Sadness

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.

Page 75 of 212 · 20 per page

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I thought talking about his mother would spark something in Charlie’s eyes. When it didn’t, I became even more concerned about the child. I noticed that there was a second chair on Charlie’s side of the table, and I realized that lawyers were apparently supposed to sit on that side and the clients on the side I chose, where there was only one chair. I’d sat in the wrong place. I lowered my voice and spoke more softly, “Charlie, you’ve got to talk to me. I can’t help you if you don’t. Would you just say your name—say something, please?” He continued to stare at the wall. I waited and then stood up and walked around the table. He didn’t look at me as I moved but returned his gaze to his wrist. I sat in the chair next to him, leaned close, and said quietly, “Charlie, I’m really sorry if you’re upset, but please talk to me. I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.” He leaned back in his chair for the first time, nearly placing his head on the wall behind us. I pulled my chair closer to him and leaned back in mine. We sat silently for a long time and then I started saying silly things, because I didn’t know what else to do. “Well, you won’t tell me what you’re thinking, so I guess I’m going to just have to tell you what I’m thinking. I bet you think you know what I’m thinking,” I said playfully, “but in fact you really couldn’t possibly imagine. You probably think I’m thinking about the law, or the judge, or the po-lice, or why won’t this young man speak with me. But what I’m actually thinking about is food. Yes, that’s right, Charlie,” I continued teasingly, “I’m thinking about fried chicken and collard greens cooked with turkey meat and sweet potato biscuits….You ever had a sweet potato biscuit?” Nothing. “You’ve probably never had a sweet potato biscuit, and that’s a shame.” Still nothing. I kept going. “I’m thinking about getting a new car because my car is so old.” I waited. Nothing. “Charlie, you’re supposed to say, ‘How old is it, Bryan?’ and then I say my car is so old—” He never smiled or responded; he just continued looking at the spot on the wall, his face frozen in sadness. “What kind of car do you think I should get?” I went through a range of ridiculous musings that yielded nothing from Charlie. He continued to lean back, and his body seemed a little less tense. I noticed that our shoulders were now touching.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  There were no immediate requests, and the general answer might well have been "Sit down and shut up". "Beggars in Spats," I called out mischievously. This was a comic number from the Broadway of thirty or forty years ago, a genre utterly antique to me but treasured by all these adults as the glamour music of their youth, and so absorbed by osmosis into my own. It was another of those things that gave me the ghostly sense of having grown up in an earlier age. She did sing "Beggars in Spats", which was about a couple getting married with only a nickel between them but somehow managing very well; it was a long song, in which everything happened several times over. "And now I've done enough," she said, turning her eyes on my father. "If I really can't persuade Lewis to join me?" He shook his head. "There seems to be a bit of a matrimonial theme. We could round it off with 'There's Nothing Like Marriage for People' . . ." "I'm just not up to it tonight." "Oh, go on, Dad!" I said, bounding across to his chair and tugging at his hand. "It's always so funny when you do it in your American accent." And Sibelius, noticing the activity, lurched to his feet and clittered round the parquet giving short affirmative barks. I appealed to my mother, who looked mournfully at my father, not knowing what to hope. Mirabelle doodled the first two lines sweetly, sotto voce, "Imagine living with someone Who's longing to live with you", and winked at me as he got up, with an alarming look of stifled wretchedness, and took his place by the piano. Mirabelle slipped her arm through his and sang the lines again, still very sweetly. ("Oh god, I imagine that every minute of the day," I thought.) "Imagine signing a lease together; And hanging a Matisse together," my father replied, but in stiff English. She took it up, in English too, "Oh what felicity In domesticity!" and he capped it, with a sternness that was comic in itself, "Let no one disparage Marriage!" It was all very strange. Geoffrey stared at his wife expressionlessly. Was he angry with her for pretending to be getting married to my father? Or was he merely stuffily hiding his admiration and assessing the song as though he had never heard it before? I wondered if I was so self-absorbed that I'd missed out on something important that had been said. The accompaniment was oddly inadvertent. Mirabelle was nursing the thing along by sheer, even exaggerated, force of personality: "Hurry, let's call up the minister!"—head thrown back. A second's delay, "Why be a sinister Old bachelor or spinister . . . " My mother had stopped and I turned to her irritably. Her cheeks were wet with tears, and she was fumbling at her cuff for a handkerchief. Then she jumped up and ran out of the room.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I was reading the story of the False Chaplain. A great Knight was married to a beautiful Lady, and they lived in a castle by the sea. The Knight went out hunting and generally doing good, and the Lady walked in her garden or sat with her women and made lovely tapestries. All seemed well, but as the years went by they were troubled by one thing: they had no children. And however hard they prayed, nothing could alter that fact. The Lady was sorrowful and spent long days in supplication to God, asking her Chaplain how she could atone for the great sin in her heart which God was punishing her for in this way. And the Knight was angry; and then he too would ask the Chaplain for absolution. At length the Chaplain, who was a fair and soft-spoken young man, said to the Knight that he must go away on the Crusade that was about to set forth and seek forgiveness from God within the walls of Jerusalem itself. Only then, he said, could the Knight and the Lady hope to be blessed with offspring. So the Knight armed himself and rode off and left the Lady in the care of the Chaplain to wait and pray. Now praying was not really what filled the Chaplain's thoughts, for he had conceived on the first day he saw her a great passion for the Lady, the more terrible for being damned by the highest precepts of his order and his honour. And as the weeks went by he worked upon the Lady, and slyly disclosed his love to her, as if he were speaking only of God's love. And she, who liked and trusted the Chaplain, found her feelings soured and disturbed by the young man's passion. Then one day, when they were sitting in the garden bower that overlooked the sea, the Chaplain said that if he himself were to lie with her, then God's will might surely be done, and her womb would flower.

