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.

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• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Oh, they were all done from photographs. Of course he gave up portraiture after about 1900 anyway. The later landscapes, all the Givrecourt pictures, were simply based on earlier pictures, with brilliantly imagined or remembered changes of light. They used to create the impression, in the galleries, that he went there year after year, but actually, no. Not after the turn of the century and all that change in his own life. Well, you can see he didn't need to. And he couldn't. The old house there was sold to finance the Villa Hermes." "It's strange, I was just reading his piece about Givrecourt this morning, and thinking about what lay ahead for him." I was never quite sure if Paul grasped the full extent of my innocence about his man. "So did he not travel at all?" "Hardly at all. He still went occasionally to London. Once or twice to northern Germany and Jutland. There was a brief trip to Italy, but he didn't like the abruptness of the southern sunsets, and never went back there. In general he followed Rembrandt's advice, that artists shouldn't travel. What is rather revealing—I can't remember if it's in what you were reading, but he tells how as a boy at Givrecourt he was set to study and copy his grandfather's collection of English watercolours, and how he was painting Suffolk scenes and the Lake District indoors before he was allowed to go and paint the forest just outside." "I used to think how odd it was that he photographed Jane so much, but perhaps it wasn't after all, if he needed the photos to paint from." It seemed an explanation of something I knew I had never liked about him, the work prolific but not abundant, the passion chilled and codified, almost menacing. "I often ponder it," said Paul, and drifted across the room as if lured by another image of her there with an orange lily beside her, and an amulet in her open palm. I was very touched, even so, by the way his subject absorbed him, and made him seem both formidable and childlike, as if each judgement were somehow referred back to their long-ago meetings and whatever had communicated itself then. "It seems to me one of the deep coincidences of art," he said, "that he should have amassed all that material with no awareness of how fate would require him to use it." "I was wondering if the photographs still exist." "Oh yes—well, a large number of them. His sister kept everything, religiously. She wasn't a scholar, by any means, but she did have a high sense of what posterity would demand of her, she wasn't like those famous obstructing widows who make scholars' lives a misery. She passed everything on to the Museum—even things that must have shocked or disturbed her." I noted this impassively and asked another question: "But you say the seascape wouldn't be based on a photograph or earlier picture?"

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I was impressed by this, as I always was by the idea of a total disappearance, the vertigo of it, and the way it none the less left room for wasting hope. And again I was full of questions, and objections too, that I hesitated to put. Had she killed herself, did no one see her from a boat or ferry, might it have been a planned escape, involving another man, a change of identity, flight to another continent? I needed the photos back to look for further signs. "The husband was questioned, of course," Paul said. "He was in Deauville, which seemed vaguely suspicious. But I believe he had a perfectly good alibi. And Edgard himself virtually ruled out suicide—there was no note or explanation, and he knew her moods." I watched Paul unlock a drawer on his side of the desk, with an apprehensive frown. "I think it did all give him a feeling of life being unaccountable, of not having much idea about what even those closest to him were thinking and going through. As well as being a dreadful shock, of course. But when he'd settled down and kept on coming back to her over and over again I assume it was his way of asking those simple questions, the how and where and why." "And not coming up with the answers." "Well, he never came up with answers. It was fortunate", said Paul with a giggle, "that he had always made something of a point of that." He was holding a battered manula envelope to his chest—the next part of the demonstration. I remembered Helene's account of after-hours tours of the Museum, the child's sense of privilege almost regardless of what she was being shown. "I'll leave you with these a moment", he said, "whilst I go and er . . ." When Paul had hurried off through the wall I got up and stretched at the window—just at the moment a few drops striped it. I looked lazily out, as I had often done before, at the inscrutable houses opposite, seen clearly now that the trees were bare. The houses Orst had looked at as a boy, that his sister had seen each day throughout those later years. It was possible to believe, in the yawning after-lunch stillness, that the same people lived there still, a minimal ghost existence of creaking boards and early dusks, looking out from time to time at our dark gables through the rain. I thought of my own view of the old doctor's house, with its shuttered upper floor, its air of professional secrecy, the occasional faint escape of an hour's silver chime. Then a window flew open, and a man in a cap dropped a sack of rubbish into the street.