizing, and talk about how fantasy just made their sex better and better? But pathology felt more and more apt the more sex she had. It took her a while to understand the cyclical loneliness of disappearing in dissociation during sex. That people have sex for a shared joy that keeps an existential loneliness at bay, so when she disappeared inside of herself, her more experienced partners sensed that absence and her disappearance hurt them. Since she dreaded hurting those she most wanted to connect with, she grew to dread and avoid sex with specifically those most-liked people. And of course, clearly dreading having to have sex with a person only hurt that person more and drove them away—concluding in a final angst in which the loneliness that had made her want to connect with someone in the first place returned upon her tenfold with every attempt to have sex.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  So I just bolted.” I laughed. He pulled out a notebook and sat down at his desk. “Yeah. Ha-ha. So Alaska said you’re staying here.” “Yeah. I feel a little guilty about ditching my parents, though.” “Yeah, well. If you’re staying here in hopes of making out with Alaska, I sure wish you wouldn’t. If you unmoor her from the rock that is Jake, God have mercy on us all. That would be some drama, indeed. And as a rule, I like to avoid drama.” “It’s not because I want to make out with her.” “Hold on.” He grabbed a pencil and scrawled excitedly at the paper as if he’d just made a mathematical breakthrough and then looked back up at me. “I just did some calculations, and I’ve been able to determine that you’re full of shit.” — And he was right. How could I abandon my parents, who were nice enough to pay for my education at Culver Creek, my parents who had always loved me, just because I maybe liked some girl with a boyfriend? How could I leave them alone with a giant turkey and mounds of inedible cranberry sauce? So during third period, I called my mom at work. I wanted her to say it was okay, I guess, for me to stay at the Creek for Thanksgiving, but I didn’t quite expect her to excitedly tell me that she and Dad had bought plane tickets to England immediately after I called and were planning to spend Thanksgiving in a castle on their second honeymoon. “Oh, that—that’s awesome,” I said, and then quickly got off the phone because I did not want her to hear me cry. I guess Alaska heard me slam down the phone from her room, because she opened the door as I turned away, but said nothing. I walked across the dorm circle, and then straight through the soccer field, bushwhacking through the woods, until I ended up on the banks of Culver Creek just down from the bridge. I sat with my butt on a rock and my feet in the dark dirt of the creek bed and tossed pebbles into the clear, shallow water, and they landed with an empty plop, barely audible over the rumbling of the creek as it danced its way south. The light filtered through the leaves and pine needles above as if through lace, the ground spotted in shadow. I thought of the one thing about home that I missed, my dad’s study with its built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves sagging with thick biographies, and the black leather chair that kept me just uncomfortable enough to keep from feeling sleepy as I read.

• From Looking for Alaska (2005)

  It was stupid, to feel as upset as I did. I ditched them, but it felt the other way around. Still, I felt unmistakably homesick. I looked up toward the bridge and saw Alaska sitting on one of the blue chairs at the Smoking Hole, and though I’d thought I wanted to be alone, I found myself saying, “Hey.” Then, when she did not turn to me, I screamed, “Alaska!” She walked over. “I was looking for you,” she said, joining me on the rock. “Hey.” “I’m really sorry, Pudge,” she said, and put her arms around me, resting her head against my shoulder. It occurred to me that she didn’t even know what had happened, but she still sounded sincere. “What am I going to do?” “You’ll spend Thanksgiving with me, silly. Here.” “So why don’t you go home for vacations?” I asked her. “I’m just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them.” fifty-two days before AFTER EVERYONE LEFT; after the Colonel’s mom showed up in a beat-up hatchback and he threw his giant duffel bag into the backseat; and after he said, “I’m not much for saying good-bye. I’ll see you in a week. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do”; and after a green limousine arrived for Lara, whose father was the only doctor in some small town in southern Alabama; and after I joined Alaska on a harrowing, we-don’t-need-no-stinking-brakes drive to the airport to drop off Takumi; and after the campus settled into an eerie quiet, with no doors slamming and no music playing and no one laughing and no one screaming; after all that: We made our way down to the soccer field, and she took me to edge of the field where the woods start, the same steps I’d walked on my way to being thrown into the lake. Beneath the full moon she cast a shadow, and you could see the curve from her waist to her hips in the shadow, and after a while she stopped and said, “Dig.” And I said, “Dig?” and she said, “Dig,” and we went on like that for a bit, and then I got on my knees and dug through the soft black dirt at the edge of the woods, and before I could get very far, my fingers scratched glass, and I dug around the glass until I pulled out a bottle of pink wine—Strawberry Hill, it was called, I suppose because if it had not tasted like vinegar with a dash of maple syrup, it might have tasted like strawberries. “I have a fake ID,” she said, “but it sucks. So every time I go to the liquor store, I try to buy ten bottles of this, and some vodka for the Colonel. And so when it finally works, I’m covered for a semester.