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

  Does the age of a child matter and should people contemplating divorce wait for a better time? The answer, of course, is “it depends” on a host of factors, including the quality of the marriage (is it violence or boredom that’s behind the decision) and the quality of the postdivorce family over the long haul. That said, it is clear from my work and others that in our divorce culture the youngest children tend to suffer the most. At an age when they need constant protection and loving nurturance, these young children have parents in turmoil. In many families this includes infants or toddlers who may have been tenderly cared for and suddenly experience a drastic change in that care. Their mothers go back to work and to night school to improve their financial status. Their fathers are less available. And they suffer. Paula is the classic example of such a child and I have chosen her story to convey the experience of millions of children like her. At least half of the children in this country whose parents divorce are under the age of six when the breakup happens. Too young to understand the sudden changes in her family, Paula grew up brokenhearted and very angry. Her life story captures her continuing rage and the dramatic, self-destructive ways she found to express it. As we follow her life, we get a close look at how court-ordered visiting plays out from the child’s perspective. In Paula’s adult life, we gain a view of how children of divorce handle divorce with their own children. PAULA STRODE INTO my office, sat down, shrugged her heavy backpack to the floor, and grinned. At age thirty-three, she looked fitter and healthier than she did at our last meeting ten years ago in Seattle when she was borderline anorexic, pale, chain-smoking, and ignoring the salad she had ordered for lunch. She also looked considerably older, with weathered skin and deep lines in her forehead. “Do you remember our last visit?” I asked, wondering if she was aware of how much she had changed. Paula startled me by throwing back her head and laughing in a throaty, smoker’s voice. “I don’t remember it at all, zip, nada. You should erase everything and anything I said back then because I was probably high on cocaine. I’ve been in recovery for two years now and things that were numbed out are starting to come back ... but that time in my life is still a total blur.” I looked more closely at Paula. She still retained vestiges of the tough street kid she had been—a tenseness in her jaw and squared-off shoulders that could carry any burden you’d care to toss at her—but she was softer now, less cocky, somehow less strident. Her backpack was filled with college textbooks, her green eyes were bright and direct, and she was plainly eager and able to tell her story.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  They worry that if a person gets upset or becomes violent, being uncuffed will make him or her harder to subdue. This guard didn’t hesitate to take the handcuffs off this child before leaving the room. We were sitting at a wooden table that was probably four by six feet. Charlie was on one side of the table, and I was on the other. It had been three days since his arrest. “Charlie, my name is Bryan. Your grandmother called me and asked me if I would come and see you. I’m a lawyer, and I help people who get in trouble or who are accused of crimes, and I’d like to help you.” The boy wouldn’t make eye contact with me. He was tiny, but he had big, beautiful eyes. He had a close haircut that was common for little boys because it required no maintenance. It made him look even younger than he was. I thought I saw tattoos or symbols on his neck, but when I looked more closely, I realized that they were bruises. “Charlie, are you okay?” He was staring intensely to my left, looking at the wall as if he saw something there. His distant look was so alarming that I actually turned to see if there was something of interest behind me, but it was just a blank wall. The disconnected look, the sadness in his face, and his complete lack of engagement—qualities he shared with a lot of the other teenagers I’d worked with—were the only things that made me believe he was fourteen. I sat and waited for a very long time in the hope that he would give me some kind of response, but the room remained silent. He stared at the wall and then looked down at his own wrists. He wrapped his right hand around his left wrist where the handcuffs had been and rubbed the spot where the metal had pinched him. “Charlie, I want to make sure you’re doing okay, so I just need you to answer a few questions for me, okay?” I knew he could hear me; whenever I spoke, he would lift his head and return his gaze to the spot on the wall. “Charlie, if I were you, I’d be pretty scared and really worried right now, but I’d also want someone to help me. I’d like to help, okay?” I waited for a response, but none was forthcoming. “Charlie, can you speak? Are you okay?” He stared at the wall when I spoke and then back at his wrists when I was finished, but he didn’t say a word. “We don’t have to talk about George. We don’t have to talk about what happened; we can talk about whatever you want.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  It was into this dispirited household that I remember Geoffrey and Mirabelle coming, quite often, as if determined to brighten us up. There was a sense of an impromptu party being stirred into reluctant life; they would arrive with a half-bottle of Beefeater or a batch of meringues in a tin. The idea of Geoffrey brightening anyone up had something incongruous about it that added to the forced sense of fun. He made a genuine effort, he smiled a lot in a rather loopy way, he even once told a long humorous anecdote, followed by an expectant silence in which Mirabelle quietly provided the proper punch-line and pointed out an error earlier in the story which altered the meaning of the whole thing. It was Mirabelle really who made the going. As well as her line-judge's shout, she had a lovely liquid singing voice, which I imagined being refined to its bright clarity in the great