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  I may not have known multiplication that day, but when I came home and told Papaw about my heartbreak, he turned it into triumph. I learned multiplication and division before dinner. And for two years after that, my grandfather and I would practice increasingly complex math once a week, with an ice cream reward for solid performance. I would beat myself up when I didn’t understand a concept, and storm off, defeated. But after I’d pout for a few minutes, Papaw was always ready to go again. Mom was never much of a math person, but she took me to the public library before I could read, got me a library card, showed me how to use it, and always made sure I had access to kids’ books at home. In other words, despite all of the environmental pressures from my neighborhood and community, I received a different message at home. And that just might have saved me. Chapter 5I assume I’m not alone in having few memories from before I was six or seven. I know that I was four when I climbed on top of the dining room table in our small apartment, announced that I was the Incredible Hulk, and dove headfirst into the wall to prove that I was stronger than any building. (I was wrong.) I remember being smuggled into the hospital to see Uncle Teaberry. I remember sitting on Mamaw Blanton’s lap as she read Bible stories aloud before the sun came up, and I remember stroking the whiskers on her chin and wondering whether God gave all old women facial hair. I remember explaining to Ms. Hydorne in the holler that my name was “J.D., like jay-dot-dee-dot.” I remember watching Joe Montana lead a TD-winning drive in the Super Bowl against the hometown Bengals. And I remember the early September day in kindergarten when Mom and Lindsay picked me up from school and told me that I’d never see my dad again. He was giving me up for adoption, they said. It was the saddest I had ever felt. My father, Don Bowman, was Mom’s second husband. Mom and Dad married in 1983 and split up around the time I started walking. Mom remarried a couple years after the divorce. Dad gave me up for adoption when I was six. After the adoption, he became kind of a phantom for the next six years. I had few memories of life with him. I knew that he loved Kentucky, its beautiful mountains, and its rolling green horse country. He drank RC Cola and had a clear Southern accent. He drank, but he stopped after he converted to Pentecostal Christianity. I always felt loved when I spent time with him, which was why I found it so shocking that he “didn’t want me anymore,” as Mom and Mamaw told me. He had a new wife, with two small children, and I’d been replaced.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "You know what they say . . . 'Un trio n'excite pas de soupçons'." "Well, my soupçons have never been more excites in their lives." I hesitated, and then drew out the wallet of pictures from my inside pocket. "I can show you." "Oh." I shuffled through the prints and laid out half a dozen in front of her. She seemed deliberately to take a detached line. "So this dark one is Patrick? He looks a real little thug, I must say. Quite nice though." "He doesn't look a thug. He's got a gigantic cock." "Sibylle is lovely, I agree. beautiful eyes, and mouth; and colouring." "Yes." "She looks very sophisticated and irresistible." "Quite. Thank you." "And this must be him." I looked away and then back to the upside-down image and waited for her reaction. It was the faun-like picture of Luc on the beach. "Don't you think it's very ancient Greece that one?" "Mm. Where was it taken?" "It's at a place just over the French border where the Three are always going. I followed them down there with my friend Matt and we kind of spied on them." "I see, you took this." "No, no—no. I stole the negatives and had them printed." Edie raised an eyebrow and I wondered again, as I had in dense hours of meditating on that picture, just who had taken it and at which of his friends that complex gaze of Luc's had been directed. "That must have been rather difficult." "Terribly easy. I've stolen lots of things. I'm wearing a pair of his pants at the moment, and one of his vests and one of his socks." I stuck out my feet beyond the tablecloth and she looked with concern at my one blue and one green ankle. "The blue one's Luc's." "Darling—I mean . . . You do seem to have gone completement bonkers." I tolerated this remark, I wasn't sure if it contained a hint of congratulation. I drank a cup of coffee in quick insistent sips, and Edie kept looking at the photos. "Are the others any good?" she said. "There are some others I wasn't going to bore you with." "Bore? I love other people's photographs. They're the only ones that aren't disappointing." I gave her the packet. "There are those rather odd ones, where they're acting or something. That one where Patrick has a sheet over his head, and Luc's waving a poker round like a sword. Most peculiar," I said, drily and enviously. Edie frowned over the print. "It isn't that peculiar. They're only larking about. Just because you can only imagine them gazing into each other's eyes and having sex all day long, you seem to have forgotten that they're only kids, who still do childish, rather kooky kind of things, and like dressing up and being silly. You may not have heard about it, it's called fantasy." "You haven't even met them." She held my hand across the table.

