Pride

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 Between Us

  What Jiro and I had in common was that we sparsely interacted with people from our own heritage culture while we lived in the U.S. This may have been the case for the average second-generation Turkish Belgian and Korean American respondent: On average, the emotion profiles of the second-generation immigrants in De Leersnyder’s study were not very “Turkish” or “Korean.” Yet, some individuals formed an exception in that their emotional profiles were “Turkish” or “Korean.” What these individuals had in common was that they had Turkish and Korean friends in their everyday lives. The reality of having a “Turkish” or a “Korean” friend trumped anything else when it came to emotions. You can be quite attached to your heritage traditions, you can feel identified with the heritage culture, and you may wish you were surrounded by friends of your heritage culture, but unless you also have heritage friends, these are not enough to preserve your heritage way of doing emotions. Not participating in the relationships makes you lose a culture’s ways of doing emotions pretty quickly, although perhaps not permanently. My friend psychologist Shinobu Kitayama is Japanese American bicultural. He grew up in Japan with an OURS model of emotions. Coming to the U.S. for him meant a shift from an OURS to a MINE model of emotions. In Japan, “emotions” were out in the world. Throughout the many years he lived in the U.S., he learned to think about his emotions as mental states. Yet, whenever he comes back to the U.S., after having spent some time in Japan, he at first has trouble answering the simple question of “How are you feeling?” It is as if he needs to zoom back into his insides again, shifting his focus outward-in. He goes through this small adjustment each time again. An equally telling example is the fact that the feelings of excitement and pride that I experience in American contexts are not sustained in the same way in European everyday life. Whenever I spend a lot of time on the European continent, my excitement and pride peter out, and are replaced by feelings more appropriate as well as better attuned to that European context.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had been wearing it as a kind of bracelet, only: it had not occurred to me to tell the time with it. Now I moved the arms to 4 and 3, for Maria’s sake - but there was really no need, of course, for me ever to wind it at all. The watch was my finest gift; but there was a present, too, from Maria herself: a walking-cane, of ebony, with a tassel at the top and a silver tip. It went very well with my new opera gear; indeed, we made a very striking couple that night, Diana and I, for her costume was of black and white and silver, to match my own. It came from Worth’s: I thought we must look just as if we had stepped out from the pages of a fashion paper. I made sure, when walking, to hold my left arm very straight, so the watch would show. We dined in a room at the Solferino. We dined with Dickie and Maria - Maria brought Satin, her whippet, and fed him dainties from a plate. The waiters had been told it was my birthday, and fussed around me, offering wine. ‘How old is the young gentleman today?’ they asked Diana; and the way they asked it showed they thought me younger than I was. They might, I suppose, have taken Diana for my mother; for various reasons, the idea was not a nice one. Once, though, I had stopped at a shoe-black while Diana and her friends stood near to watch it, and the man - catching sight of Dickie and reading tommishness, as many regular people do, as a kind of family likeness - asked me if she, Dickie, were not my Auntie, taking me out for the day; and it had been worth being mistaken for a schoolboy, for the sake of her expression. She once or twice tried to compete with me, on the question of suits. The night of my birthday, for example, she wore a shirt with cuff-links and, above her skirt, a short gent’s cloak. At her throat, however, she had a jabot - I should never have worn anything so effeminate. She did not know it - she would have been horrified to know it! - but she looked like nothing so much as a weary old mary-anne - one of the kind you see sometimes holding court, with younger boys, on Piccadilly: they have rented so long they’re known as queens. Our supper was a very fine one, and when it was over Diana sent a waiter for a cab.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  There were one or two rather startling coiffures; and there were more neckties than I had ever before seen brought together at an exclusively female ensemble. I did not notice all these details at once, of course; but the room was a large one and, since Diana took her time to lead me across it, I had leisure to gaze about me as she did so. We walked through a hush that was thick as bristling velvet - for, at our appearance at the door the lady members had turned their heads to stare, and then had goggled. Whether, like Miss Hawkins, they took me for a gentleman; or whether - like Diana - they had seen through my disguise at once, I cannot say. Either way, there was a cry - ‘Good gracious!’ - and then another exclamation, more lingering: ‘My word...’ I felt Diana stiffen at my side, with pure complacency. Then came another shout, as a lady at a table in the farthest corner rose to her feet. ‘Diana, you old roué! You have done it at last!’ She gave a clap. Beside her, two more ladies looked on, pink-faced. One of them had a monocle, and now she fixed it to her eye. Diana placed me before them all, and presented me - more graciously than she had introduced me to Miss Hawkins, but again as her ‘companion’; and the ladies laughed. The first of them, the one who had risen to greet us, now seized my hand. Her fingers held a stubby cigar. ‘This, Nancy dear,’ said my mistress, ‘is Mrs Jex. She is quite my oldest friend in London - and quite the most disreputable. Everything she tells you will be designed to corrupt.’ I bowed to her. I said, ‘I hope so, indeed.’ Mrs Jex gave a roar. ‘But it speaks!’ she cried. ‘All this’ - she gestured to my face, my costume - ‘and the creature even speaks!’ Diana smiled, and raised a brow. ‘After a fashion,’ she said. I blinked, but Mrs Jex still held my hand, and now she squeezed it. ‘Diana is brutal to you, Miss Nancy, but you must not mind it. Here at the Cavendish we have been positively panting to see you and make you our particular friend. You must call me “Maria”’ - she pronounced it the old-fashioned way - ‘and this is Evelyn, and Dickie. Dickie, you can see, likes to think of herself as the boy of the place.’

