Relief

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 Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had been a regular girl once; I could be regular again - being regular, indeed, might prove a kind of holiday. I thought back over my recent history, and gave a shudder; and then I glanced at Florence, and was glad - as I had been glad once before - that she was rather plain, and rather ordinary. She had taken out a handkerchief, and was wiping at her nose; now she was calling out to Ralph, to put the kettle on the stove. My lusts had been quick, and driven me to desperate pleasures: but she, I knew, would never raise them. My too-tender heart had once grown hard, and had lately grown harder - but there was no chance of it softening, I thought, at Quilter Street. Chapter 17 [image "023" file=wate_9781101078198_oeb_023_r1.jpg] One of the ladies who had come dressed as Marie Antoinette to Diana’s terrible party had come clad, not as a queen, but as a shepherdess, with a crook: I had heard her tell another guest (who had mistaken her for Bo Peep, from the nursery poem) about how Marie Antoinette had had a little cottage built in the garden of her palace, and had thought it droll to play in it, with all of her friends dressed up as dairy-maids and yokels. I remembered that story, in the first few weeks of my time at Quilter Street, a little bitterly. I think I had felt rather like Marie Antoinette, the day that I put on an apron and cleaned Florence’s house for her and cooked her supper; I think I even felt like her, the second day I did it. By the third day, however - the third day of waiting in the street for the stand-pipe to spit out its bit of cloudy water, of black-leading the fireplaces and the stove, of whitening the step, of scouring out the privy - I was ready to hang up my crook and return to my palace. But the palace doors, of course, had been closed on me; I must work, now, in earnest. And I must work, too, with a baby squirming on my arm - or rolling about the floor, cracking his head against the furniture - or, more usually, shrieking out, from his crib upstairs, for milk and bread-and-butter. For all my promises to Florence, if there had been gin in the house, I think I would have given it to him - or else, I might have swallowed some of it myself, to make the chores a little gayer.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  That gave me an opening. I asked if she was also sad that her own father hadn’t lived to see her children and grandchildren. “‘May he rest in peace,’ she answered. ‘I was a baby. I didn’t know what it was to grow up with a father. You know, your father, my older brother, was like a father to me.’ “And then I asked her, directly, ‘Why did he kill himself, do you know?’ My aunt didn’t hesitate. ‘Leo, these were different times. There was a big drama. He couldn’t live his life the way he wanted, like you.’ “I was so glad that you and I had talked about this for so long,” Leonardo says to me. “Because I got it right away. I knew what she was talking about. At first it irritated me because I thought she meant gay people now are free to be who they are, which is obviously totally not true. I tried to say that, but she cut me off. “‘He had this secret and then my mother found out. She was pregnant with me when they discovered that he used to have sex with men. My mother never told me how it all came out. I only know that there was a scandal. A few months later I was born and then my father killed himself.’” Leonardo pauses. “Can you believe that?” he asks. “My first feeling was relief. I thought, ‘Thank God, I’m not crazy.’ But then I thought, ‘Oh my God, my poor grandfather, how awful for him,’ and it made me feel angry with my aunt for saying that he used to have sex with men. What a dismissive thing to say, as if he was not a full person with feelings.” Leonardo pauses again. He doesn’t look at me, and we sit in silence for a long minute before he continues. “Now I understand why it was so important for my dad to make sure I knew that he accepted my gayness. I always felt that it was related to his father’s suicide but I didn’t know how. And I’ll tell you something else. I think my grandfather was in love with a man and that’s why he killed himself. I think he was in a relationship and that he was forced to end it. The family devalued it by making it only about sex, making it sound dirty so they could frame it as bad. But it was about his identity. It was about love and loss. Can you see that?” Leonardo raises his head and looks at me.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  He opens his bag. “Also, I brought something to show you.” He pulls out a small box wrapped in layers of newspaper. “I had to bring it in, just to show you how amazing this is.” There it is, a small blue ceramic vase: his father’s vase . “For years,” Leonardo says, “I imagined my father as a boy, holding in his hands this gift he made at school for his father’s birthday in his favorite color, blue. That gift that I saw so many times as a child, and that I kept in my closet after my father’s death.” Leonardo pauses and then exhales deeply in relief. “Only after our last session,” he says, “did I realize what I’ve been using it for.” He hands me the vase and I peek inside, where I see three single, mismatched cuff links. I look at Leonardo, puzzled. He explains that he stored each of them there when they lost their mate. We look at each other and Leonardo shrugs and smiles. “They’ve been waiting all these years for their loved ones to come back.” 9 THE TASTE OF SORROW I t is rare that I find myself taken off guard by a patient’s secret. But I was not prepared for what I discovered after Isabella’s death. I have never met Isabella. She was my patient Naomi’s best friend. It isn’t unusual for therapists to feel that we know our patients’ friends, lovers, and family. In some ways, we accompany those people from afar, as if they were characters in a beloved book. We will never meet them but we know them intimately and have feelings for them. We get attached to the people in our patients’ lives; we follow their stories; we watch them change with our patients and see their relationships develop or sometimes end. Naomi has been in therapy with me for three years, and that is how I have come to know Isabella, who has been her best friend since childhood. Both of them grew up as only children, and in some ways they have been sisters to each other. Naomi takes a tissue from the box on the side table. She is shaken. She tells me that Isabella has just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer and that the doctors don’t know yet how bad it is or if it’s treatable. We are both silent. Isabella gave birth only a few months earlier. She always wanted a big family, and when she learned that she carried BRCA1, the so-called breast cancer gene, she and her husband decided to rush to have another child. Then she would have the surgery that she believed would save her life, a double mastectomy. “Now it’s too late,” Naomi says quietly and immediately adds, “But Isabella is brave. If anyone can make it, she can.” I recognize the way Naomi comforts herself, using her idealization of Isabella.