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

  And who, I wondered, does Karen turn to for soothing words? Who does she have to comfort her in the years following divorce? Or does she gradually learn to block her own feelings and needs because they are too painful? Karen told me how she liked to sit alone in her grandmother’s garden where it was quiet and she felt safe. I regretted that she didn’t have many friends but was pleased to hear she had at least this one oasis. I remember Karen years later telling me, “My grandmother saved my life.” There’s no way for a sensitive child to see her mother cry or her father fall into depression without worrying that she’s the cause of it—and so she takes full responsibility for her mother’s tears and father’s moods. I watched Karen with a feeling of great helplessness, realizing there was nothing I could do to alleviate her pain or slake her thirst for protection. I remember once asking her, “What will you be when you grow up, Karen?” She blushed. “I want to work with children who are blind or retarded or who can’t speak.” I thought of Karen’s mother who sat alone and cried, of her brother who was afraid of the dark, of all the sorrowful people in this family, including herself, whom this amazing child wanted to rescue and I almost cried. When a child forfeits her childhood and adolescence to take on responsibilities for a parent, her capacity to enjoy her life as a young person, develop close friendships, and cultivate shared interests is sacrificed. Beyond this loss, there is a major psychological hazard if the upside-down dependence goes on too long. The child may become trapped into feeling that she alone must rescue the troubled parent. When she attends to her own needs and wishes, she feels guilty and undeserving. This happens if the parent’s unhappiness continues for years and the parent comes to rely on the child for comfort or when the child herself assumes the role and won’t give it up. Whatever its origins, the child feels obliged to care for the parent in whatever capacity is needed—as caregiver, companion, mentor, or the person who keeps depression at bay. Karen said, “My mom has no one. Only me.”

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  My desire to fight arose more out of a sense of duty. But it was a strong sense of duty, so Mom and I went to Mamaw’s for the night. I remember watching an episode of The West Wing about education in America, which the majority of people rightfully believe is the key to opportunity. In it, the fictional president debates whether he should push school vouchers (giving public money to schoolchildren so that they escape failing public schools) or instead focus exclusively on fixing those same failing schools. That debate is important, of course—for a long time, much of my failing school district qualified for vouchers—but it was striking that in an entire discussion about why poor kids struggled in school, the emphasis rested entirely on public institutions. As a teacher at my old high school told me recently, “They want us to be shepherds to these kids. But no one wants to talk about the fact that many of them are raised by wolves.” I don’t know what happened the day after Mom and I escaped Ken’s to Mamaw’s for the night. Maybe I had a test that I wasn’t able to study for. Maybe I had a homework assignment due that I never had the time to complete. What I do know is that I was a sophomore in high school, and I was miserable. The constant moving and fighting, the seemingly endless carousel of new people I had to meet, learn to love, and then forget—this, and not my subpar public school, was the real barrier to opportunity. I didn’t know it, but I was close to the precipice. I had nearly failed out of my freshmen year of high school, earning a 2.1 GPA. I didn’t do my homework, I didn’t study, and my attendance was abysmal. Some days I’d fake an illness, and others I’d just refuse to go. When I did go, I did so only to avoid a repeat of the letters the school had sent home a few years earlier—the ones that said if I didn’t go to school, the administration would be forced to refer my case to county social services. Along with my abysmal school record came drug experimentation—nothing hard, just what alcohol I could get my hands on and a stash of weed that Ken’s son and I found. Final proof, I suppose, that I did know the difference between a tomato plant and marijuana. For the first time in my life, I felt detached from Lindsay. She’d been married well over a year and had a toddler. There was something heroic about Lindsay’s marriage—that after everything she’d witnessed, she’d ended up with someone who treated her well and had a decent job. Lindsay seemed genuinely happy. She was a good mom who doted on her young son. She had a little house not far from Mamaw’s and seemed to be finding her way.

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

  The time that you invest in comforting your children, in being available to them in the evenings, is the most important investment you can make in your future relationship with them. Try your best not to delegate parenting tasks to your eldest or most competent child. If you do, then be sure to make the job temporary. As I said in earlier chapters, you need to maintain household structure and routines in childhood as well as during adolescence. And what has emerged clearly from this work is that your children will continue to need your help in entering young adulthood and during their early twenties. If a very young child has enjoyed having one parent at home part-or full-time, you should consider finding ways to maintain this arrangement for at least a year after the breakup. Little children who lose both parents because daddy moves out and mommy goes to work full-time suffer terribly. These children pathetically search for their lost parents everywhere. The youngsters in our study, who had so little capacity to understand the changes in their lives or to provide for their own care, remained vulnerable throughout their growing up years and had more trouble in adulthood than children who were older at the breakup. Just as postponing the sale of the home can be built into the divorce agreement, I recommend that parents delay the mother’s reentry into full-time work until the youngest child has had time to adjust. This investment in our youngest children of divorce is something we would celebrate in future years. These little ones are the most vulnerable. Their feelings of pain, anger, and abandonment endure into adulthood. They need special protection. I also want to amplify another finding of this study having to do with support for higher education. Children who would have received financial help for their college educations should not, at age eighteen, feel they’re paying for their parents’ divorce with the forfeiture of their future careers. This is an intolerable injustice. The children will never forgive their parents for this betrayal, nor should they. If parents cannot afford to pay for college, children understand that just fine. But if a parent has the means to help pay tuition but says he or she is not “obligated,” then the child has every right to be furious—at the parent and even more at a society that has sanctioned the child’s heavy loss with its divorce laws.