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  And at that, Kitty herself turned to me - and showed me such a look of wonder and confusion that it was as if, just for a second, she had never seen me before; and I do not know whose cheeks at that moment were the pinker - mine, or hers. Then she gave a tight little smile. ‘Very nice,’ she said, and looked away; so that I thought, miserably, that the dress must suit me even less than I had hoped, and readied myself for a wretched party. But the party was not wretched; it was gay and genial and loud, and very crowded. The manager had had to build a platform from the end of the stage to the back of the pit, to carry us all, and he had hired the orchestra to play reels and waltzes, and set tables in the wings bearing pastries and jellies, and barrels of beer and bowls of punch, and row upon row of bottles of wine. We were much complimented, Kitty and I, on our new dresses; and over me, in particular, people smiled and exclaimed - mouthing at me across the noisy hall, ‘How fine you look!’ One woman - the conjuror’s assistant - took my hand and said, ‘My dear, you’re so grown-up tonight, I didn’t recognise you!’: just what Mrs Dendy had said an hour before. Her words impressed me. Kitty and I stood side by side all evening but when, some time after midnight, she moved away to join a group that had gathered about the champagne tables, I hung back, rather pensive. I wasn’t used to thinking of myself as a grown-up woman, but now, clad in that handsome frock of blue and cream, satin and lace, I began at last to feel like one - and to realise, indeed, that I was one: that I was eighteen, and had left my father’s house perhaps for ever, and earned my own living, and paid rent for my own rooms in London. I watched myself as if from a distance - watched as I supped at my wine as if it were ginger beer, and chatted and larked with the stage-hands, who had once so frightened me; watched as I took a cigarette from a fellow from the orchestra, and lit it, and drew upon it with a sigh of satisfaction. When had I started smoking? I couldn’t remember.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I saw several faces that I knew from my old renter days. One time I stood washing my hands in the lavatory of a theatre and felt a gent look me over - he didn’t know that he had had my lips on him already, in an alley off Jermyn Street; later I saw him in the audience, with his wife. One time, too, I saw Sweet Alice, the mary-anne who had been so kind to me in Leicester Square. He also sat in a box; and when he recognised me, he blew a kiss. He was with two gents: I raised my brows, he rolled his eyes. Then he saw who it was I sat with - It was Diana and Maria - and he stared. I gave a shrug, he looked thoughtful - then rolled his eyes again, as much as to say, What a business! To all these places, as I have said, I went clad as a boy — indeed, the only time I ever dressed as a girl, now, was for our visits to the Cavendish. This was the single spot in the city at which Diana might have put me in trousers and not cared who knew it; but after Miss Bruce’s complaint they introduced a new rule, and ever after I was taken there in skirts - Diana having something made up for me, I forget the cut and colour of it now. At the club I would sit and drink and smoke, and be flirted with by Maria, and eyed by other ladies, while Diana met friends or wrote letters. She did this very often, for she was known - I suppose I might have guessed it, in a way - as a philanthropist, and ladies courted her for schemes. She gave money to certain charities. She sent books to girls in prisons. She was involved in the producing of a magazine for the Suffrage, named Shafts. She attended to all this, with me at her side. If I leaned to pick up a paper or a list and idly read it, she would take the sheet away, as if gazing too hard at too many words might tire me. In the end, I would settle on the cartoons in Punch. These, then, were my public appearances. There were not too many of them - I am describing here a period that lasted about a year. Diana kept me close, for the most part, and displayed me at home.