• From Wild (2012)

  “Cool shirt,” a woman said. She had short curly gray hair and a big white dog on a leash. “This is Odin.” She bent to scratch his neck, then stood and pushed her little round glasses back into place on her nose and fixed me in her curious gaze. “Are you, by chance, hiking the PCT?” Her name was Trina. She was a fifty-year-old high school English teacher from Colorado who’d begun her hike only a couple of days before. She’d left Belden Town, hiking north on the PCT, only to be met by enough snow on the trail that she’d returned. Her report filled me with gloom. Would I ever escape the snow? As we talked, another hiker walked up—a woman named Stacy who had also begun her hike the day before, coming up the same road I had to reach Three Lakes. At last I’d met some women on the trail! I was dumbfounded with relief as we exchanged in a flurry the quick details of our lives. Trina was an avid weekend backpacker, Stacy an experienced trekker who’d hiked the PCT with a friend from Mexico to Belden Town the previous summer. Stacy and I talked about the places on the trail we’d both been, about Ed in Kennedy Meadows, whom she’d met the summer before, and about her life in a desert town in southern California, where she worked as a bookkeeper for her father’s company and took her summers off to hike. She was thirty and from a big Irish family, pale, pretty, and black-haired. “Let’s camp together for the night and make a plan,” said Trina. “There’s a spot over in that meadow.” She pointed to a place visible from the store. We walked there and pitched our tents. I unpacked my box while Trina and Stacy talked on the grass. Waves of pleasure came over me as I picked up each item and held it instinctively to my nose. The pristine packets of Lipton noodles or dehydrated beans and rice that I ate for dinner, the still shiny Clif bars and immaculate ziplock bags of dried fruit and nuts. I was sick to death of these things, but seeing them new and unsullied restored something in me. There was the fresh T-shirt I didn’t need now that I had my Bob Marley shirt, two brand-new pair of wool socks, and a copy of Margaret Drabble’s A Summer Bird-Cage, which I wasn’t quite ready for yet—I’d burned my way through only about half the pages of The Novel, tossing them that morning in Paco’s fire. And, most important, a fresh supply of 2nd Skin.

• From Less (2017)

  Though the course features, curiously, neither vampires nor Frankenstein monsters, the students adore it. No one has given them scissors and glue sticks since they were in kindergarten. No one has ever asked them to translate a sentence from Carson McCullers ( In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together ) into German ( In der Stadt gab es zwei Stumme, und sie waren immer zusammen ) and pass it around the room, retranslating as they go, until it comes out as playground gibberish: In the bar there were two potatoes together, and they were trouble. What a relief for their hardworking lives. Do they learn anything about literature? Doubtful. But they learn to love language again, something that has faded like sex in a long marriage. Because of this, they learn to love their teacher. It is in Berlin that Less begins to grow a beard. You could blame the approach of a certain wedding date. You could also blame his new German lover, Bastian. One would not expect them to become lovers. Less certainly did not. After all, they are not well suited. Bastian is young, vain, arrogant, and incurious, even contemptuous, of literature and art; instead, he follows sports avidly, and Germany’s losses leave him in a depression not seen since Weimar days. This, despite the fact that he does not consider himself German; he is Bavarian. This means nothing to Less, who associates this nation more with München’s beer fests and lederhosen than with the graffiti heaven of Berlin. But it means a great deal to Bastian. He frequently wears T-shirts proclaiming his heritage, and these, along with light-colored jeans and a puffy cotton jacket, are his typical costume. He is not intellectual about, interested in, or kind with words. But he is, Less is to discover, surprisingly softhearted. It so happens that Bastian visits Less every few nights. Waiting outside Less’s apartment building in his jeans, neon T-shirt, puffy jacket. What on earth does he want with your Mr. Professor? He does not say. He merely pins Less against the wall the moment they are inside, paraphrasing in a whisper from the Checkpoint Charlie sign: Entering American Sector .…Sometimes they don’t even leave the apartment, and Less is forced to make dinner from his meager fridge: bacon, eggs, and walnuts. One night two weeks into the Wintersitzung, they watch Bastian’s favorite TV show, something called Schwiegertochter gesucht, about country people looking to play matchmaker for their children, until the young man falls asleep with his body wrapped tight around Less’s, his nose docked in Less’s ear. Around midnight, the fever begins.