stills of her bosom. She was always rather shy of using it in my father's presence, and made pointless remarks about how she couldn't sing at all, but then would break into a phrase or two from Cole Porter inadvertently, out of pure tunefulness, when carrying out the plates or pouring a drink. What sometimes happened was a duet with my father, which seemed less presumptuous on her part, though he would much rather have just listened to her or better still had no singing: "I will if Lewis will too," she would say, which may have been the basis for Geoffrey's festering jealousy all these years later. My father had a great aversion to character-acting in songs, any rolling of the eyes, putting hands on hips or wringing out of humour. He tended to sing like a sentinel, sworn to some higher purpose. Mirabelle, however, was much given to caperings and routines which spoke of a thwarted desire for the stage and could be rather overwhelming in the confines of the sitting-room. She knew several of the drunk songs from operettas and fin de siecle musicals and sometimes did "Ah, quel diner", from La Perichole, in a recklessly "French" manner. But her party piece was a song "I'm just a wee bit boozy", from a forgotten show called Her Cousin from Kansas, in which each verse was slightly more slurred than the one before; at the end she would pretend to stumble against the piano or even fall to the floor. My mother, who accompanied, always had a look of forlorn sobriety after this number.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  Without ambitions and without joy, like many a man who from year to year thus effaces himself more and more, he had come to put a fanatic application into minor matters to which he limited himself. I have myself known these honorable temptations to meticulousness and scruple. Experience had produced in my father a skepticism toward all mankind in which he included me, as yet a child. My success, had he lived to see it, would not have impressed him in the least; family pride was so strong that it would not have been admitted that I could add anything to it. I was twelve when this overburdened man left us. My mother settled down, for the rest of her life, to an austere widowhood; I never saw her again from the day that I set out for Rome, summoned hither by my guardian. My memory of her face, elongated like those of most of our Spanish women and touched with melancholy sweetness, is confirmed by her image in wax on the Wall of Ancestors. She had the dainty feet of the women of Gades, in their close-fitting sandals, nor was the gentle swaying of the hips which marks the dancers of that region alien to this virtuous young matron. I have often reflected upon the error that we commit in supposing that a man or a family necessarily share in the ideas or events of the century in which they happen to exist. The effect of intrigues in Rome barely reached my parents in that distant province of Spain, even though at the time of the revolt against Nero my grandfather had for one night offered hospitality to Galba. We lived on the memory of obscure heroes of archives without renown, of a certain Fabius Hadrianus who was burned alive by the Carthaginians in the siege of Utica, and of a second Fabius, an ill-starred soldier who pursued Mithridates on the roads of Asia Minor. Of the writers of the period my father knew practically nothing: Lucan and Seneca were strangers to him, although like us they were of Spanish origin. My great uncle Aelius, a scholar, confined his reading to the best known authors of the time of Augustus. Such indifference to contemporary fashion kept them from many an error in taste, and especially from falling into turgid rhetoric. Hellenism and the Orient were unknown, or at best regarded frowningly from afar; there was not, I believe, a single good Greek statue in the whole peninsula. Thrift went hand in hand with wealth, and a certain rusticity was always present in our love of pompous ceremony.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  While he was out at the shop, I drifted through the house, only half-curious about the Rostands and barely conscious that I was doing wrong. At the other end of the landing was a door with a boyish notice, "Julien, Privé, Danger de Mort", and as I opened it I saw for a fraction of a second a fat little boy with glasses earnestly coming to terms with The Police or Duran Duran. But as my eyes adjusted to the gloom there was nothing but a bare mattress, and a child's deal desk on which lay some Astérix books and a die-cast Ferrari Testa Rossa and a long-since shrivelled inflatable globe. I felt Julien must be a bit younger than Patrick. Had they known each other, played with the boat each long summer, been transformed one after the other by puberty, Julien anxious and awestruck by his Belgian friend? Maybe Luc had known him too, and maybe that earlier, simpler threesome had come up to his room to fight and boast and hold the stilted talk of adolescence.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  My father called "Peg" and went after her, half-tangled up with the doleful but excited dog. Mirabelle looked horrified at what she had brought about. Geoffrey nodded towards the door, and she drifted into the hall, biting her lower lip. The two of us were left alone. The shock of the first moments was yielding to a childish urge to cry too, the contagion of misery, however little understood. Geoffrey got up, walked to the window, and stood glaring into the dusk and the privet hedge. "I'm very sorry about your father's bad news," he said, raking and smoothing his beard. "I suppose it's as well to be prepared for the worst. Let's hope they can hold it off for a few more months, eh?" I did ring Willie Turlough, god knows why—perhaps out of that same sense of desolation that had welled up from the past and seemed to me, as it can in certain lights, to be our real environment. We talked against a background of white noise, he was impossibly distracted; I pictured him holding a wriggling bundle like the baby that turns into a piglet in Alice. What people put themselves through . . . I shouted that I would come round