• From City of Night (1963)

  “Oh, no!” he exclaimed adamantly, obviating such a simple explanation. “Nothing like that!... Im convinced it’s someone who just wants to know— has to Know!—that someone, somewhere—someone like Me—exists. Eventually,” he predicted solemnly, “whoever it is will speak to me, and he’ll ask me if he can come up.... Oh, you may not know it, but I am rather—well, I’ll say it: Why not?” (Except that he said it like this: “Whu-I NOT-” and he shrugged his fleshy shoulders—or, rather, attempted to: The warning stretching sound of the shirt rejected the movement.) “I am rather Famous in California.” “Because of your costumes?” “‘Dressing up,’” he corrected me coolly, “does not mean wearing costumes! ” He finished his first cup of tea—offered me another cup, which I refused. “When I spoke to you the other night in the bar,” he told me, “it was because I felt a certain propinquity—I mean,” he added carefully, “a certain interest.” “You stood out—even in that bar,” I said tactfully. Again, it wasnt what he wanted to hear. “What I mean,” he said testily, “is that I felt you were ‘ready.’” “Ready for what?” He avoided the question mysteriously. A furry amber cat curled like an ostrich plume about the man’s boots, then jumped lithely on his lap. Neil began to stroke the cat absently. In the long silence that followed, I could hear the satisfied purring of the animal as it pressed itself against the leather costume. As if just realizing that he’d been stroking the cat, Neil pushed it away suddenly, thrusting it angrily to the floor. He almost lifted it away with the tip of his boot. “I hate him when he becomes snivelingly affectionate!” he said. He rose precariously from the chair. The tight costume would not even allow him to walk easily. And when he opened a drawer in the antique desk, he crouched before it uncertainly, rigidly to keep his clothes intact. He brought out a box, removed a key from another smaller box, opened the first, and took out a stack of pictures which he brought over to show me. I prepared myself. That world, being a world of fleeting contacts, has a great attachment to photographs, as if to lend some permanence to what is usually all too impermanent. But I know before Ive seen them that the ones Neil will show me will be far from ordinary—will, in fact, be a part of a game Im convinced hes playing with me.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Hiciste la salsa de tacos, ¿verdad? Asiento, navegando en mi Instagram desde el asiento del pasajero. —Sí. —¿Y los rollitos de jalapeño envueltos en tocino? —pregunta Pike. —Sí —refunfuño—. Acabas de preguntarme hace como diez minutos. Se calla por un momento, conduciendo a través de un vecindario no muy lejos del nuestro. Quiero decir, el suyo. Nuestro. —Solo es que me gustan, es todo —dice. Una sonrisa perezosa tira de mis labios, y siento un toque de orgullo. Me encanta que no sea solo amable con algunas cosas. Que en realidad le guste mucho que yo contribuya. Tanto si es una comida o un aperitivo que le dejo listo sobre la encimera para después del trabajo o el nuevo camino de piedra que hice para el jardín ayer, el que le encantó. Había tenido la idea después de enlodarnos y notar cómo la manguera había hecho más barro, así que decidí que sería divertido poner una caja de piedras lisas junto a la manguera, así ahora podemos estar de pie con la manguera funcionado y mantener nuestros pies limpios al mismo tiempo. También drena el agua excepcionalmente bien, y será práctica. Cuando vayamos a enlodarnos de nuevo. Ha pasado una semana desde esa noche, y seis días desde que los hijos de Kyle estuvieron de visita nadando, y he intentado transformar lo que pasó entre nosotros, en solo un extraño accidente por estar despechada y vulnerable por atención o algo así, pero eso no ha evitado que crezca lo que he empezado a sentir por él. Es un enamoramiento. Estamos a solas demasiado tiempo, y es comprensible que formemos un lazo. Con suerte, asistir a esta fiesta del barrio, donde llevamos comida para compartir, salir de la casa y estar cerca de otras personas, pondrá las cosas en perspectiva nuevamente.

• From Birthday Girl (2018)

  —Oh, no me gustan las cebollas. Me detengo ante las palabras de Pike y miro la salsa de barbacoa rociada sobre mis obras maestras de aros de cebolla. Son una publicación de Instagram esperando a suceder. Si quito las hermosas cebollas doradas, será solo un fail para Pinterest. —¿Y si pruebas un poco? —Me arriesgo, con una sonrisa tímida—. Te gustará. Lo prometo. En mi experiencia, los hombres comerán lo que tienen enfrente. Parece pensarlo un momento y luego cierra el refrigerador y se encuentra con mi mirada. Su expresión se suaviza. —Bien. Probablemente siente que me lo debe, ya que hice la cena, así que lo acepto. Cubriendo la hamburguesa, le doy el plato, y él lo lleva hasta un taburete, tomando un bocado antes de sentarse. Echo un vistazo por encima de mi hombro. Su mandíbula deja de moverse, y parpadea un par de veces, los músculos de sus mejillas se flexionan. Y luego escucho un gemido. Me vuelvo hacia la estufa para que no pueda ver mi sonrisa. —En realidad, está bueno —asegura—. Realmente bueno. Solo asiento, pero noto una pequeña pizca de orgullo. —Cuando comes barato al crecer —indico—, encuentras tus propias maneras de agregarle un toque gourmet.