• From Take Back Your Life: Recovering from Cults and Abusive Relationships (2000)

  They suggest ways to minimize conflict and trauma during court proceedings. Many lawyers in the cult field give similar advice to members leaving larger groups: • Keep to the facts • Keep a meticulous record of incidents and criminal trespasses by the leader • Stay cool and allow the leader to act inappropriately and/or bizarrely in court without interference • Stay away from belief systems or ideas and stick to criminal acts that the leader may have committed • Hire an attorney who is familiar with the problems of being in court opposing someone with a personality disorder (there are now workshops on this topic for divorce mediators and lawyers) • Educate your attorney about these specific issues of abuse, personality disorders, thought reform, and cults • Sever all contact with the leader/spouse or remaining loyal members of the group, unless there are unusual circumstances, such as maintaining contact with children or vulnerable family members who may still be under the leader's control • Allow authorities to stay involved Although one can never truly know the diagnosis or motivation of another individual, this information should help you gain a better understanding of the relationship you had with your leader. Usually this ameliorates the tendency toward self-blame. Most of us believe others think and feel the way we do. Often it is difficult to embrace the idea that the leader you loved and admired was unable to love you or empathize with you. It may also be difficult to digest the fact that you were drawn to someone who seemed certain, strong, and knowing, but was actually psychologically impaired and deeply troubled. Although you may not recognize it in yourself now, ultimately, you are the one who is flexible, resilient, and able to grow. The tables are turned, in a sense, and most likely, you are not used to thinking in that way, of putting yourself ahead of the leader, for example. It may be painful to take this in, but ultimately it may be what frees you from the emotional ties and self-blame. [image file=img/img0010.jpg] Although much of the material in this book involves larger cult situations, the victim of an abusive cultic relationship-whether it's one-on-one, no-name, or family-should review all of the chapters and implement any of the suggestions and exercises that feel right. Additionally, excellent resources on domestic violence and relationship abuse are available in most regions. In some cases, Victim Witness services may provide medical, legal, and counseling support. Also look in the phone directory for local services and check out the resources listed in Appendix C. Numerous links to organizations that work with victims of abuse can be found on such Internet sites as www.shgresources.com/ resources/dv. In some cases, long-term therapy and intensive rehabilitation will be needed to help a survivor of a family cult or a one-on-one cult become able to lead a normal life. But life after the cult is possible.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  I walked lightly effortlessly about the town like an escaped prisoner. Mnemjian had violet tears in his violet eyes as he embraced me warmly. He settled down to shave me himself, his every gesture expressing an emollient sympathy and tenderness. Outside on the pavements drenched with sunlight walked the citizens of Alexandria each locked into a world of personal relationships and fears, yet each seeming to my eyes infinitely remote from those upon which my own thoughts and feelings were busy. The city was smiling with a heartbreaking indifference, a cocotte refreshed by the darkness. There remained only one thing to do now, to see Nessim. I was relieved to learn that he was due to come into town that evening. Here again time had another surprise in store for me for the Nessim who lived in my memories had changed. He had aged like a woman — his lips and face had both broadened. He walked now with his weight distributed comfortably on the flat of his feet as if his body had already submitted to a dozen pregnancies. The queer litheness of his step had gone. Moreover he radiated now a flabby charm mixed with concern which made him at first all but unrecognizable. A foolish authoritativeness had replaced the delightful old diffidence. He was just back from Kenya. I had hardly time to capture and examine these new impressions when he suggested that we should visit the Etoile together — the night-club where Melissa used to dance. It had changed hands, he added, as if this somehow excused our visiting it on the very day of her funeral. Shocked and surprised as I was I agreed without hesitation, prompted both by curiosity as to his own feelings and a desire to discuss the transaction which concerned the child — this mythical child. When we walked down the narrow airless stairway into the white light of the place a cry went up and the girls came running to him from every corner like cockroaches. It appeared that he was well known now as an habitué. He opened his arms to them with a shout of laughter, turning to me for approval as he did so. Then taking their hands one after another he pressed them voluptuously to the breast pocket of his coat so that they might feel the outlines of the thick wallet he now carried, stuffed with banknotes. This gesture at once reminded me of how, when I was accosted one night in the dark streets of the city by a pregnant woman and trying to make my. escape, she took my hand, as if to give me an idea of the pleasure she was offering (or perhaps to emphasize her need) and pressed it upon her swollen abdomen. Now, watching Nessim, I suddenly recalled the tremulous beat of the foetal heart in the eighth month.