after supper, and had the impression that he agreed. I was in the pub first. It didn't seem to them to be all that long since I had left. To me it did, so that I was reluctant to go in, and then hurt at how little fuss was made of me. The deaths of our friends were in the smoke-soured air, of course; they were still being talked about with original shock, and with the occasional hilarity that came with shock and brought a tear to the eye that the indulgent reminiscences failed to raise. From time to time someone would have the muffled excitement of breaking the news to a new arrival who hadn't heard. I noticed how the story was changing as each teller patched it together. I bought lagers for my old chums Danny and Simon, who must have known me well, we had drunk so much together and talked so much, up and down the scale between murky confession and the permitted embellishments of tales of conquest, the two of them drily puncturing my more preposterous flights; but I had an eerie sense of having broken with them, of looking in with envy on their steady and self-sufficient affair. The utterly unchanged bar, some of the men I had slept with at one time or another, even Dawn himself, existed in earlier, closed-down precincts of my life. When Simon asked me some perfectly straightforward question, I felt it had been run through a scrambler. What was the scene like in Belgium? You mean the scene . . . in Belgium . . . ? I couldn't think of anything to say.

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

  She took him to endless medical appointments, consulted with doctors and dietitians, and watched over his daily meals and routines. During the long days at home when he had to miss school and rest, Billy’s mother was there helping with homework, playing games, and inventing diversions. Her care and attention paid off. From almost being held back in kindergarten and first grade, Billy’s academic work and self-esteem steadily improved. Shortly before his parents divorced, Billy was at the top of his fourth-grade class and was an especially gifted writer. Other kids liked him. Then Billy’s world caved in. “I’m tired of full-time mothering,” his mom told me during our first interview, five months after the separation. Young and attractive, Billy’s mother started dating the minute her husband packed his bags and within weeks was spending all her time with Tom, the man she would later marry. “Billy adores Tom,” she exclaimed. In fact, Billy and his mother spent most of that first summer visiting Tom in Petaluma where Tom owns a sporting goods store, away from Billy’s friends and regular summer activities. “All Billy does is sit home on the couch and mope,” she said. “It drives me nuts. The more he demands my attention, the more obnoxious he gets. I’ve devoted my life to this child,” she said earnestly, leaning toward me. “He has to realize that I need a life of my own!” Billy’s mother was a gregarious woman who was an accomplished amateur musician. His father, a native Australian, built a successful restaurant franchise and spent the rest of his time engaged in his true passion, racquet sports. The parents had an active social life but maintained predictable routines at home for Billy. When they went out in the evenings, Billy was cared for by a retired nurse whom he had known all his life. One of the only times that Billy came out of his shell during our first interview together was when I asked if it was hard for him to miss so much school. He looked at me sharply and then his eyes fell on the bony little hands tightly laced in his lap. In a low voice, he muttered, “Mom made it okay. We used to do things together.” “What sorts of things?” Billy huddled into his parka. He was silent so long I thought he wasn’t going to respond. Then he said, softly, “We had games we played only on those days. We’d use my spelling words and it was really fun to learn them that way. We made multiplication dominos and I knew all the times tables up to twelve even before third grade ended. We read the kid’s National Geographic and made up stories to go with it. And we had big maps of imaginary worlds that we kept adding to and coloring.” His voice trailed off and he looked very sad. “That sounds wonderful!” I said, glad to have found a topic that evoked some interest in him.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  He called something to the barman, who was slow to respond, and gave the impression Cherif was not his favourite customer as he handed over a newspaper that had been stowed behind the till. It was the Flemish Post, a few days old, folded, slightly browned already, with the brittle texture of newsprint that has got damp and been dried out. Cherif set it in front ofme, pointed to a short article, and then watched me as I read it. I knew his grasp of the language was poor and he seemed to take the piece in again by following my reactions to it. "Hm," I said, pushing the paper back towards him. "We had the police in here talking to everybody." "Oh." I looked towards the article again. It said how the body of a young man had been found in the sea-canal; Pieter who-was-it . . . "It's Rose," said Cherif, "the one you called Rose." A moment of uncomfortable recall—his big twitching fist with the girl's name pricked in blue across the knuckles, his pin-point pupils and nervy patter and crude attempt to hustle that older man. The barman came past and took the paper away again. "I threw him out," he said. "Dangerous sort. Drugs. A week or two back. Not queer of course," he explained. "Either a waste of time or it means trouble." He turned with a single firm shake of the head. "So what have they found out?" I asked Cherif. "I don't know." Well of course he wouldn't, but I'd hoped for a little more. "He was mad, perhaps." "He talked a lot of sense to me." But Cherif was melancholy about it. "You didn't know him, did you?" "I met him in here, that's all. You sound like a policeman." "Sorry, darling." I drank, and looked down the half-empty room. It was a doldrums hour, the juke-box silent, the TV hectic but noiseless, one or two bores in uncontested command. I stroked the back of his hand. "No, it is a horrible thing, someone just being taken out, so to speak." I had my own grief and was alternately resentful and full of sympathetic intuitions. "It doesn't matter," he said. But he came back to it later, as we lay in the dark: the jingling of bed-springs was over, I was just asleep, looking for my bunk in the workers' hostel Cherif was staying in, such a confusion of doors and unlit stairways. . . Something about "Rose," out in the cold canal, I think he only called up the image and let it palely float, nothing more to say about it—a kind of dread, though, underneath.