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  All three children were profoundly affected by their tumultuous home life. Papaw wanted Jimmy to get an education instead of slogging it out in the steel mill. He warned that if Jimmy got a full-time job out of high school, the money would be like a drug—it would feel good in the short term, but it would keep him from the things he ought to be doing. Papaw even prevented Jimmy from using him as a referral on his Armco application. What Papaw didn’t appreciate was that Armco offered something more than money: the ability to get out of a house where your mother threw vases at your father’s forehead. Lori struggled in school, mostly because she never attended class. Mamaw used to joke that she’d drive her to school and drop her off, and somehow Lori would beat her home. During her sophomore year of high school, Lori’s boyfriend stole some PCP, and the two of them returned to Mamaw’s to indulge. “He told me that he should do more, since he was bigger. That was the last thing I remembered.” Lori woke up when Mamaw and her friend Kathy placed Lori in a cold bathtub. Her boyfriend, meanwhile, wasn’t responding. Kathy couldn’t tell if the young man was breathing. Mamaw ordered her to drag him to the park across the street. “I don’t want him to die in my fucking house,” she said. Instead she called someone to take him to the hospital, where he spent five days in intensive care. The next year, at sixteen, Lori dropped out of high school and married. She immediately found herself trapped in an abusive home just like the one she’d tried to escape. Her new husband would lock her in a bedroom to keep her from seeing her family. “It was almost like a prison,” Aunt Wee later told me. Fortunately, both Jimmy and Lori found their way. Jimmy worked his way through night school and landed a sales job with Johnson & Johnson. He was the first person in my family to have a “career.” By the time she turned thirty, Lori was working in radiology and had such a nice new husband that Mamaw told the entire family, “If they ever get divorced, I’m following him.” Unfortunately, the statistics caught up with the Vance family, and Bev (my mom) didn’t fare so well. Like her siblings, she left home early. She was a promising student, but when she got pregnant at eighteen, she decided college had to wait. After high school, she married her boyfriend and tried to settle down. But settling down wasn’t quite her thing: She had learned the lessons of her childhood all too well. When her new life developed the same fighting and drama so present in her old one, Mom filed for divorce and began life as a single mother. She was nineteen, with no degree, no husband, and a little girl—my sister, Lindsay. Mamaw and Papaw eventually got their act together.

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

  The potential for disappointment and hurt, or for misunderstanding on both sides, is omnipresent. The opportunities for making up after a quarrel, for doing better, are more limited. It’s as if the myriad daily interactions of the father-child relationship have to flow through the narrow end of a funnel. Relationships feel constrained by the clock because they are being interrupted constantly. Even more important, as the child gets older the symbolic significance of the divorced father changes. He’s no longer the commanding presence in his child’s life—the loving protective figure who makes sure everyone is cared for. Because he’s no longer responsible for the welfare of the household, his image inevitably diminishes. Daddy may be good company or a bore, he may be loved or resented, but he has lost his big job. Henceforth he is judged by what transpires between himself and his child, not by virtue of his traditional role as father in situ. Whatever relationship father and child create, they must do it by themselves without the structure of the family to support either of them, without the comforting presence of just having each other around, and without the help of the mother who, in a good intact family, encourages the father-child relationship to take off and to grow. The average child in a functioning intact family turns to each parent as he wants or needs their attention or help. Children are very astute in figuring out what each parent is better at providing emotionally as well as in other spheres of knowledge. When children get hurt, they often call for their mothers. Even older children want comforting and holding when they’re in pain. When the same child feels lively and eager to do something new, she may well turn to her father. When my twelve-year-old daughter was hit by a car, she wanted her father to ride in the ambulance because she had greater confidence in his ability to take charge. Later on in the hospital, she wanted me to sit at her bedside all day to comfort her. What could be more natural? I’m reminded of Alice in Wonderland, who held pieces of a magic mushroom in each hand. One side made her smaller and the other taller. She could nibble away at will and change her height. Similarly, the child in an intact family is free to turn alternately to each parent to meet her changing needs and wishes as she grows. Young adolescent girls typically turn to their mothers. Six-year-old boys want to be with their dads. But in the divorced family the child has to tailor her needs and wishes to the parent who happens to be scheduled in her life at any given moment. Many children complain that when they’re with their moms they miss their dads and vice versa. Indeed they do. They cannot postpone their needs to fit the custody schedule until they’re much older.