Shame

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 Girls (2016)

  “Like you could have done it, too.” I inhaled sharply. The pathetic betrayal: Sasha had told Julian everything I’d said. “So show us,” Zav said, turning back to Sasha. I was already invisible again. “Show us the famous tits.” “You don’t have to,” I said to her. Sasha flicked her eyes in my direction. “It isn’t a big deal or anything,” she said, her tone dripping with cool, obvious disdain. She plucked her neckline away from her chest and looked pensively down her shirt. “See?” Julian said, smiling hard at me. “Listen to Sasha.” —I had gone to one of Julian’s recitals when Dan and I were still close. Julian must have been nine years old or so. He was good at the cello, I remembered, his tiny arms going about their mournful adult work. His nostrils rimed with snot, the instrument in careful balance. It didn’t seem possible that the boy who had called forth those sounds of longing and beauty was the same almost-man who watched Sasha now, a cold varnish on his eyes. She pulled her shirt down, her face flushed but mostly dreamy. The impatient, professional tug she gave when the neckline caught on her bra. Then both pale breasts were exposed, her skin marked by the line of her bra. Zav exclaimed approvingly. Reaching to thumb a rosy nipple while Julian looked on. I had long outlived whatever usefulness I had here. 196911I got caught; of course I did. Mrs. Dutton on her kitchen floor, calling my name like a right answer. And I hesitated for just a moment—a stunned, bovine reaction to my own name, the knowledge that I should help the fallen Mrs. Dutton—but Suzanne and Donna were far ahead, and by the time I jarred back into that realization, they had almost disappeared. Suzanne turned back just long enough to see Mrs. Dutton clamp a trembling hand on my arm. —My mother’s pained and baffled declarations: I was a failure. I was pathological. She wore the air of crisis like a flattering new coat, the stream of her anger performed for an invisible jury. She wanted to know who had broken into the Dutton house with me. “Judy saw two girls with you,” she said. “Maybe three. Who were they?” “Nobody.” I tended my rigid silence like a suitor, full of honorable feelings. Before she and Donna disappeared, I tried to flash Suzanne a message: I would take responsibility. She didn’t have to worry. I understood why they’d left me behind. “It was just me,” I said. Anger made her words garbled. “You can’t stay in this house and spout lies.” I could see how rattled she was by this confusing new situation. Her daughter had never been a problem before, had always zipped along without resistance, as tidy and self-contained as those fish that clean their own tanks. And why would she bother to expect otherwise or even prepare herself for the possibility?

• From Saint Augustine (Penguin Lives) (1999)