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  It’s easy even for residents to miss it because the change has been gradual—more erosion than mudslide. But it’s obvious if you know where to look, and a common refrain for those of us who return intermittently is “Geez, Middletown is not looking good.” In the 1980s, Middletown had a proud, almost idyllic downtown: a bustling shopping center, restaurants that had operated since before World War II, and a few bars where men like Papaw would gather and have a beer (or many) after a hard day at the steel mill. My favorite store was the local Kmart, which was the main attraction in a strip mall, near a branch of Dillman’s—a local grocer with three or four locations. Now the strip mall is mostly bare: Kmart stands empty, and the Dillman family closed that big store and all the rest, too. The last I checked, there was only an Arby’s, a discount grocery store, and a Chinese buffet in what was once a Middletown center of commerce. The scene at that strip mall is hardly uncommon. Few Middletown businesses are doing well, and many have ceased operating altogether. Twenty years ago, there were two local malls. Now one of those malls is a parking lot, and the other serves as a walking course for the elderly (though it still has a few stores). Today downtown Middletown is little more than a relic of American industrial glory. Abandoned shops with broken windows line the heart of downtown, where Central Avenue and Main Street meet. Richie’s pawnshop has long since closed, though a hideous yellow and green sign still marks the site, so far as I know. Richie’s isn’t far from an old pharmacy that, in its heyday, had a soda bar and served root beer floats. Across the street is a building that looks like a theater, with one of those giant triangular signs that reads “ST___L” because the letters in the middle were shattered and never replaced. If you need a payday lender or a cash-for-gold store, downtown Middletown is the place to be. Not far from the main drag of empty shops and boarded-up windows is the Sorg Mansion. The Sorgs, a powerful and wealthy industrial family dating back to the nineteenth century, operated a large paper mill in Middletown. They donated enough money to put their names on the local opera house and helped build Middletown into a respectable enough city to attract Armco. Their mansion, a gigantic manor home, sits near a formerly proud Middletown country club. Despite its beauty, a Maryland couple recently purchased the mansion for $225,000, or about half of what a decent multi-room apartment sets you back in Washington, D.C. Located quite literally on Main Street, the Sorg Mansion is just up the road from a number of opulent homes that housed Middletown’s wealthy in their heyday. Most have fallen into disrepair. Those that haven’t have been subdivided into small apartments for Middletown’s poorest residents.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  had to respond to the same physical punishments of the father. At a very early age Anton revealed a more ironic attitude, prone to laughing at the world and seeing things with some detachment. This made it easier for him to reassess his father once he was on his own. The other children lacked this ability to distance themselves and were more easily enmeshed in the father’s brutality. This would seem to indicate something different in the way Anton’s brain was wired. Some children are greedier than others—they display from early on a greater need for attention. They tend to always see what is missing, what they are not getting from others. Second, our earliest experiences and attachment schemas (see chapter 4) play a large role in shaping the attitude. We internalize the voices of the mother and father figure. If they were very authoritarian and judgmental, we will tend to be harsher on ourselves than others and have a more critical bent toward everything we see. Equally important are the experiences we have outside the family, as we get older. When we love or admire someone, we tend to internalize a part of their presence, and they shape how we see the world in a positive way. This could be teachers, mentors, or peers. Negative and traumatic experiences can have a constricting effect—they close our minds off to anything that might possibly make us reexperience the original pain. Our attitude is constantly being shaped by what happens to us, but vestiges of our earliest attitude always live on. No matter how far he progressed, Chekhov remained susceptible to feelings of depression and self-loathing. What we must understand about the attitude is not only how it colors our perceptions but also how it actively determines what happens to us in life—our health, our relations with people, and our success. Our attitude has a self-fulfilling dynamic. Look again at the scenario of the young man in Paris. Feeling somewhat tense and insecure, he reacts defensively to mistakes that he makes in learning the language. This makes it harder for him to learn, which in turn makes meeting people more difficult, which makes him feel more isolated. The more his energy lowers from depression, the more this cycle perpetuates itself. His insecurities can also push people away. The way we think about people tends to have a like effect upon them. If we feel hostile and critical, we tend to inspire critical emotions in other people. If we feel defensive, we make others feel defensive. The attitude of the young man tends to lock him into this negative dynamic. The attitude of the young woman, on the other hand, triggers a positive dynamic. She is able to learn the language and meet people, all of which elevates her mood and energy levels, which makes her more attractive and interesting to others, on and on. Although attitudes come in many varieties and blends, we can