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  • • • When I was a junior, Miss Bivens made me the editor in chief, though the job was supposed to go to a senior. Only a handful of students wanted to work for the Wave, and I ended up writing so many of the articles that I abolished bylines; it looked a little ridiculous having my name appear four times on the front page. The paper cost fifteen cents, and I sold it myself, going from class to class and standing in the hallways, hawking it like a newsboy. Welch High had about twelve hundred students, but we sold only a couple hundred copies of the paper. I tried various schemes to boost the circulation: I held poetry competitions, added a fashion column, and wrote controversial editorials, including one questioning the validity of standardized tests, which provoked an irate letter from the head of the state Department of Education. Nothing worked. One day a student I was trying to get to buy the Wave told me he had no use for it because the same names appeared in the paper again and again: the school’s athletes and cheerleaders and the handful of kids known as slide rules who always won the academic prizes. So I started a column called “Birthday Corner,” listing the names of the eighty or so people who had their birthday in the coming month. Most of these people had never appeared in the paper, and they were so excited to see their names in print, they bought several copies. Circulation doubled. Miss Bivens wondered aloud if “Birthday Corner” represented serious journalism. I told her I didn’t care—it sold papers. • • • Chuck Yeager visited Welch High that year. I’d been hearing about Chuck Yeager all my life from Dad, about how he’d been born in West Virginia, in the town of Myra on the Mud River over in Lincoln County, about how he joined the air force during World War II and had shot down eleven German planes by the time he was twenty-two, about how he became a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base high up on the Mojave Desert in California, and about how one day in 1947 he became the first man to break the sound barrier in his X-1, even though the night before, he’d been up drinking and had been thrown from a horse and cracked some ribs. Dad would never admit to having heroes, but the brass-balled, liquor-loving, coolly calculating Chuck Yeager was the one man in the world he admired above all others. When he heard that Chuck Yeager was giving a speech at Welch High and that he’d agreed to let me interview him afterward, Dad could hardly contain his excitement. He was waiting on the porch for me with a pen and paper when I got home from school the day before the big interview.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  He sat down to help me draw up a list of intelligent questions so I wouldn’t embarrass myself in front of this greatest of West Virginia’s native sons. What was going through your head when you first broke Mach I? What was going through your head when A. Scott Crossfield broke Mach II? What is your favorite aircraft? What are your thoughts on the feasibility of flying at the speed of light? Dad wrote up about twenty-five or thirty questions like that and then insisted we rehearse the interview. He pretended to be Chuck Yeager and gave me detailed answers to the questions he’d written out. His eyes got misty as he described what it was like to break the sound barrier. Then he decided I needed some solid grounding in aviation history, and he stayed up half the night briefing me, by the light of a kerosene lamp, on the test-flight program, basic aerodynamics, and the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach. The next day Mr. Jack, the principal, introduced Chuck Yeager during assembly in the auditorium. He looked more like a cowboy than a West Virginian, with his horseman’s gait and his lean leathery face, but as soon as he started speaking, his voice was pure up-hollow. As he talked, the fidgety students settled into their folding chairs and became enraptured by the legendary, world-traveled man who told us how proud he was of his West Virginia roots, and how we, too, should be proud of those roots, roots we all shared; and how, regardless of where we came from, each and every one of us could and should follow our dreams, just as he had followed his. When he finished talking, the applause about shattered the glass in the windows. I climbed up on the stage before the students filed out. “Mr. Yeager,” I said, holding out my hand, “I’m Jeannette Walls with The Maroon Wave .” Chuck Yeager took my hand and grinned. “Jes’ spell my name right, ma’am,” he said, “so’s my kin’ll know who you’re writin’ about.” We sat down on some folding chairs and talked for nearly an hour. Mr. Yeager took every question seriously and acted like he had all the time in the world for me. When I mentioned various aircraft he’d flown, the aircraft Dad had briefed me about, he grinned again and said, “Heck, I do believe we got an aviation expert on our hands.” In the hallways afterward, the other kids kept coming up to tell me how lucky I was. “What was he really like?” they asked. “What did he say?” Everyone treated me with the deference accorded only to the school’s top athletes. Even the varsity quarterback caught my eye and nodded. I was the girl who had actually talked to Chuck Yeager. Dad was so eager to hear how the interview went that he was not only home when I got back from school, he was even sober.