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  I only know that there was a scandal. A few months later I was born and then my father killed himself.’” Leonardo pauses. “Can you believe that?” he asks. “My first feeling was relief. I thought, ‘Thank God, I’m not crazy.’ But then I thought, ‘Oh my God, my poor grandfather, how awful for him,’ and it made me feel angry with my aunt for saying that he used to have sex with men. What a dismissive thing to say, as if he was not a full person with feelings.” Leonardo pauses again. He doesn’t look at me, and we sit in silence for a long minute before he continues. “Now I understand why it was so important for my dad to make sure I knew that he accepted my gayness. I always felt that it was related to his father’s suicide but I didn’t know how. And I’ll tell you something else. I think my grandfather was in love with a man and that’s why he killed himself. I think he was in a relationship and that he was forced to end it. The family devalued it by making it only about sex, making it sound dirty so they could frame it as bad. But it was about his identity. It was about love and loss. Can you see that?” Leonardo raises his head and looks at me. I notice the tears in his eyes. “This is what my dream was about,” he says. “My father’s wish to save his father from a breakup that felt like death.” “From a death your grandfather couldn’t fully mourn,” I say. Philosopher Judith Butler describes the idea of “grievability,” the notion that some things, lives, or relationships are not considered valuable, and therefore if they were to be lost, that loss wouldn’t register as such. It is only lives that were acknowledged by the culture as having a value that we consider worthy of grief. Some lives, some loves, some races, sexual orientations, and identities, are seen as less valuable or are not recognized as lives at all. Butler writes, “Grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.” There is no way to grieve what is not considered lived. When love isn’t recognized as such, it is not grievable, and one is left mystified and inconsolable. As in Leonardo’s case, the loss that couldn’t be fully mourned lives in its raw form in the unconscious of the next generation.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  ‘All right’ I said. ‘God bless you, son.’ Together we wrapped his full-moon regalia in some newspapers and tied the bundle up with string. His relief was tempered with doubt. ‘You won’t lose them?’ he said anxiously. ‘Give them to me’ I said firmly and he handed me the parcel meekly. As I went down the stairs he called after me to express relief and gratitude, adding the words: ‘I’ll say a little prayer for you, son.’ I walked back slowly through the dock-area with the parcel under my arm, wondering whether I would ever dare to confide this wonderful story to someone worth sharing it with. The warships turned in their inky reflections — the forest of masts and rigging in the Commercial Port swayed softly among the mirror-images of the water: somewhere a ship’s radio was blaring out the latest jazz-hit to reach Alexandria: Old Tiresias No-one half so breezy as, Half so free and easy as Old Tiresias. [image file=image_rsrc1AY.jpg] III Somehow, then, the problem is just how to introject this new and disturbing material into (under?) the skin of the old without changing or irremediably damaging the contours of my subjects or the solution in which I see them move. The golden fish circling so languidly in their great bowl of light — they are hardly aware that their world, the field of their journeys, is a curved one.… The sinking sun which had emptied the harbour roads of all but the black silhouettes of the foreign warships had nevertheless left a flickering greyness — the play of light without colour or resonance upon the surface of a sea still dappled with sails. Dinghies racing for home moved about the floor of the inner harbour, scuttling in and out among the ships like mice among the great boots of primitive cottagers. The sprouting tier of guns on the Jean Bart moved slowly — tilted — and then settled back into brooding stillness, aimed at the rosy heart of the city whose highest minarets still gleamed gold in the last rays of the sunset. The flocks of spring pigeons glittered like confetti as they turned their wings to the light. (Fine writing!) But the great panels of the brass-framed windows in the Yacht Club blazed like diamonds, throwing a brilliant light upon the snowy tables with their food, setting fire to the glasses and jewellery and eyes in a last uneasy conflagration before the heavy curtains would be drawn and the faces which had gathered to greet Mountolive took on the warm pallors of candle-light. The triumphs of polity, the resources of tact, the warmth, the patience.… Profligacy and sentimentality … killing love by taking things easy … sleeping out a chagrin.… This was Alexandria, the unconsciously poetical mother-city exemplified in the names and faces which made up her history. Listen.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Finally, Nell mortgaged some of her properties and borrowed against her jewels and plate to obtain cash to pay the creditors. She believed that James would honor his brother’s deathbed request. She was right—three months after Charles’s death, James sent Nell cash for her most pressing needs and promises of additional help. By the end of the year he had paid numerous merchants’ bills and given her an additional twenty-three hundred pounds in cash. Most important, in January 1686 James settled on Nell an annual pension of fifteen hundred pounds—a fraction of what she had received from Charles, but enough to live on comfortably as a private person. In the two years after Charles’s death, Nell enjoyed her life in London. She visited friends, gave dinner parties, and went to the theater. Over the years she had spells of illness but usually bounced back quickly. It is likely that Nell had caught from Charles the same venereal disease that Louise had, but in Nell’s case it slowly hardened her arteries and increased her blood pressure. In March 1687, Nell had a stroke. She seemed to be slowly recuperating when two months later she suffered one even more devastating. Paralyzed, she lay in her great silver bed, the one royal Charles had christened so many times, and there she breathed her last at the age of thirty-seven. “More in need of pity than anyone else”It was not Madame de Pompadour but her successor, Madame du Barry, who had the misfortune to lose Louis XV to death while she was still maîtresse-en-titre. At sixty-four the king, who had always enjoyed a morbid fascination with dead bodies, caught smallpox after examining the coffin of a girl about to be buried. His face, covered with boils, turned the color of bronze, and he suffered horribly. After Madame du Barry had nursed her royal lover through the ravages of the disease at great risk to herself, she was dismissed from the stench of sweat and putrefaction so the king could receive absolution for his earthly sins. When the king, roused from a feverish sleep, asked for her and was told she had left, he asked, “What, already?” and wept.13 Before administering the comforting rites, the priests forced the dying monarch to sign a letter imprisoning his faithful mistress in the moldering convent of the Pont aux Dames. The faithless lover, trembling before the gates of hell, signed the despicable document. The new king, young Louis XVI, at his wife’s prodding, banished everyone with the name of du Barry from court, and many relatives who had been the objects of her bounty quickly changed their names. But Marie Antoinette’s mother, Maria Theresa of Austria, reproached her daughter for gloating over an “unfortunate creature who had lost everything and was more in need of pity than anyone else.”14