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I recommend Celer to you: he has all the qualities to be sought in an officer placed in second rank; his very virtues will always keep him from pushing into first place. Once again, but in circumstances somewhat different from those of other days, I had come upon one of those beings whose destiny is to devote himself, to love, and to serve. Since I have known him Celer has had no thought which was not for my comfort or my security; I lean still upon that firm shoulder. In the spring of the third year of campaign the army laid siege to the citadel of Bethar, an eagle's nest where Simon and his partisans held out for nearly a year against the slow tortures of hunger, thirst, and despair, and where the Son of the Star saw his followers perish one by one but still would not surrender. Our army suffered almost as much as the rebels, for the latter, on retiring, had burned the forests, laid waste the fields, slaughtered the cattle, and polluted the wells by throwing our dead therein; these methods from savage times were hideous in a land naturally arid and already consumed to the bone by centuries of folly and fury. The summer was hot and unhealthy; fever and dysentery decimated our troops, but an admirable discipline continued to rule in those legions, forced to inaction and yet obliged to be constantly on the alert; though sick and harassed, they were sustained by a kind of silent rage in which I, too, began to share. My body no longer withstood as well as it once did the fatigues of campaign, the torrid days, the alternately suffocating or chilly nights, the harsh wind, and the gritty dust; I sometimes left the bacon and boiled lentils of the camp mess in my bowl, and went hungry. A bad cough stayed with me well into the summer, nor was I the only one in such case. In my dispatches to the Senate I suppressed the formula which is regulation for the opening of official communications: The emperor and the army are well. The emperor and the army were, on the contrary, dangerously weary. At night, after the last conversation with Severus, the last audience with fugitives from the enemy side, the last courier from Rome, the last message from Publius Marcellus or from Rufus, whose respective tasks were to wipe up outside Jerusalem and to reorganize Gaza, Euphorion would measure my bath water sparingly into a tub of tarred canvas; I would lie down on my bed and try to think. There is no denying it; that war in Judaea was one of my defeats.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  When I opened my eyes the first thing I saw was a pair of shoes, made of webbed orange-coloured leather, shucked at forty-five degrees, the heel of one on top of the other, like a first position in ballet. They were intensely horrible, alien in design, scuffed and lopsided from wear. I was lying on my side at the mattress's edge, the bedding just reaching to the line of my shoulders and hips. I was afraid the weight of my stomach would topple me over on to the floor. The shoes were the focus of my dry misery, and I closed my eyes again and ran yearningly back through the dream-fade to catch and remember everything I could. How he had loved me. How he had clung to me. I was fixed in my position by the rough heel of a foot pushed against my calf and the lightly adhesive pressure of a biggish bottom pressed against my own. I tried shoving slowly but firmly backwards, but met with unconscious, heavy resistance. Squinting at my watch on the floor I saw it was only 6.15; daylight was hardening on the wall and all I longed for was warmth and oblivion. I slipped out of bed, walked round and climbed into the cold welcome of the other side. The pillow there had the yeasty smell of dried semen—fresh and stale at once. I looked at the big stubbly face of—who was it? Frits. From Holland. A keen uncritical lover of English literature. Perhaps the coppery lighting of the Cassette and the benign warp of drink had lent him a glow as he stood against the wall reading Of human Bondage —misled himself, I suspected, by that potent noun, but still stubbornly hoping after two hundred pages. He'd looked shelteringly big and artisanal, with a touching mixture of clumsiness and adroitness about him; I imagined him doing something expertly with wood. He seemed pleasantly surprised when I asked him back to my place, as if our talk about Maugham might have been an end in itself; as if I were offering him a lift that took me somewhat out of my way. "Thanks very much," he said.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  He has spent nearly his entire life in Appalachian Ken tucky; we went to lunch at a local fast-food restaurant, because in that corner of the world there isn’t much else to eat. As we talked, I noticed little quirks that few others would. He didn’t want to share his milk shake, which was a little out of character for a kid who ended every sentence with “please” or “thank you.” He finished his food quickly and then nervously looked from person to person. I could tell that he wanted to ask a question, so I wrapped my arm around his shoulder and asked if he needed anything. “Y—Yeah,” he started, refusing to make eye contact. And then, almost in a whisper: “I wonder if I could get a few more french fries?” He was hungry. In 2014, in the richest country on earth, he wanted a little extra to eat but felt uncomfortable asking. Lord help us. Just a few months after we saw each other last, Brian’s mom died unexpectedly. He hadn’t lived with her in years, so outsiders might imagine that her death was easier to bear. Those folks are wrong. People like Brian and me don’t lose contact with our parents because we don’t care; we lose contact with them to survive. We never stop loving, and we never lose hope that our loved ones will change. Rather, we are forced, either by wisdom or by the law, to take the path of self-preservation. What happens to Brian? He has no Mamaw or Papaw, at least not like mine, and though he’s lucky enough to have supportive family who will keep him out of foster care, his hope of a “normal life” evaporated long ago, if it ever existed. When we met, his mother had already permanently lost custody. In his short life, he has already experienced multiple instances of childhood trauma, and in a few years he will begin making decisions about employment and education that even children of wealth and privilege have trouble navigating. Any chance he has lies with the people around him—his family, me, my kin, the people like us, and the broad community of hillbillies. And if that chance is to materialize, we hillbillies must wake the hell up. Brian’s mom’s death was another shitty card in an already abysmal hand, but there are many cards left to deal: whether his community empowers him with a sense that he can control his own destiny or encourages him to take refuge in resentment at forces beyond his control; whether he can access a church that teaches him lessons of Christian love, family, and purpose; whether those people who do step up to positively influence Brian find emotional and spiritual support from their neighbors. I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth. We take an electric saw to the hide of those who insult our mother. We make young men consume cotton undergarments to protect a sister’s honor.