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  “Who’s there?” I called out, but because I had my braces on, it came out sounding like “Phoof der?” “It’s your old man,” Dad answered. “What’s with the mumbling?” He came over to my bunk, held up his Zippo, and flicked it. A flame shot up. “What the Sam Hill’s that on your head?” “My brafef,” I said. “Your what?” I took off the contraption and explained to Dad that, because my front teeth stuck out so badly, I needed braces, but they cost twelve hundred dollars, so I had made my own. “Put them back on,” Dad said. He studied my handiwork intently, then nodded. “Those braces are a goddamn feat of engineering genius,” he said. “You take after your old man.” He took my chin and pulled my mouth open. “And I think they’re by God working.” THAT YEAR I STARTED working for the school newspaper, The Maroon Wave . I wanted to join some club or group or organization where I could feel I belonged, where people wouldn’t move away if I sat down next to them. I was a good runner, and I thought of going out for the track team, but you had to pay for your uniform, and Mom said we couldn’t afford it. You didn’t have to buy a uniform or a musical instrument or pay any dues to work on the Wave . Miss Jeanette Bivens, one of the high school English teachers, was the Wave ’s faculty adviser. She was a quiet, precise woman who had been at Welch High School so long that she had also been Dad’s English teacher. She was the first person in his life, he once told me, who’d showed any faith in him. She thought he was a talented writer and had encouraged him to submit a twenty-four-line poem called “Summer Storm” to a statewide poetry competition. When it won first prize, one of Dad’s other teachers wondered aloud if the son of two lowlife alcoholics like Ted and Erma Walls could have written it himself. Dad was so insulted that he walked out of school. It was Miss Bivens who convinced him to return and earn his diploma, telling him he had what it took to be somebody. Dad had named me after her; Mom suggested adding the second N to make it more elegant and French. Miss Bivens told me that as far as she could remember, I was the only seventh-grader who’d ever worked for the Wave . I started out as a proofreader. On winter evenings, instead of huddling around the stove at 93 Little Hobart Street, I’d go down to the warm, dry offices of The Welch Daily News, where The Maroon Wave was typeset, laid out, and printed. I loved the newsroom’s purposeful atmosphere. Teletype machines clattered against the wall as spools of paper carrying news from around the world piled up on the floor.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  bring myself to stick that needle in Dad’s arm one more time. We both looked at the two dark, slightly sloppy stitches. “That’s some fine handiwork,” Dad said. “I’m mighty proud of you, Mountain Goat.” When I left the house the next morning, Dad was still asleep. When I came home in the evening, he was gone. DAD HAD TAKEN TO disappearing for days at a time. When I asked him where he’d been, his explanations were either so vague or so improbable that I stopped asking. Whenever he did come home, he usually brought a bag of groceries in each arm. We’d gobble deviled-ham sandwiches with thick slices of onion while he told us about the progress of his investigation into the UMW and his latest moneymaking schemes. People were always offering him jobs, he’d explain, but he wasn’t interested in work for hire, in saluting and sucking up and brownnosing and taking orders. “You’ll never make a fortune working for the boss man,” he said. He was focused on striking it rich. There might not be gold in West Virginia, but there were plenty of other ways to make your pile. For instance, he was working on a technology to burn coal more efficiently, so that even the lowest-grade coal could be mined and sold. There was a big market for that, he said, and it was going to make us rich beyond our dreams. I listened to Dad’s plans and tried to encourage him, hoping that what he was saying was true but also pretty certain it wasn’t. Money would come in—and with it, food—on the rare occasion that Dad landed an odd job or Mom received a check from the oil company leasing the drilling rights on her land in Texas. Mom was always vague about how big the land was and where exactly it was, and she refused to consider selling it. All we knew was that every couple of months, this check would show up and we’d have plenty of food for days at a time. When the electricity was on, we ate a lot of beans. A big bag of pinto beans cost under a dollar and would feed us for days. They tasted especially good if you added a spoonful of mayonnaise. We also ate a lot of rice mixed with jack mackerel, which Mom said was excellent brain food. Jack mackerel was not as good as tuna but was better than cat food, which we ate from time to time when things got really tight. Sometimes Mom popped up a big batch of popcorn for dinner. It had lots of fiber, she pointed out, and she had us salt it heavily because the iodine would keep us from getting goiters. “I don’t want my kids looking like pelicans,” she said. Once, when an extra-big royalty check came in, Mom bought us a whole canned ham. We ate off it for days, cutting thick slices for sandwiches. Since we had no refrigerator, we left the ham on a kitchen shelf. After it had been there for about a

• From Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994)

  The best solution is not only to disguise and change as many characteristics as you can but also to make the fictional person a composite. Then throw in the teenie little penis and anti-Semitic leanings, and I think you’ll be Okay. [image file=Image00006.jpg] Try not to feel sorry for yourselves, I say, when you find the going hard and lonely. You seem to want to write, so write. You didn’t have to sign up for this class. I didn’t chase you down and drag you by the hair back to my cave. You are lucky to be one of those people who wishes to build sand castles with words, who is willing to create a place where your imagination can wander. We build this place with the sand of memories; these castles are our memories and inventiveness made tangible. So part of us believes that when the tide starts coming in, we won’t really have lost anything, because actually only a symbol of it was there in the sand. Another part of us thinks we’ll figure out a way to divert the ocean. This is what separates artists from ordinary people: the belief, deep in our hearts, that if we build our castles well enough, somehow the ocean won’t wash them away. I think this is a wonderful kind of person to