  In his exhaustive search for some conceivable good to be found in his bad act, Augustine finally comes up with a psychological clue: Whatever his motive for acting with the gang, he would not have done the same thing all by himself. Does that suggest some good hidden in the bad? He finds a psychological parallel that may help him toward an explanation. People normally laugh when together, not when alone—or, as Bergson put it, anyone who laughs alone is imagining the company of others (Le Rire 1). There is something essentially social about laughter. Companionship (consortium) is the good in the morally indifferent act of laughing. Could that have been the good paradoxically prompting him to the bad act of theft? Yes, he concludes: “The mutual provocation of my partners in crime provided the friction that ignited my desire to act thus” (T 2.16). He began his discussion with the observation that theft is obviously wrong, since even thieves do not want to be stolen from. He will later dwell on the bonds of good that unite even robber bands; they insist on just distribution of the “take” from their robberies (CG 19.12). Consortium and amicitia (friendship) are key values in Augustine’s eyes. His later companionship with heretics will prolong his own adherence to error. He will make amicitia the base of all Christian communities. He will even dispute Cicero’s definition of the state, saying that “things loved in common” are the basis of all politics, not mere abstract justice. So a persistent love of fellowship was the falsely conceived good behind his motiveless act in the pear orchard. Augustine has solved his own psychological mystery without having to resort to the Manichean heresy, which holds that evil is a positive (choosable) substance. But more. People notice that there is a parallel between this “first sin” of The Testimony and Adam’s fall in the garden of Eden. Though the gang hauls off a “huge load” (onera ingentia) of pears from the orchard, Augustine talks of only one tree—like the tree of the apple in Eden. He goes out of his way to say the pears were not beautiful, marking a contrast with the fruit in Eden, where the tree “was pleasant to the eyes” (Genesis 3.6). But a further parallel, the key one, has not been noticed, I think. Eve falls for the serpent’s lies in Genesis; but Saint Paul’s First Letter to Timothy (which Augustine thought was authentically Pauline) says that “Adam was not deceived” (2.14). Why did Adam commit the original sin if he was neither desirous of the fruit in itself nor deceived about any power it might give him? The problem is exactly Augustine’s in his own little orchard.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  After an inward snort about “normal comparison group,” I read on and found that, as usual in new fields of clinical medicine, there were far more questions than answers, and it was unclear what any of these findings really meant: they could be due to problems in measurement, they could be explained by dietary or treatment history, they could be due to something totally unrelated to manic-depressive illness; there could be any number of other explanations. The odds were very strong, however, that the UBOs meant something. In a strange way, though, after reading through a long series of studies, I ended up more reassured and less frightened. The very fact that the science was moving so quickly had a way of generating hope, and, if the changes in the brain structure did turn out to be meaningful, I was glad that first-class researchers were studying them. Without science, there would be no such hope. No hope at all. And, whatever else, it certainly gave new meaning to the concept of losing one’s mind. Clinical Privileges [image file=image_rsrcW1.jpg] There is no easy way to tell other people that you have manic-depressive illness; if there is, I haven’t found it. So despite the fact that most people that I have told have been very understanding—some remarkably so—I remain haunted by those occasions when the response was unkind, condescending, or lacking in even a semblance of empathy. The thought of discussing my illness in a more public forum has been, until quite recently, almost inconceivable. Much of this reluctance has been for professional reasons, but some has resulted from the cruelty, intentional or otherwise, that I have now and again experienced from colleagues or friends that I have chosen to confide in. It is what I have come to think of, not without bitterness, as the Mouseheart factor. Mouseheart, a former colleague of mine in Los Angeles, was also, I thought, a friend. A soft-spoken psychoanalyst, he was someone I was in the habit of getting together with for a morning coffee. Less frequently, but enjoyably, we would go out for a long lunch and talk about our work and our lives. After some time, I began to feel the usual discomfort I tend to experience whenever a certain level of friendship or intimacy has been reached in a relationship and I have not mentioned my illness. It is, after all, not just an illness, but something that affects every aspect of my life: my moods, my temperament, my work, and my reactions to almost everything that comes my way. Not talking about manic-depressive illness, if only to discuss it once, generally consigns a friendship to a certain inevitable level of superficiality. With an inward sigh, I decided to go ahead and tell him.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  7-17-75Patient has elected to resume lithium because of the severity of her depressive episodes. Will begin with lithium 300mg. BID [twice a day]. 7-25-75Vomiting. 8-5-75Tolerating lithium. Feeling depressed at realization she was more hypomanic than she believed. 9-30-75Patient has stopped lithium again. Very important, she says, to prove she can handle stress without it. 10-2-75Persists in not taking lithium. Already hypomanic. Patient well aware of it. 10-7-75Patient has resumed lithium because of increased irritability, insomnia, and inability to concentrate.Part of my stubbornness can be put down to human nature. It is hard for anyone with an illness, chronic or acute, to take medications absolutely as prescribed. Once the symptoms of an illness improve or go away, it becomes even more difficult. In my case, once I felt well again I had neither the desire nor incentive to continue taking my medication. I didn’t want to take it to begin with; the side effects were hard for me to adjust to; I missed my highs; and, once I felt normal again, it was very easy for me to deny that I had an illness that would come back. Somehow I was convinced that I was an exception to the extensive research literature, which clearly showed not only that manic-depressive illness comes back, but that it often comes back in a more severe and frequent form. It was not that I ever thought lithium was an ineffective drug. Far from it. The evidence for its efficacy and safety was compelling. Not only that, I knew it worked for me. It certainly was not that I had any moral arguments against psychiatric medications. On the contrary. I had, and have, no tolerance for those individuals—especially psychiatrists and psychologists—who oppose using medications for psychiatric illnesses; those clinicians who somehow draw a distinction between the suffering and treatability of “medical illnesses” such as Hodgkin’s disease or breast cancer, and psychiatric illnesses such as depression, manic-depression, or schizophrenia. I believe, without doubt, that manic-depressive illness is a medical illness; I also believe that, with rare exception, it is malpractice to treat it without medication. All of these beliefs aside, however, I still somehow thought that I ought to be able to carry on without drugs, that I ought to be able to continue to do things my own way.