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  She sang a song in a voice so satiny smooth that I trusted the sound and followed it right into sleep. Edwin brought over my blue suit coat. She found the matching trousers in a pile by my bathroom door and took them both to the dry cleaners for me. When I didn’t show up at the Malibou the next Friday, Ed and Georgetta and Peaches came by and picked me up. Cookie threw me a towel when I arrived and told me to start waiting on tables. I moved in numbness for several weeks, unable to feel the sensation of temperature, hot or cold. The world seemed distant. One night at work a guy beckoned me over to his table and told me to take the french fries back to the kitchen. He said they were cold. I took them to Cookie, but she said she was too busy. I brought the french fries back to the guy and apologized. He picked up a class of water and poured its contents all over the french fries. ““They’re cold,” he said. He opened a traveling case, pulled out a huge snake, and coiled it around his neck. And then he bit off a chunk of the water glass and chewed it. “The french fries are cold,” he repeated. “Cookie,” I yelled as I skidded into the kitchen. “Give me some hot french fries, and I mean now!” She started to protest. “Now, goddamn it. I want them now!” The guy left me a great tip. “You didn’t know who that guy was?” Booker doubled over laughing, Everyone chuckled. “That was Razor Man. He performs at a club near here.” I threw down my towel. “This job is fucked up,” I protested, but even I started to smile. “What’s so funny?” Toni said behind me. I turned around to explain but her face was all twisted up in anger. “I said, what’s so goddamn funny?” she demanded. One of the butches tried to pull her back, “Come on, Toni, blow it off.” She yanked free and staggered toward me. “You think you’re funny?” “What the hell, Toni,” I said, flustered. A group of pros came in the door and I started to walk over to say hello, but Toni spun me around. “You think I don’t know what’s going on with you and my femme?” Everyone sucked in their breath. I felt stunned. “Toni, what the hell are you talking about?” “You think I don’t know, don’t your” Betty started toward Toni, but Angie, one of the pros who had just walked in, held her back. “Step outside, you chickenshit bastard.” Toni spat on the floor. I sure as hell didn’t want to fight Toni, so I went Stone Butch Blues 69 outside to talk to her. Everyone followed me out to listen. “Toni,” I appealed to het. “Shut up and fight, you fuckin’ bastard. Come on, you chickenshit son-of-a-bitch.”

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  I longed to tell him, whom I could completely trust; but my trust to Arthur, enforced by the whole way I was living my life, had become an unbreakable code to me, that is to say a principle of honour as well as an enigma. I merely shrugged. ‘And that fight, for God’s sake.’ I shrugged again. Could he really believe the fight story? ‘It’s all pretty much a mystery to you, isn’t it?’ I said, both proud and pained at the unplanned and inexplicable way things stood. There was nothing I could adduce in evidence of Arthur’s charm. ‘Sometimes I just put my arms round his shoulder and burst into tears.’ ‘I’m not surprised,’ was James’s comment. At the Corry the mood was perverse. A few bull-necked mutants were hogging the weights, the room was crowded, and crossness was given voice to. Bradley was training for a contest the following week, and did so many presses that he lost count and, red-faced and shuddering, insisted on starting again. Others, who worked out for more trivial reasons, forced to stand around, lapsed from their normally passing and formal chat into extended conversations, like housewives with shopping waiting for a bus. ‘I know—well, that’s what she said.’ ‘But have you seen her since?’ ‘Only briefly, and then I couldn’t say anything, because of course you-know-who was in attendance.’ ‘I really like her actually; from what I’ve seen of her, that is.’ It was the typical transsexual talk of the place, which had been confusing to me at first and which had thrown poor James into deep dejection when he innocently overheard a boy he had a crush on talking of his girlfriend. It was all a game, any man in the least attractive being dubbed a ‘she’ and only males too dire for such a conceit being left an unadorned ‘he’ or, occasionally, sinisterly, ‘mister’—as in the poisonous declaration ‘I trust you won’t be seeing Mister Elizabeth Arden again.’ ‘You know that new girl behind the bar?’ one square-jawed athlete enquired of his bearded companion. ‘What, the blonde, you mean—no, she’s been there a while.’ ‘No, not her, no, the dark one with big tits.’ ‘I’m not sure I’ve seen her. Nice, is she?’ It was conversation thrown out with a complex bravado, its artifice defiant as it was transparent. I half listened to it as I waited, and looked around at the dozens of bodies, squatting, lying, straining, muscles sliding to the surface in thick-veined upper arms, shoulders bending and pumping, the sturdiness of legs under pressure, the dark stains on singlets that adhered to the sweating channel of the back, the barely perceptible swing of cocks and balls in shorts and track-suits, with, permeating it all, the clank and thud of weights and the rank underarm essence of effort.