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

  At some point in her growing up, probably in adolescence, Lisa decided that her father had violated a fundamental moral code in leaving his wife and daughter to marry another woman. Because she dearly loves her father, she never discussed her conclusions with him. Undoubtedly he would have suffered greatly had his beloved daughter directly accused him of infidelity. Doubtless Lisa, a sensitive and loving daughter, understood this. As a result it was a dreaded secret, a ghost that stood between them that Lisa, during their many hours together, took great pains never to mention. Like many young people from divorced families, Lisa is preoccupied with the morality of her parents’ behavior. I was startled the first time a teenager walked into my office and demanded to know if her mother was a good woman. But as I have since learned, this is a common concern among children of divorce. Siblings spend years speculating over the probability that there were affairs during or after the marriage. As adults, children of divorce are influenced by their moral judgment of who was wronged by the divorce. No-fault divorce is a legal concept. It was never intended to mean no moral responsibility. Children never subscribe to the idea that no one is to blame for the divorce, although they are too protective of themselves and their parents to say so. As young children they blame themselves, and when they dare, they blame one or both parents. But as adolescents in search of moral values, suspicion of infidelity, other mistreatment, or exploitation can be a serious obstacle to developing a close or honest relationship with the parent they think behaved immorally. For thousands of children and parents the undiscussed past hangs heavily over both generations, keeping them emotionally distant from each other. These moral issues are also kept alive by what happens to each parent in the postdivorce years. The discrepancy between her mother’s loneliness and her father’s happiness broke Lisa’s heart. Thus, despite the lack of overt fighting in this family, Lisa has placed herself years later exactly in the middle. Ironically, this is what both parents sought to avoid by “not fighting.” The ways of a child’s heart are unpredictable and cannot be orchestrated from the outside. Children make moral judgments about their parents. They want and need virtuous parents. They are willing to forgive if asked, but when this fails to happen, they find the silence deafening. After finally breaking up with Jim, Lisa told me that she had several boyfriends but no relationships that lasted more than a year or two at the most. “Look at my life,” she said heatedly. “I have a great career and plenty of money. I’ve always had close women friends. I get along with all my parents. But for some reason I don’t understand, my relationships with men are still bad news. I’m getting pretty discouraged. I have nothing at all against marriage, but it’s not for me.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  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. 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.

• 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 Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  All three children were profoundly affected by their tumultuous home life. Papaw wanted Jimmy to get an education instead of slogging it out in the steel mill. He warned that if Jimmy got a full-time job out of high school, the money would be like a drug—it would feel good in the short term, but it would keep him from the things he ought to be doing. Papaw even prevented Jimmy from using him as a referral on his Armco application. What Papaw didn’t appreciate was that Armco offered something more than money: the ability to get out of a house where your mother threw vases at your father’s forehead. Lori struggled in school, mostly because she never attended class. Mamaw used to joke that she’d drive her to school and drop her off, and somehow Lori would beat her home. During her sophomore year of high school, Lori’s boyfriend stole some PCP, and the two of them returned to Mamaw’s to indulge. “He told me that he should do more, since he was bigger. That was the last thing I remembered.” Lori woke up when Mamaw and her friend Kathy placed Lori in a cold bathtub. Her boyfriend, meanwhile, wasn’t responding. Kathy couldn’t tell if the young man was breathing. Mamaw ordered her to drag him to the park across the street. “I don’t want him to die in my fucking house,” she said. Instead she called someone to take him to the hospital, where he spent five days in intensive care. The next year, at sixteen, Lori dropped out of high school and married. She immediately found herself trapped in an abusive home just like the one she’d tried to escape. Her new husband would lock her in a bedroom to keep her from seeing her family. “It was almost like a prison,” Aunt Wee later told me. Fortunately, both Jimmy and Lori found their way. Jimmy worked his way through night school and landed a sales job with Johnson & Johnson. He was the first person in my family to have a “career.” By the time she turned thirty, Lori was working in radiology and had such a nice new husband that Mamaw told the entire family, “If they ever get divorced, I’m following him.” Unfortunately, the statistics caught up with the Vance family, and Bev (my mom) didn’t fare so well. Like her siblings, she left home early. She was a promising student, but when she got pregnant at eighteen, she decided college had to wait. After high school, she married her boyfriend and tried to settle down. But settling down wasn’t quite her thing: She had learned the lessons of her childhood all too well. When her new life developed the same fighting and drama so present in her old one, Mom filed for divorce and began life as a single mother. She was nineteen, with no degree, no husband, and a little girl—my sister, Lindsay. Mamaw and Papaw eventually got their act together.