• From The Girls (2016)

  “So we can open it up.” “I’ll get them,” Connie said. “Don’t miss me too much,” she crooned to Henry, fluttering a little wave before she left. To me, she just raised her eyebrows. I understood this was part of some plan she had hatched to get Henry’s attention. To leave, then return. She had probably read about it in a magazine. That was our mistake, I think. One of many mistakes. To believe that boys were acting with a logic that we could someday understand. To believe that their actions had any meaning beyond thoughtless impulse. We were like conspiracy theorists, seeing portent and intention in every detail, wishing desperately that we mattered enough to be the object of planning and speculation. But they were just boys. Silly and young and straightforward; they weren’t hiding anything. Peter let the lever ratchet to a starting position and stepped back to give Henry a turn, the two of them passing the joint back and forth. They both wore white T-shirts that were thin from washings. Peter smiled at the carnival racket when the slot machine clattered out a pile of coins, but he seemed distracted, finishing another beer, smoking the joint until it was crushed and oily. They were speaking low. I heard bits and pieces. They were talking about Willie Poteracke: we all knew him, the first boy in Petaluma to enlist. His father had driven him to register. I’d seen him later at the Hamburger Hamlet with a petite brunette whose nostrils streamed snot. She called him stubbornly by his full name, Will-iam, like the extra syllable was the secret password that would transform him into a grown, responsible man. She clung to him like a burr. “He’s always out in the driveway,” Peter said. “Washing his car like nothing’s different. He can’t even drive anymore, I don’t think.” This was news from the other world. I felt ashamed, seeing Peter’s face, for how I only playacted at real feelings, reaching for the world through songs. Peter could actually be sent away, he could actually die. He didn’t have to force himself to feel that way, the emotional exercises Connie and I occupied ourselves with: What would you do if your father died? What would you do if you got pregnant? What would you do if a teacher wanted to fuck you, like Mr. Garrison and Patricia Bell? “It was all puckered, his stump,” Peter said. “Pink.” “Disgusting,” Henry said from the machine. He didn’t turn away from the looping images of cherries that scrolled in front of him. “You wanna kill people, you better be okay with those people blowing your legs off.” “He’s proud of it, too,” Peter said, his voice rising as he flicked the end of the joint onto the garage floor. He watched it snuff out. “Wanting people to see it. That’s what’s crazy.” The dramatics of their conversation made me feel dramatic, too.

• From Trash (1988)

  I felt momentarily like a snake that has finally trapped a rabbit. Caught like that, on the living-room couch, all her rules were momentarily suspended. Bobby held herself perfectly still, except for one moment when she put her blunt fingers on my left cheek. I leaned over and licked delicately at the seam on first the left and then the right inner thigh. Her couch was one of those swollen chintz monsters, and my nose would bump the fabric each time I moved from right to left. I kept bumping it, moving steadily, persistently, not touching her with any other part of my body except my tongue. Under her jeans, her muscles rippled and strained as if she were holding off a great response or reaching for one. I felt an extraordinary power. I had her. I knew absolutely that I was in control. Oh, but it was control at a cost, of course, or I would be there still. I could hold her only by calculation, indirection, and distraction. It was dear, that cost, and too dangerous. I had to keep a distance in my head, an icy control on my desire to lose control. I wanted to lay the whole length of my tongue on her, to dribble over my chin, to flatten my cheeks to that fabric and shake my head on her seams like a dog on a fine white bone. But that would have been too real, too raw. Bobby would never have sat still for that. I held her by the unreality of my hunger, my slow nibbling civilized tongue. Oh, Bobby loved that part of it, like she loved her chintz sofa, the antique armoire with the fold-down shelf she used for a desk, the carefully balanced display of appropriate liquors she never touched—unlike the bottles on the kitchen shelves she emptied and replaced weekly. Bobby loved the aura of acceptability, the possibility of finally being bourgeois, civilized, and respectable. I was the uncivilized thing in Bobby’s life, reminding her of the taste of hunger, the remembered stink of her mother’s sweat, her own desire. I became sex for her. I held it in me, in the push of my thighs against hers when she finally grabbed me and dragged me off into the citadel of her bedroom. I held myself up, back and off her. I did what I had to do to get her, to get myself what we both wanted. But what a price we paid for what I did. What I did. What I was. What I do. What I am. I paid a high price to become who I am. Her contempt, her terror, was the least of it.