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  When the boy was two years old, Bianca knew that stories of his birth had reached Francesco’s ears. Since he had a legitimate son, there seemed little reason to keep the lie about Antonio alive. And so she disclosed her secret as an amusing joke she had played to make him happy. Francesco, content in his legitimate son, accepted her explanation. However, he continued to raise Antonio as his son. He must have grown to love the boy, and moreover, he didn’t want to become the laughingstock of Europe by admitting that his mistress had foisted a stranger’s bastard upon him as his son. When Francesco’s only legitimate son died at the age of four in 1582, Bianca pushed to have Antonio created heir to the throne. Francesco asked permission from King Philip II of Spain, who wielded great power over the Italian states. It was a shocking request, especially as most of the world knew the child’s unique history. With great diplomacy, Philip consented to having the child elevated to prince of Capestrano of the kingdom of Naples, but not heir to the throne of Tuscany. Without waiting for Philip’s response, Francesco legitimized Antonio in a completely illegal maneuver, presented him to his legislative advisory group, the Council of two hundred, as his son, and ordered that he should be addressed as His Highness. He sent the child out in a coach accompanied by an escort of the German Guard, a privilege reserved for princes. The Tuscan people were appalled. Legitimate Medicis had become bad enough, but to foist on them as their prince a commoner’s bastard—without a drop of Medici blood—was to foment rebellion. Francesco’s brother Ferdinando, the legitimate heir to the throne, was afraid that Francesco would convince King Philip to recognize Antonio and support him with Spanish firepower. He kept a watchful eye on Bianca and loathed her more than ever. Both Francesco and Bianca died within a few hours of each other in 1587, apparently from a malarial infection, though many whispered of poison. Ferdinando, the new archduke, immediately stripped eleven-year-old Antonio of all titles and possessions and refused to acknowledge him as his nephew. But the next day Ferdinando, having flexed his muscle and shown the boy’s true position, returned all his magnificent estates. He promised to protect and honor him as long as he remained a faithful subject. A loving guardian, Ferdinando personally arranged an excellent education for the boy. Hearing of the deaths of Bianca and Francesco, Antonio’s mother, Lucia, ventured back to Florence and, at archduke Ferdinando’s instigation, was reunited with her son. Ferdinando, seeking to avoid a future generation of spurious heirs claiming the Medici throne, forced Antonio to become a Knight of Malta, an order whose members were unable to contract a legally valid marriage. Antonio lived rich and successful and died in 1626, so ending the story of the royal bastard who almost inherited a throne—without a single drop of royal blood.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  And I was not very kind when you first came, I think. She had been gone a little under six months then, and the idea of having another girl about the place - especially you, who I had met the very week I had found her - well! And then, your story was like hers, you had been with a gent who had thrown you out, after he’d got you in trouble - it seemed too queer. But there was a moment, when you picked up Cyril — I daresay you don’t even remember doing it - but you held Cyril in your arms, and I thought of her, who had never cradled him at all... I didn’t know whether I could stand to see you do it; or whether I could bear to see you stop. And then you spoke - and you were not like Lily then, of course. And, oh! I’ve never been gladder of anything, in all my life!’ She laughed; I made some sort of sound that seemed to pass for laughter, some kind of face that could be mistaken, in that dim light, for a smile. Then she gave a terrific yawn, and rose, and shifted Cyril a little higher against her neck, and brushed her cheek across his head; and then, after a moment, she smiled and stepped wearily to the door. But before she could reach it, I called her name. I said, ‘Flo, there never was a gent who threw me out. It was a lady I was living with; but I lied, so you’d let me stay. I’m - I’ m a tom, like you.’ ‘You are!’ She gaped at me. ‘Annie said it all along; but I never thought much about it, after that first night.’ She began to frown. ‘And so, if there never was a man, your story wasn’t like Lilian’s, at all...’ I shook my head. ‘And you were never in trouble...’ ‘Not that kind of trouble.’ ‘And all this time, you have been here, and I’ve been thinking you one thing, and...’ She looked at me, then, with a strange expression - I didn’t know if she felt angry, or sad, or bewildered, or betrayed, or what. I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ But she only shook her head, and put a hand across her eyes for a second; and when she took the hand away, her gaze seemed perfectly clear, and almost amused. ‘Annie always said it,’ she said again. ‘Won’t she be pleased, now!