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

  Spoken very clearly, I said to myself, and alas utterly realistic. There’s no question that a child has first dibs on the mother, and unless the father can join in the giving there’s serious trouble ahead. As Billy recognizes, he’s not in the giving line. His own long-postponed needs are too great and too pressing. I was finding more and more confirmation for his prophecy of trouble ahead. I wondered if he had other worries and asked, “How stable is your relationship with Kristi?” “Stable relationship?” He snorted his reply. “I’ve never had a stable relationship with a woman, not ever. Even when I think it’s stable, it blows up from under me.” “Billy,” I sighed, settling back in my chair. “You’ve had a hard time with the women in your life. Can you bring me up to date from the start?” “It’s not a happy story and it’s not a short one. But here goes. The truth is that when other guys in high school or later were dating or partying or screwing, I wasn’t. I know you’re going to ask me why so let me tell you short and sweet. I had no confidence that I would find a woman who would like me. Love I never even dreamed about. I figured anyone who went out with me was scraping the bottom of the barrel. Like she was desperate. I figured I was just not in the human race, sort of a mule supposed to pull his load and shut up. And if I ever found someone, she’d end up betraying me anyway, so why try?” I was appalled at his terrible self-image and very distressed by his loneliness. “How did you spend all those years in your early twenties?” “You know, it’s too painful to remember. 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 A LTHOUGH 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.

• From Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)

  “Taylor’s been here since nine. Look at me,” he breathes. I struggle to meet his eyes, but when I do, he’s gazing down at me with wonder. “You didn’t cry,” he murmurs, then grabs me suddenly and kisses me fervently. “Sunday,” he whispers against my lips, and it’s both a promise and a threat. I watch him walk down the path and climb into the big black Audi. He doesn’t look back. I close the door and stand helpless in the living room of an apartment that I shall only spend another two nights in. A place I have lived happily for almost four years…yet today, for the first time ever, I feel lonely and uncomfortable here, unhappy with my own company. Have I strayed so far from who I am? I know that lurking not very far under my rather numb exterior is a well of tears. What am I doing? The irony is I can’t even sit down and enjoy a good cry. I’ll have to stand. I know it’s late, but I decide to call my mom. “Honey, how are you? How was graduation?” she enthuses down the phone. Her voice is a soothing balm. “Sorry it’s so late,” I whisper. She pauses. “Ana? What’s wrong?” She’s all seriousness now. “Nothing, Mom, I just wanted to hear your voice.” She’s silent for a moment. “Ana, what is it? Please tell me.” Her voice is soft and comforting, and I know she cares. Uninvited, my tears begin to flow. I have cried so often in the last few days. “Please, Ana,” she says, and her anguish reflects mine. “Oh, Mom, it’s a man.” “What’s he done to you?” Her alarm is palpable. “It’s not like that.” Although it is… Oh crap. I don’t want to worry her. I just want someone else to be strong for me at the moment. “Ana, please, you’re worrying me.” I take a big breath. “I’ve kind of fallen for this guy, and he’s so different from me, and I don’t know if we should be together.” “Oh, darling. I wish I could be with you. I am so sorry I missed your graduation. You’ve fallen for someone, finally. Oh, honey, men, they are tricky. They’re a different species, honey. How long have you known him?” Christian is definitely a different species…different planet. “Oh, nearly three weeks or so.” “Ana, darling, that’s no time at all. How can you possibly know someone in that kind of time frame? Just take it easy with him and keep him at arm’s length until you decide whether he’s worthy of you.” Wow…it’s unnerving when my mother is so insightful, but she’s just too late on this. Is he worthy of me? That’s an interesting concept. I always wonder whether I am worthy of him.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The Professor. These types cannot get out of the trap of analyzing and criticizing everything that crosses their path. Their minds are overdevel-oped and overstimulated. Even when they talk about love or sex, it is with great thought and analysis. Having developed their minds at the expense of their bodies, many of them feel physically inferior and compensate by lord-ing their mental superiority over others. Their conversation is often wry or ironic—you never quite know what they are saying, but you sense them looking down on you. They would like to escape their mental prisons, they would like pure physicality, without any analysis, but they cannot get there on their own. Professor types sometimes engage in relationships with other professor types, or with people they can treat as inferiors. But deep down they long to be overwhelmed by someone with physical presence—a Rake or a Siren, for instance. Professors can make excellent victims, for underneath their intellectual strength lie gnawing insecurities. Make them feel like Don Juans or Sirens, to even the slightest degree, and they are your slaves. Many of them have a masochistic streak that will come out once you stir their dormant senses. You are offering an escape from the mind, so make it as complete as possible: if you have intellectual tendencies yourself, hide them. They will only 156 • The Art of Seduction stir your target's competitive juices and get their minds turning. Let your Professors keep their sense of mental superiority; let them judge you. You will know what they will try to hide: that you are the one in control, for you are giving them what no one else can give them—physical stimulation. The Beauty. From early on in life, the Beauty is gazed at by others. Their desire to look at her is the source of her power, but also the source of much unhappiness: she constantly worries that her powers are waning, that she is no longer attracting attention. If she is honest with herself, she also senses that being worshiped only for one's appearance is monotonous and unsatisfying—and lonely. Many men are intimidated by beauty and prefer to worship it from afar; others are drawn in, but not for the purpose of conversation. The Beauty suffers from isolation.