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  He is a striking-looking fellow, with thick fair hair, shifting eyes & huge lyrical moustaches. His clothes, on another, wd have been enough to incite nudism—a boisterously checked jacket, bright yellow trousers & a bowtie with dogs on it. I rather liked him, but I was sorry not to have Sandy to myself. We all went on to a dingy little chophouse, the idea of which, apparently, was to reintroduce me to the epitome of English culture. Between us we made a thoroughly English nuisance of ourselves, & Sandy & Otto regaled me with the news of London life, Otto showing a thorough familiarity with all our old friends & treating me as if we had been at school together. Timmy Carswell has married, ‘extremely well’ Otto assured me. I felt a little pang, and a little gloom, too, which I dashed away with some more of the sour red wine we’d ordered. Sandy—who at the House had really I suppose been madly in love with Tim—cursed him obscenely & teetered into maudlin reminiscence. I sat back and looked around the restaurant while this was going on, though I cdn’t avoid remembering Tim and his angelic beauty at 15. It was not nice to think of female fingernails doodling over his smooth man’s body. June 15, 1925 : Odd—though perfectly natural—how going away disconnects one from life. Everything has gone on at such a pace. Sandy painting his pictures, & clearly more or less living with the effusive Otto—and this puts me in a strange position. The paintings themselves I do not understand, & have been thinking about over this week, when I’ve seen him often. Their colours are unnatural, & their subjects are peculiarly distorted; but above all they are large. It is not a largeness I can claim to like, or even believe in. Their largeness is the largeness of Sandy’s own gestures, of his drinking, of his fantastical filthy talk—it is not the largeness of large pictures. He has an extraordinary study of Otto, naked to the waist, seen from somewhere right down on the ground, so that he towers up above, his chin turned heroically, all the features exaggerated almost into brutality. It’s larger than life-size. It’s ridiculous, I can’t help myself feeling. But I know that that might be because Otto is himself ridiculous. S. is so absorbed in him, so greedily goes on about him, that I feel his thoughts are not really with me any more. His manner is wilder than ever, but beneath it all there is restraint & even boredom between us. About Africa, about everything that has happened to me, he shows no curiosity.

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

  Her shoulders dropped, her body sagged, and she seemed paralyzed. For over a minute she stood there, frozen, and then her body began to tremble and then shake noticeably. I heard her groan. Tears were running down her face and she began to shake her head sadly. I kept watching until she turned around and quickly walked out of the courtroom. I felt my own mood shift. I didn’t know exactly what had happened to Mrs. Williams, but I knew that here in Alabama, police dogs and black folks looking for justice had never mixed well. — I was trying to shake off the dark feeling that the morning’s events had conjured when the officers brought Walter into the courtroom. Because there was no jury, the judge had not permitted me to give him street clothes to wear, so Walter was wearing his prison uniform. They allowed him to be in the courtroom without handcuffs but had insisted on keeping his ankles shackled. Michael and I conferred briefly about the order of witnesses as the rest of McMillian’s family and supporters slowly filed through the metal detector, past the dog, and into the courtroom. Despite the State’s early-morning maneuvers and the bad omen of the dog and Mrs. Williams, we had another good day in court. Evidence from the state mental health workers who had dealt with Myers after he initially refused to testify in the first trial and was sent to the Taylor Hardin Secure Medical Facility for evaluation confirmed Myers’s testimony from the day before. Dr. Omar Mohabbat explained that Myers had told him then “that the police had framed him to accept the penalty for the murder case that he is accused of or ‘to testify’ that ‘the man did.’ ” Mohabbat reported that Myers “categorically denied having anything to do with the alleged crime. He claimed, ‘I don’t know the name of this girl, I don’t know the time of the alleged crime, I don’t know the date of the alleged crime, I don’t know the place of the alleged crime.’ ” Mohabbat testified that Myers had told him, “They told me to say what they wanted me to say.” Evidence from other doctors further confirmed this testimony. Dr. Norman Poythress from Taylor Hardin explained that Myers had told him that “his prior ‘confessions’ are bogus and were coerced out of him by the police through keeping him physically and psychologically isolated.