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  In the following sessions, Leonardo and I dive into his family history, trying to explore his secret identification with his grandfather: the feeling that his dead grandfather lives in him and that Leonardo needs to live out something for him and for the whole family. There are many unanswered questions, but I realize that the more we talk about his grandfather’s sexuality, the less space Milo takes up in his mind. As time passes and his symptoms of depression slowly subside, Leonardo becomes certain that he has figured out his family secret, and he decides it’s time to find out the truth. “I didn’t want to feel that I was crazy and that I made up all these theories about my family,” he tells me one morning, describing how, at his cousin’s wedding the previous night, he decided to ask his aunt. “My whole family was there, my two aunts, my father’s younger sisters, and their children. I really like my family and I was happy to see them, and you know, I love weddings.” He smiles. “The pathos of forever and ever until death do us part, isn’t that romantic?” Leonardo is playful and I recognize his fantasy about romance and death. “My aunts were very close to my grandmother, and I figured this was my chance to learn something about the years before my grandfather died and know what’s only in my head and what is real. Let me tell you, the good news is that I’m not crazy. The bad news is that it’s worse than I imagined. “After the ceremony, one of my aunts came to me in tears and said how sad she was that my father hadn’t lived to celebrate that day with us. She told me she was thinking about him the entire evening. That gave me an opening. I asked if she was also sad that her own father hadn’t lived to see her children and grandchildren. “‘May he rest in peace,’ she answered. ‘I was a baby. I didn’t know what it was to grow up with a father. You know, your father, my older brother, was like a father to me.’ “And then I asked her, directly, ‘Why did he kill himself, do you know?’ My aunt didn’t hesitate. ‘Leo, these were different times. There was a big drama. He couldn’t live his life the way he wanted, like you.’ “I was so glad that you and I had talked about this for so long,” Leonardo says to me. “Because I got it right away. I knew what she was talking about. At first it irritated me because I thought she meant gay people now are free to be who they are, which is obviously totally not true. I tried to say that, but she cut me off.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Madame de Parabère told her husband that some friends in financial embarrassment wanted to sell the items at a ridiculously low price. Her generous spouse immediately gave her the money to buy them. When she displayed her glittering gems proudly in public and courtiers asked her where she had obtained them, she replied that her kind husband had bought them for her. No one was fooled except her husband. Basking in his wife’s seeming fidelity, Monsieur de Parabère replied that a husband should be generous to a wife who loved no one but himself. The room erupted into guffaws of laughter. Monsieur de Parabère considerately died afterward, sparing his wife traumatic scenes when he would inevitably discover the truth. Relieved of this burden, Madame de Parabère could flaunt the regent’s gifts more freely. But most married royal mistresses did not have husbands who thoughtfully provided them with the freedoms of an early widowhood. In the 1740s Madame de Pompadour was forced to unharness herself from an adoring husband when she became the mistress of Louis XV. Born Jeanne Poisson, she had married—rather above her station—a wealthy and handsome bourgeois named Le Normant d’Etioles. Monsieur d’Etioles was the nephew of Le Normant de Tournehem, Jeanne’s mother’s lover, who was also presumed to be Jeanne’s father. Monsieur d’Etioles idolized his bride and gave her a large allowance to beautify herself and their homes, and to secure her social position, which had been dimmed by her mother’s shady past. Since childhood, Madame d’Etioles’s sole ambition had been to become the king’s mistress. It is likely that her marriage to Monsieur d’Etioles fulfilled a dual purpose—to enjoy the fruits of improved social status, and to use that status as a springboard to meet the king. While the pretty young wife had many admirers, she took no lovers, a rare phenomenon in eighteenth-century Paris. She was known to remark at lively dinner parties that the king alone could make her unfaithful to her husband. The room would always ring with laughter at this remark, her husband laughing loudest of all. Little did he know the cold truth that lurked behind the witticism and the pain it would cause him. The d’Etioles had been married four years when Jeanne achieved her desire of meeting—and winning—the king. Monsieur de Tournehem occupied the position of farmer-general—a wealthy tax collector—and, showing more loyalty to his presumed daughter Jeanne than to his nephew, quickly packed her husband off on a long tour of the provinces. When Monsieur d’Etioles returned some two months later, his uncle broke the unwelcome news that his pretty wife had become the king’s mistress. Monsieur d’Etioles fainted from the shock. When he came to, he reacted so violently that his uncle feared he would try to kill himself and had all guns removed from the house. Monsieur d’Etioles threatened to go to Versailles to reclaim his wife. His uncle pointed out the folly of such a venture.

• From Wild (2012)

  When he was gone, I ripped the pages of The Ten Thousand Things from their gummy paperback binding and set them into the fire in thin clumps, prodding them with a stick until they burned. As I stared at the flames, I thought about Eddie, the same as I did just about every time I sat by a fire. It had been he who’d taught me how to build one. Eddie was the one who’d taken me camping the first time. He’d shown me how to pitch a tent and tie a knot in a rope. From him, I’d learned how to open a can with a jackknife and paddle a canoe and skip a rock on the surface of a lake. In the three years after he fell in love with my mother, he’d taken us camping and canoeing along the Minnesota and St. Croix and Namekagon rivers practically every weekend from June to September, and after we’d moved north onto the land my family had bought with the proceeds from his broken back, he’d taught me even more about the woods. There’s no way to know what makes one thing happen and not another. What leads to what. What destroys what. What causes what to flourish or die or take another course. But I was pretty certain as I sat there that night that if it hadn’t been for Eddie, I wouldn’t have found myself on the PCT. And though it was true that everything I felt for him sat like a boulder in my throat, this realization made the boulder sit ever so much lighter. He hadn’t loved me well in the end, but he’d loved me well when it mattered.