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  As I grew older, my obsession with the Blanton men faded into appreciation, just as my view of Jackson as some sort of paradise matured. I will always think of Jackson as my home. It is unfathomably beautiful: When the leaves turn in October, it seems as if every mountain in town is on fire. But for all its beauty, and for all the fond memories, Jackson is a very harsh place. Jackson taught me that “hill people” and “poor people” usually meant the same thing. At Mamaw Blanton’s, we’d eat scrambled eggs, ham, fried potatoes, and biscuits for breakfast; fried bologna sandwiches for lunch; and soup beans and cornbread for dinner. Many Jackson families couldn’t say the same, and I knew this because, as I grew older, I overheard the adults speak about the pitiful children in the neighborhood who were starving and how the town could help them. Mamaw shielded me from the worst of Jackson, but you can keep reality at bay only so long. On a recent trip to Jackson, I made sure to stop at Mamaw Blanton’s old house, now inhabited by my second cousin Rick and his family. We talked about how things had changed. “Drugs have come in,” Rick told me. “And nobody’s interested in holding down a job.” I hoped my beloved holler had escaped the worst, so I asked Rick’s boys to take me on a walk. All around I saw the worst signs of Appalachian poverty. Some of it was as heartbreaking as it was cliché: decrepit shacks rotting away, stray dogs begging for food, and old furniture strewn on the lawns. Some of it was far more troubling. While passing a small two-bedroom house, I noticed a frightened set of eyes looking at me from behind the curtains of a bedroom window. My curiosity piqued, I looked closer and counted no fewer than eight pairs of eyes, all looking at me from three windows with an unsettling combination of fear and longing. On the front porch was a thin man, no older than thirty-five, appar ently the head of the household. Several ferocious, malnourished, chained-up dogs protected the furniture strewn about the barren front yard. When I asked Rick’s son what the young father did for a living, he told me the man had no job and was proud of it. But, he added, “they’re mean, so we just try to avoid them.” That house might be extreme, but it represents much about the lives of hill people in Jackson. Nearly a third of the town lives in poverty, a figure that includes about half of Jackson’s children. And that doesn’t count the large majority of Jacksonians who hover around the poverty line. An epidemic of prescription drug addiction has taken root. The public schools are so bad that the state of Kentucky recently seized control.

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

  Paula’s mother is one of an army of women for whom divorce brings economic nightmares. The statistics are well documented.2 Divorced mothers as a group earn a lot less than divorced fathers do, and child support does not make up the difference. Studies show that women and children who were in the upper economic group prior to divorce suffer the most precipitous decline in income. In 1991, 40 percent of all divorced women with children were living below the poverty level. The situation was even more desperate for those women with children below the age of six, like Paula’s mother. Over half of these mostly younger women with young children were living below the poverty level. Divorced women are not only poor after divorce but remain poor for many years.3 This is because, despite improved collection of child support, the average amount that they receive, when it is paid, is much less than the cost of raising a child. Moreover, when the women seek employment, many, like Paula’s mother, are handicapped in the marketplace. They lack the requisite skills to begin with or they have spent the years prior to the divorce taking care of children and working part-time or working full-time as homemakers. After the divorce they are faced with the double burden of acquiring a new education or updating their former skills and simultaneously supporting their children and themselves. Many take night jobs, shift jobs, temp jobs, or real estate jobs that keep them away from home all weekend. They are physically exhausted and emotionally depleted as they run in place, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland—the faster she runs, the more she stays in one place. Their valiant efforts to feed, clothe, and house their children tragically diminishes their availability as parents. As Paula told me, “I have no memory of her sitting down and reading to me or playing or just hanging out. It still makes me mad and sad to think about this.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  At dinner we had the restaurant almost to ourselves. Marcel drank a glass of wine and chatted about the day's excitements, how he thought he'd seen Luc several times but in the end it was always another "funny-looking" boy. The months he had spent playing video games in the sanatorium had paid off magnificently this afternoon—he'd emerged as a kind of champion in the amusements arcade: it was altogether one of the best days he'd had for years. But soon my lack of attention made him fall quiet; he looked at me with his head on one side and made sweet little attempts to jolly me along, but I was sinking fast into incommunicable gloom—the first bottle was already empty. He was still aglow with his new role as Sibylle's esquire, sent on to the coast whilst she retreated home. I glanced in a tall mirror and saw us as a headwaiter might, as a boy with an uncle, a godfather perhaps, a bachelor evidently, who lacked an easy way with youngsters, and disheartened the lad when he was meant to be giving him a treat. The age-gap seemed to widen between us; he gripped his cutlery like a child, and piled in the good, overdressed food as if determined to get value from that at least, whilst I was too racked by other hungers to want to eat. Sometimes he pointed his knife at something and I told him what it was called in English, and he repeated the word with a nod. Dismal canned music played, the short tape slurring from incessant repetition, fragments of Mozart and Tchaikovsky swung and sugared—I saw the morning studio, the shirt-sleeved sessioneers, the villainous arranger, the mockery of everything I held dear. At another table was a respectable couple with a clever-looking boy in glasses. I knew the constraints between them at a glance, and picked up some of the exeat talk, the mother's resentful account of things at home, the son's attempts to convey the excitements of study in which the parents had no interest. A reading-list was gone into in some detail; one gathered this week he was doing The Republic —"by Plato". I found myself enlisting their support. "Isn't this music awful?" I called across. They didn't at first get my meaning, and when they did it was clear that the parents, if they'd noticed it at all, were quite grateful for its faceless protection, whilst the boy allied himself with me: "Terrible, terrible", and then seemed to regret the momentary hysteria of his tone.