be. Now there is only a little time left in the class, and it feels like that last half hour at camp when you’ve all gathered in the parking lot, waiting for your duffel bags to be loaded on the bus. I think I’ve told my students every single thing I know about writing. Short assignments, shitty first drafts, one-inch picture frames, Polaroids, messes, mistakes, partners. But a lot of these people came to my class with the best ten pages they’ve ever written, hoping to get published, and now they wonder if this was just a pipe dream. I don’t think so. Maybe most of them are not going to be published in big magazines or by big presses. They are not going to end up on talk shows and best-seller lists, are not going to be David Letterman’s best friend or show Sharon Stone a good time. They are not going to buy big houses and pedigreed dogs and fish forks as a result of their writing. Many of them want these things more than anything else. They don’t believe that if they got these things they’d probably end up even more mentally ill and full of stress and self-doubt than they already are. Anyway, it is not going to happen for very many of them. I still think they should write with everything they have, daily if possible, and for the rest of their lives. When I suggest, however, that devotion and commitment will be their own reward, that in dedication to their craft they will find solace and direction and wisdom and truth and pride, they at first look at me with great hostility.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  In a voice so low that Dad didn’t hear him, Brian said, “Yes.” • • • “Dad has to start carrying his weight,” Lori said as she stared into the empty refrigerator. “He does!” I said. “He brings in money from odd jobs.” “He spends more than he earns on booze,” Brian said. He was whittling, the shavings falling to the floor right outside the kitchen where we were standing. Brian had taken to carrying a pocketknife with him at all times, and he often whittled pieces of scrap wood when he was working something out in his head. “It’s not all for booze,” I said. “Most of it’s for research on cyanide leaching.” “Dad doesn’t need to do research on leaching,” Brian said. “He’s an expert.” He and Lori cracked up. I glared at them. I knew more about Dad’s situation than they did because he talked to me more than anyone else in the family. We’d still go Demon Hunting in the desert together, for old time’s sake, since by then I was seven and too grown up to believe in demons. Dad told me about all his plans and showed me his pages of graphs and calculations and geological charts, depicting the layers of sediment where the gold was buried. He told me I was his favorite child, but he made me promise not to tell Lori or Brian or Maureen. It was our secret. “I swear, honey, there are times when I think you’re the only one around who still has faith in me,” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do if you ever lost it.” I told him that I would never lose faith in him. And I promised myself I never would. • • • A few months after Mom had started working as a teacher, Brian and I passed by the Green Lantern. The clouds above the setting sun were streaked scarlet and purple. The temperature was dropping quickly, from searing hot to chilly within a matter of minutes, like it always did in the desert at dusk. A woman with a fringed shawl draped over her shoulders was smoking a cigarette on the Green Lantern’s front porch. She waved at Brian, but he didn’t wave back. “Yoo-hoo! Brian, it’s me, sugar! Ginger!” she called. Brian ignored her. “Who’s that?” I asked. “Some friend of Dad’s,” he said. “She’s dumb.” “Why is she dumb?” “She doesn’t even know all the words in a Sad Sack comic book,” Brian said. He told me that Dad had taken him out for his birthday awhile back. In the drugstore, Dad had let Brian pick out whatever present he wanted, so Brian chose a Sad Sack comic book. Then they went to the Nevada Hotel, which was near the Owl Club and had a sign outside saying BAR GRILL CLEAN MODERN . They had dinner with Ginger, who kept laughing and talking real loud and touching both Dad and Brian.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  cottonwood tree. We were so stiff from holding on all night that our joints could scarcely move, and the mud kept sucking at our shoes, but we got to dry land as the sun was coming up and climbed the hill to the house just the way I had seen it. Dad was on the porch, pacing back and forth in that uneven stride he had on account of his gimp leg. When he saw us, he let out a yelp of delight and started hobbling down the steps toward us. Mom came running out of the house. She sank to her knees, clasped her hands in front of her, and started praying up to the heavens, thanking the Lord for delivering her children from the flood. It was she who had saved us, she declared, by staying up all night praying. “You get down on your knees and thank your guardian angel,” she said. “And you thank me, too.” Helen and Buster got down and started praying with Mom, but I just stood there looking at them. The way I saw it, I was the one who’d saved us all, not Mom and not some guardian angel. No one was up in that cottonwood tree except the three of us. Dad came alongside me and put his arm around my shoulders. “There weren’t no guardian angel, Dad,” I said. I started explaining how I’d gotten us to the cottonwood tree in time, figuring out how to switch places when our arms got tired and keeping Buster and Helen awake through the long night by quizzing them. Dad squeezed my shoulder. “Well, darling,” he said, “maybe the angel was you.” Continue Reading... Half Broke Horses Jeannette Walls JEANNETTE WALLS was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and grew up in the Southwest and in Welch, West Virginia. She graduated from Barnard College and was a journalist in New York City for twenty years. Her award-winning memoir, The Glass Castle, is an international bestseller and has been translated into twenty-three languages. Walls is also the author of Half Broke Horses, a novel about her grandmother Lily Casey Smith. She is married to writer John Taylor and lives in Virginia. MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT SimonandSchuster.com • THE SOURCE FOR READING GROUPS • MOTION PICTURE ARTWORK © 2017 LIONS GATE ENTERTAINMENT INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Also by Jeannette Walls Half Broke Horses The Silver Star We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster ebook. Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions. CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Instead of attempting to empower those born female by encouraging them to move further away from femininity, we should instead learn to empower femininity itself. We must stop dismissing it as “artificial” or as a “performance,” and instead recognize that certain aspects of femininity (and masculinity as well) transcend both socialization and biological sex—otherwise there would not be feminine boy and masculine girl children. We must challenge all who assume that feminine vulnerability is a sign of weakness. For when we do open ourselves up, whether it be by honestly communicating our thoughts and feelings or expressing our emotions, it is a daring act, one that takes more courage and inner strength than the alpha male facade of silence and stoicism. We must challenge all those who insist that women who act or dress in a feminine manner take on a submissive or passive posture. For many of us, dressing or acting feminine is something we do for ourselves, not for others. It is our way of reclaiming our own bodies and fearlessly expressing our own personalities and sexualities. It is not us who are guilty of trying to reduce our bodies to mere playthings, but rather those who foolishly assume that our feminine style is a signal that we sexually subjugate ourselves to men. In a world where masculinity is assumed to represent strength and power, those who are butch and boyish are able to contemplate their identities within the relative safety of those connotations. In contrast, those of us who are feminine are forced to define ourselves on our own terms and develop our own sense of self-worth. It takes guts, determination, and fearlessness for those of us who are feminine to lift ourselves up out of the inferior meanings that are constantly being projected onto us. If you require any evidence that femininity can be more fierce and dangerous than masculinity, all you need to do is ask the average man to hold your handbag or a bouquet of flowers for a minute, and watch how far away he holds it from his body. Or tell him that you would like to put your lipstick on him and watch how fast he runs off in the other direction. In a world where masculinity is respected and femininity is regularly dismissed, it takes an enormous amount of strength and confidence for any person, whether female-or male-bodied, to embrace their feminine self.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  She and Dad had found a place to live. Their new home, Mom said, was in an abandoned building on the Lower East Side. “It’s a tad run-down,” she admitted. “But all it really needs is a little TLC. And best of all, it’s free.” Other folks were also moving into abandoned buildings, she said. They were called squatters, and the buildings were called squats. “Your father and I are pioneers,” Mom said. “Just like my great-great-grandfather, who helped tame the Wild West.” Mom called in a few weeks and said that although the squat still needed a few finishing touches—a front door, for example—she and Dad were officially accepting visitors. I took the subway to Astor Place on a late spring day and headed east. Mom and Dad’s apartment was in a six-story walk-up. The mortar was crumbling and bricks had come loose. All the windows on the first floor had been boarded up. I reached to open the building’s front door, but where the lock and handle should have been, there was only a hole. Inside, a single naked lightbulb hung from a wire in the hallway. On one wall, chunks of plaster had crumbled away, revealing the wooden ribs and pipes and wiring. On the third floor, I knocked on the door to Mom and Dad’s apartment and heard Dad’s muffled voice. Instead of the door swinging inward, fingers appeared on both sides, and it was lifted out of the frame altogether. There was Dad, beaming and hugging me while he went on about how he’d yet to install door hinges. As a matter of fact, they’d only just gotten the door itself, which he’d found in the basement of another abandoned building. Mom came running up behind him, grinning so widely you could see her molars, and gave me a big hug. Dad knocked a cat off a chair—they had already taken in a few strays—and offered me a seat. The room was crammed with broken furniture, bundles of clothes, stacks of books, and Mom’s art supplies. Four or five electric space heaters blasted away. Mom explained that Dad had hooked up every squat in the building to an insulated cable he’d hot-wired off a utility pole down the block. “We’re all getting free juice, thanks to your father,” Mom said. “No one in the building could survive without him.” Dad chuckled modestly. He told me how complicated the process had been, because the wiring in the building was so ancient. “Damnedest electrical system I’ve ever seen,” he said. “The manual must have been written in hieroglyphics.” I looked around, and it hit me that if you replaced the electric heaters with a coal stove, this squat on the Lower East Side looked pretty much like the house on Little Hobart Street.