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  But Monsieur d’Etioles had no inclination whatsoever to take back the wife who had so publicly shamed him. “I have received, Madame, your letter in which you inform me of your determination to return to me and your desire to surrender yourself to God,” he replied. “I cannot but admire such a resolution. I can well understand that it would be very embarrassing for you to see me, and you must agree that my feelings would be the same. Your presence can only intensify painful memories. Therefore, the best course for us is to live apart. No matter how much dissatisfaction you have caused me, I believe that you are concerned for my honor, and I should regard it as compromised if I received you in my house and lived with you as my wife. You are aware that time cannot alter what honor demands.”14 Breathing a huge sigh of relief, Madame de Pompadour showed her husband’s letter to an obliging priest, and was purified of her carnal sins and allowed to take the holy sacraments. Reconciled with the Church, she was now permitted to fulfill her dream of becoming lady-in-waiting to the queen. Monsieur d’Etioles’s story had a happy ending. When Madame de Pompadour died at forty-two, her spurned husband married Mademoiselle Raime, legitimizing their children, and they lived happily for many years. He survived the Revolution and died at the age of eighty-three in 1800. Some husbands who were initially horrified at the loss of their wives to the king became quickly reconciled. Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony, had such good fortune with the husbands of several of his mistresses. Tall, handsome, his brute strength only partially tempered by the refinements of the time, Augustus had become elector in 1694 at the age of twenty-four. He dutifully married a princess and sired an heir, but his restless nature compelled him to continue the travels he had enjoyed before he mounted the throne. A crowned king wandering across Europe was a rarity in those days, and the itinerant monarch found throngs of willing noblewomen throwing themselves into his bed when he visited foreign courts. In Vienna, at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph I, Augustus fell in love with Madame d’Esterle, whose resistance was conquered by the gift of a pair of earrings worth 40,000 florins. Thrilled with such valuable proof of royal desire, Madame d’Esterle threw caution to the winds and ended up seducing the king rather than the other way around. Soon after, her husband entered her bedroom one morning to find his wife asleep, with the thick curly head of the king of Saxony resting on her naked breast. The distraught husband cried out, “O thou perfidious wretch!”15 As the shaken king jumped out of bed and grabbed his sword, Monsieur d’Esterle ran away. Dressing hastily, Augustus sent his mistress to the inviolable home of his envoy to Vienna, clutching a case full of her jewels.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Now, this is where I have to point out it’s easy for avoidance to masquerade as JOMO. We socially anxious types are perfectionists, after all, so it’s easy to get into an all-or-nothing mind-set—hit every party or stay at home with the shades drawn. But all-or-nothing isn’t the answer to perfectionism. What is instead? In 1980, Dr. David Burns, now emeritus faculty at Stanford, published the first research-based self-help book for depression, which is now a multimillion-selling classic, Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy. In it, he penned a chapter on perfectionism titled “Dare to Be Average,” where he tackled perfectionism using a topic close to Rosie’s heart: scientific papers. He writes that, as a young trainee, he took two years to polish his first scientific paper. It was an excellent paper and he’s proud of it to this day, but he noticed that his colleagues churned out a lot more papers in those same two years. He reasoned that his first paper was really good, worth ninety-eight “units of excellence.” But he reasoned that he could probably churn out ten papers each worth eighty “units of excellence” in the same time period, with a net result of eight hundred units, which would be way better than the mere ninety-eight conferred by his two-year masterpiece. Rosie, our grad student, ever the scientific mind, jumped at the concept of daring to be average. A black belt in karate, she deliberately put herself through some mediocre workouts. She polled her colleagues about how many times they rehearsed their lab meeting presentations (the average: one or two run-throughs, maybe one more for highly technical slides) and tried to do that herself rather than overpreparing and overrehearsing. But even better, Rosie decided to experiment with having some conversations that met 50 percent of her standards. It was instant relief. She only had to be funny, confident, or smart to a level of 50 percent: “It was like the opposite of Lake Woebegone,” she said. “I was trying to be average.” What happened? Because she felt less pressure, Rosie acted more naturally, which got a better response from her conversation partners than when she felt so uptight and miserable. She left conversations feeling pretty good, which raised her confidence. Before, when she dove in thinking she was responsible for carrying the exchange and that she had to be witty and smooth at all times, she never reached her goal. By aiming for mediocrity—a few gaps in conversation, carrying some but not all of the interaction, maybe saying something witty, but maybe not—she not only met her goal, but was also willing to try again, which created a virtuous cycle. It was not only more productive—she was racking up a lot of practice—but also way more pleasant.

• From Less (2017)