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I had Pell Grants and government-subsidized low-interest student loans that made college affordable, and need-based scholarships for law school. I never went hungry, thanks at least in part to the old-age benefits that Mamaw generously shared with me. These programs are far from perfect, but to the degree that I nearly succumbed to my worst decisions (and I came quite close), the fault lies almost entirely with factors outside the government’s control. Recently, I sat down with a group of teachers from my alma mater, Middletown High. All of them expressed the worry, in one form or another, that society devoted too many resources too late in the game. “It’s like our politicians think college is the only way,” one teacher told me. “For many, it’s great. But a lot of our kids have no realistic shot of getting a college degree.” Another said: “The violence and the fighting, it’s all they’ve seen from a very young age. One of my students lost her baby like she’d lost her car keys—had no idea where it went. Two weeks later, her child turned up in New York City with the father, a drug dealer, and some of his family.” Short of a miracle, we all know what kind of life awaits that poor baby. Yet there’s precious little to support her now, when an intervention might help. So I think that any successful policy program would recognize what my old high school’s teachers see every day: that the real problem for so many of these kids is what happens (or doesn’t happen) at home. For example, we’d recognize that Section 8 vouchers ought to be administered in a way that doesn’t segregate the poor into little enclaves. As Brian Campbell, another Middletown teacher, told me, “When you have a large base of Section 8 parents and kids supported by fewer middle-class taxpayers, it’s an upside-down triangle. There’re fewer emotional and financial resources when the only people in a neighborhood are low-income. You just can’t lump them together, because then you have a bigger pool of hopelessness.” On the other hand, he said, “put the lower-income kids with those who have a different lifestyle model, and the lower-income kids start to rise up.” Yet when Middletown recently tried to limit the number of Section 8 vouchers offered within certain neighborhoods, the federal government balked. Better, I suppose, to keep those kids cut off from the middle class. Government policy may be powerless to resolve other problems in our community. As a child, I associated accomplishments in school with femininity. Manliness meant strength, courage, a willingness to fight, and, later, success with girls. Boys who got good grades were “sissies” or “faggots.” I don’t know where I got this feeling. Certainly not from Mamaw, who demanded good grades, nor from Papaw. But it was there, and studies now show that working-class boys like me do much worse in school because they view schoolwork as a feminine endeavor.

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

  (Most adolescents who become delinquent after divorce do not make the connection between anger at their parents and their acting out. Unfortunately, many parents don’t make this connection, either. If they did, they might reach out to their children who are often lonely and depressed like Billy.) But I was troubled and somewhat mystified by Billy’s attitude toward his stepfather, Tom. From all accounts except Billy’s, Tom, a former Peace Corps volunteer and English teacher, had made consistent efforts to be an available, interested, and involved parent to Billy. After nearly five years, Billy respected Tom but still resented him and certainly didn’t seem to feel close to him. I knew from talking to Billy’s mother that she felt happier. She was very active in her younger son’s preschool, played her cello at community events and convalescent homes, and was very involved with Tom in several charitable organizations. Billy’s loyalty to his own father seemed as strong as ever, even as the real-life ties grew weaker. The father had gotten more deeply involved in his work and seemed to have little time for anyone outside the spheres of sports and restaurants. Later he told me that Billy’s stepbrother, Dave, was a “great guy” and that he hoped Billy would turn out more like Dave. The Stepfather OUR LATEST NATIONAL reports say that 25 percent of all children will spend part of their childhood in a stepfamily. 1 Moreover, 40 percent of all marriages in the 1990s involve one or both persons who have been married before. 2 So we are looking at new roles for millions of adults and millions of children. For adults, this situation means knowing what it takes to be a successful stepmother or stepfather. For children, it means dealing with the arrival of a stranger who takes up residence in the bosom of the family. Neither job is easy. Both are rife with potential for misunderstanding and misery as well as deep emotional support and unfailing love. The stepfather—child relationship is usually conceived as a duet that involves only the child and the stepparent. But it is composed of at least four voices, sometimes more, each of which has a major role in the harmony or the dissonance that ensues. The four voices are the new husband, the child, the mother, and the biological father. They are the new ensemble that has to learn to play well together. The background sometimes swells to a chamber orchestra what with stepmothers, step-siblings, and half siblings, but for now we’ll talk about the main players. It seems that we are comfortable with the idea that each person has only one biological mother in this world (egg donor technologies aside) and that stepmothers, while loved, do not usurp that special position. But fathers are different.