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Cues for anecdotes about their shared childhood produced only grouchy vaguenesses; when she was fourteen he had gone to war and in a sense the rest of his life had taken place under military camouflage; all we saw was an impatient self-discipline and a sardonic tendency that never quite rose to humour and was especially disconcerting in these visits intended to comfort and distract. At the time I knew nothing of his constant sexual appetite, and it is possible she didn't either: like so many siblings they had nothing useful in common and their attempts at sharing things were marked by childish awkwardness and dogged cross-purposes. Wilfred checked the kit for us. "Done it a thousand times with the Susies," he said, peering shrewdly at Dawn, who was bending to unbuckle his rucksack and looking somewhat resentful of the old boy's drill. I thought he might be critical of The Pilgrim: he declared it ambiguously to be "a tight little tent". "Having a cook-up?" he said. I told him we were just taking scotch eggs and a bar of chocolate, which he clearly thought feeble to the point of effeminacy, but my mother snapped that there was nothing else. I ran upstairs to say goodbye to my father, who was lying on his bed fully clothed. I asked him how he was feeling and he said, "Not very good, old boy", which was the most he ever did say, and left me habitually at a loss how to answer him. On the turn of the stairs corning down I heard my mother saying hurriedly to Wilfred, ". . .a week or two, perhaps, they say, probably no more"—so that I went into shocked slow-motion, my hand to my mouth, and after ten seconds jogged down in a forced briskness of concealment. We hiked up the familiar paths, Dawn deliberately testing my loyalties with a good imitation of my uncle. Mimicry, like drawing, was one of his gifts, and both were literal and so at times unsettling. I responded with cowardly jabs and pinches, knowing that he would get me back later with some stifling, bare-breasted wrestling hold. It was still quite early and we wandered across the network of summer paths scuffed and scrawled through the dry grass; we didn't want to pitch our tent in the dark but felt self-conscious about doing so whilst walkers and lyrical late kite-fliers were still about. Probably the best place would be on the far side, the way Dawn came from home, where there would be shelter by the copse-like remains of ancient hedgerows. We circled back to the pond and sat on the bench, eating our scotch eggs and watching anglers packing up their gear.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  She was a recluse, a neighborhood mystery. She came outside only to smoke. She never said hello, and her lights were always off. She and her husband had divorced, and her children had landed in jail. She was extremely obese—as a child, I used to wonder if she hated the outdoors because she was too heavy to move. There were the neighbors down the street, a younger woman with a toddler and her middle-aged boyfriend. The boyfriend worked, and the woman spent her days watching The Young and the Restless . Her young son was adorable, and he loved Mamaw. At all times of the day—one time, past midnight—he would wander to her doorstep and ask for a snack. His mother had all the time in the world, but she couldn’t keep a close enough watch on her child to prevent him from straying into the homes of strangers. Sometimes his diaper would need changing. Mamaw once called social services on the woman, hoping they’d somehow rescue the young boy. They did nothing. So Mamaw used my nephew’s diapers and kept a watchful eye on the neighborhood, always looking for signs of her “little buddy.” My sister’s friend lived in a small duplex with her mother (a welfare queen if one ever existed). She had seven siblings, most of them from the same father—which was, unfortunately, a rarity. Her mother had never held a job and seemed interested “only in breeding,” as Mamaw put it. Her kids never had a chance. One ended up in an abusive relationship that produced a child before the mom was old enough to purchase cigarettes. The oldest overdosed on drugs and was arrested not long after he graduated from high school. This was my world: a world of truly irrational behavior. We spend our way into the poorhouse. We buy giant TVs and iPads. Our children wear nice clothes thanks to high-interest credit cards and payday loans. We purchase homes we don’t need, refinance them for more spending money, and declare bankruptcy, often leaving them full of garbage in our wake. Thrift is inimical to our being. We spend to pretend that we’re upper-class. And when the dust clears—when bankruptcy hits or a family member bails us out of our stupidity—there’s nothing left over. Nothing for the kids’ college tuition, no investment to grow our wealth, no rainy-day fund if someone loses her job. We know we shouldn’t spend like this. Sometimes we beat ourselves up over it, but we do it anyway. Our homes are a chaotic mess. We scream and yell at each other like we’re spectators at a football game. At least one member of the family uses drugs—sometimes the father, sometimes the mother, sometimes both. At especially stressful times, we’ll hit and punch each other, all in front of the rest of the family, including young children; much of the time, the neighbors hear what’s happening. A bad day is when the neighbors call the police to stop the drama.