  He remembers his scream in the night, and the pastor running in (wearing only a dhoti and carrying his daughter), the kind man arranging for a church member to drive Less to the hospital in Thiruvananthapuram, Rupali’s worried good-bye, the long painful hours in the waiting room, whose only solace was a supernatural vending machine that produced, in change, more than it took in, the casting call of nurses—from seen-it-all-before battle-axes to pretty ingenues—before Less was allowed an X-ray of his right foot (beautiful archipelago of bones), which confirmed, alas, a fractured ankle and, buried deep in the pad of his foot, one half of a needle, at which point he received his first procedure—done by a female doctor with collagen lips who called his injury “bullshit” (“Why does this man have a sewing needle?”) and was unable to retrieve the object—and, that having failed, his foot now in a temporary splint, Less was assigned a hospital room, a chamber he shared with an elderly laborer who had spent twenty years in Vallejo, California, and had Spanish but not English, then was prepared for the next morning’s surgery, requiring a variety of gurney changes and anesthetic injections until he was finally thrust into a pristine operating theater whose motile X-ray machine allowed the surgeon (an affable man with a Hercule Poirot mustache) to produce for Less, within five minutes, and with the additional use of a pocket magnet, the trifling source of his injury (held before his eyes with tweezers), after which his foot was fitted into a bootlike splint and our protagonist was given a strong painkiller, which put him almost instantly into an exhausted sleep. And now he is looking around the room and considering his situation. His paper gown is green as the Statue of Liberty’s, and his fracture is safe in its black plastic boot. His blue suit is presumably lining the den of some feral dog family. A portly nurse is busying herself with some paperwork in the corner, her bifocals giving her the appearance of the four-eyed fish ( Anableps anableps ) that can see both above and below water. He must have made noise; her head turns, and she shouts in Malayalam. Impressively, the result is that his mustachioed surgeon appears through the door, white coat swinging, smiling and gesturing at Less’s foot as a plumber might at a repaired kitchen sink. “Mr. Less, you are awake! So now you will no longer set off the metal detectors, bing bing bing! We are all curious,” the doctor asks, leaning down. “Why does a man have a sewing needle?” “To mend things. To put on missing buttons.” “This is a great hazard in your profession?” “Apparently a needle is a greater one.” Less feels he does not even sound like himself anymore. “When can I go back to the retreat, Doctor?” “Oh!” he says, searching his pockets and producing an envelope. “The retreat has sent this for you.”

• From Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (2004)

  Having personally witnessed with horror the unmitigated disaster of Charles’s marriage to a virgin noblewoman, modern princes are now insisting on marrying nonvirgin commoners of their choice and are willing to fight for that right. In 2001 twenty-eight-year-old Crown Prince Haakon of Norway married his live-in girlfriend Mette-Marit Tjessem Hoiby, a tall blonde with a strong jaw and healthy good looks. Also twenty-eight, Mette-Marit was not only a commoner, but a very “common commoner” according to a public opinion poll. She was a former waitress and strawberry picker who had never completed her education. Worse, she had a four-year-old illegitimate son whose father was in jail on drug charges. Prince Haakon pushed hard for the wedding and threatened to renounce his rights to the throne of his father, King Harald. Many compared it to the constitutional crisis of Wallis Warfield Simpson and Edward VIII. Holding very modern values, however, most Norwegians had nothing against the marriage; a poll found that 70 percent wanted the prince’s fiancée for their queen. And so the tainted Mette-Marit was forgiven her trespasses; she promised she would never again be led into temptation; and her kingdom was come. Prince Charles attended the wedding; it is said he returned home with a lighter heart and a spring in his step. In 2002 thirty-three-year-old Crown Prince Willem of the Netherlands married twenty-nine-year-old Argentine Maxima Zorreguieta despite numerous protests. The problem was not Maxima’s lack of virginity, which we can assume. Nor was anything deemed wrong with Maxima herself, who was well educated and worked as a banker on Wall Street. But Maxima’s father had been a member of Argentina’s former junta, a regime that tortured and killed thirty thousand people. Some politicians said Willem should renounce his right to inherit the throne if he married a woman with such an inappropriate father. And Willem indicated he would be willing to do so if they tried to prevent his marriage. Despite the protests, Maxima won tremendous popular support among Dutch citizens. The couple was married in February 2002, but the bride’s parents were requested to stay home in Argentina. Charles was likely the last prince to immolate himself on the altar of Hymen as an exercise in duty to his country. Modern princes like Haakon and Willem will marry women they love. But many of us common folk who have married the partners of our choice are keenly aware of a painful fact—that the heady trip down the aisle often ends on a hard wooden bench in divorce court by way of a third party’s soft, inviting bed. A marriage made for love, once strained by the contempt of familiarity, is no remedy for eventual adultery.

• From How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (2018)

  Then, at the next opportunity, try out the things on your list. Spoiler alert: you will feel far worse anticipating your challenges than actually completing them. This is so common it has a name: the worry mismatch. It’s called a mismatch for a reason: just like my experience with the parking space, the consequence of intentionally trying something outside our comfort zone is, typically, nothing. Sometimes we get a raised eyebrow or an incredulous stare, but it’s nothing we can’t handle. Jia learned that even though the dog-grooming ladies giggled as they explained they don’t do human haircuts, they were nice about it. Nothing catastrophic happens. No one calls the police. No one asks why we’re so stupid. No one gets angry. But we have to experience it to believe it. Indeed, when I talked to Jia about his anticipation versus his experience he said, “That mismatch gets corrected really quickly. Do it a couple of times and your calibration changes pretty fast. When I started, everything I was thinking about was the worst-case scenario: the person would pull out a gun, call the cops, or cuss me out. My mind was treating this as a foregone conclusion. But by the end, I could ask anything of anyone, anywhere.” So it’s okay if you feel a little leery before you try the things on your Challenge List. Pranav will feel anxious when ordering food. Nelly will get the jitters before heading off on a date. Ali didn’t want to ask for directions. I felt nervous introducing myself to parents at my sons’ schools. But I did it anyway and that’s what matters. Whether or not you get the raise, her number, or even a smile doesn’t matter: it’s that you did it. The success of your task is independent of the outcome. The only bar: Did you do it? Yes? Gold star for you.