• From The Canterbury Tales (2009)

  He believed that God Himself could not challenge him or deprive him of his power. Little did he know. This proud king was humbled suddenly, and reduced to the condition of a beast of the field. He imagined himself to be an ox; he lay with the herd, and ate their food. He walked on all fours and munched on grass. His hair grew like an eagle’s feathers, and his nails became as long as an eagle’s talons. After a number of years had passed, God gave him back his reason. With the return of his humanity, Nebuchadnezzar wept. He thanked God, and promised that he would never again trespass into sin. He kept that oath until the day of his death. God be praised for His justice and His mercy. Belshazzar The name of his son was Belshazzar, and he reigned over Babylon after his father’s death. Yet he did not heed the warning, or the example, of Nebuchadnezzar. He was proud in heart, fierce, and an idolater. He lived in high estate but then, suddenly, Fortune cast him down. There were divisions within his kingdom. He gave a feast for all the nobles at his court, and bid them all to be of good cheer. He told his servants to bring out the sacred vessels that his father had taken from the temple at Jerusalem. ‘We will pour libations to our gods,’ he said, ‘in honour of my father’s victories over the Jews.’ So his wife, his lords and his concubines poured wine into the holy chalices of the Lord and drank their fill. But then Belshazzar happened to look around, gesturing for a servant, when he saw a hand writing very quickly on the wall. There was a hand, and nothing else. No arm. No body. Of course the king was aghast, and shook with fear. He looked with horror upon the words that had been written. Mane. Techel. Phares. None of the wise men in the kingdom could interpret these three words. Only Daniel knew the secret of the saying. ‘Great king,’ he said, ‘Almighty God gave power and glory to your father. He loaded him with wealth and honour. But your father was proud. He did not fear or venerate the Almighty. So God sent him grief and wretchedness. He took away his kingdom. He took away his reason. ‘He was an outcast, lost to human society. His companions were the beasts of the field. He ate the grass and the hay, exposed to the elements, until the time came when it was revealed to him that Almighty God has dominion over all creatures. Only to Him belong the power and the glory. Out of pity for the poor man, God restored his humanity and gave him back his kingdom. ‘You, sir, his son, are also filled with pride. You are following your father’s sinful course, and you have become an enemy of God. You drank from the sacred vessels stolen from the temple.

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  A FEW DAYS AFTER Mom and Dad brought me home, I cooked myself some hot dogs. I was hungry, Mom was at work on a painting, and no one else was there to fix them for me. … Dad also thought I should face down my enemy, and he showed me how to pass my finger through a candle flame. I did it over and over, slowing my finger with each pass, watching the way it seemed to cut the flame in half, testing to see how much my finger could endure without actually getting burned. I was always on the lookout for bigger fires. Whenever neighbors burned trash, I ran over and watched the blaze trying to escape the garbage can. I'd inch closer and closer, feeling the heat against my face until I got so near that it became unbearable, and then I'd back away just enough to be able to stand it. … "Why the hell would she?" Dad bellowed with a proud grin. "She already fought the fire once and won."

• From The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005)

  • • • When I was a junior, Miss Bivens made me the editor in chief, though the job was supposed to go to a senior. Only a handful of students wanted to work for the Wave, and I ended up writing so many of the articles that I abolished bylines; it looked a little ridiculous having my name appear four times on the front page. The paper cost fifteen cents, and I sold it myself, going from class to class and standing in the hallways, hawking it like a newsboy. Welch High had about twelve hundred students, but we sold only a couple hundred copies of the paper. I tried various schemes to boost the circulation: I held poetry competitions, added a fashion column, and wrote controversial editorials, including one questioning the validity of standardized tests, which provoked an irate letter from the head of the state Department of Education. Nothing worked. One day a student I was trying to get to buy the Wave told me he had no use for it because the same names appeared in the paper again and again: the school’s athletes and cheerleaders and the handful of kids known as slide rules who always won the academic prizes. So I started a column called “Birthday Corner,” listing the names of the eighty or so people who had their birthday in the coming month. Most of these people had never appeared in the paper, and they were so excited to see their names in print, they bought several copies. Circulation doubled. Miss Bivens wondered aloud if “Birthday Corner” represented serious journalism. I told her I didn’t care—it sold papers. • • • Chuck Yeager visited Welch High that year. I’d been hearing about Chuck Yeager all my life from Dad, about how he’d been born in West Virginia, in the town of Myra on the Mud River over in Lincoln County, about how he joined the air force during World War II and had shot down eleven German planes by the time he was twenty-two, about how he became a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base high up on the Mojave Desert in California, and about how one day in 1947 he became the first man to break the sound barrier in his X-1, even though the night before, he’d been up drinking and had been thrown from a horse and cracked some ribs. Dad would never admit to having heroes, but the brass-balled, liquor-loving, coolly calculating Chuck Yeager was the one man in the world he admired above all others. When he heard that Chuck Yeager was giving a speech at Welch High and that he’d agreed to let me interview him afterward, Dad could hardly contain his excitement. He was waiting on the porch for me with a pen and paper when I got home from school the day before the big interview.