• From Trash (1988)

  I watched her closely and kept my hands in my pockets. She talked about her divorce and the politics in the department, how she had worked for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and demonstrated for civil rights in Little Rock in ’65. There were lots of books she could lend me, she insisted, but didn’t say exactly which ones. She poured me Harveys Bristol Cream, trailing her fingers across my wrist when I took the glass. Then she shook her head nervously and tried to persuade me to talk about myself, interrupting only to get me to switch topics as she moved restlessly from her rocking chair to a bolster to the couch beside me. She did not want to hear about my summers working in the mop factory, but she loved my lies about hitchhiking cross-country. “Meet me for lunch on Monday,” she insisted, while her eyes behind her glasses kept glancing at me, turning away and turning back. My palms were sweaty, but I nodded yes. At the door she stopped me, and put her hand out to touch my face. “Your family is very poor, aren’t they?” My face froze and burned at the same time. “Not really,” I told her, “not anymore.” She nodded and smiled, and the heat in my face went down my body in waves. I didn’t want to go on Monday but made myself. Her secretary was confused when I asked about lunch. “I don’t have anything written down about it,” she said, without looking up from her calendar. After class that afternoon the sociology professor explained her absence with a story about one of her children who had been bitten by a dog, “but not seriously. Come on Thursday,” she insisted, but on Thursday neither she nor her secretary were there. I stood in the doorway to her office and tilted my head back to take in her shelves of books. I wanted to pocket them all, but at the same time I didn’t want anything of hers. Trembling, I reached and pulled out the fattest book on the closest shelf. It was a hardbound edition of Sadism in the Movies, with a third of the pages underlined in red. It fit easily in my backpack, and I stopped in the Student Union bookstore on the way back to the dorm to buy a Hershey bar and steal a bright blue pen. On the next Monday, she apologized again, and again invited me to go to lunch the next day. I skipped lunch but slipped in that afternoon to return her book, now full of my bright blue comments. In its spot on the shelf there was now a collection of the essays of Georges Bataille, still unmarked. By the time I returned it on Friday, heavy blue ink stains showed on the binding itself.

• From Austerlitz (2001)

  Verneuil—whom I had met in Paris, and of whom I shall have more to say— when we stood in the nave of the wonderful church of Salle in Norfolk, which towers in isolation above the wide fields, and I could not bring out the words I should have spoken then. White mist had risen from the meadows outside, and we watched in silence as it crept slowly into the church porch, a rippling vapor rolling forward at ground level and gradually spreading over the entire stone floor, becoming denser and denser and rising visibly higher, until we ourselves emerged from it only above the waist and it seemed about to stifle us. Memories like this came back to me in the disused Ladies’ Waiting Room of Liverpool Street Station, memories behind and within which many things much further back in the past seemed to lie, all interlocking like the labyrinthine vaults I saw in the dusty gray light, and which seemed to go on and on for ever. In fact I felt, said Austerlitz, that the waiting room where I stood as if dazzled contained all the hours of my past life, all the suppressed and extinguished fears and wishes I had ever entertained, as if the black and white diamond pattern of the stone slabs beneath my feet were the board on which the endgame would be played, and it covered the entire plane of time. Perhaps that is why, in the gloomy light of the waiting room, I also saw two middle-aged people dressed in the style of the thirties, a woman in a light gabardine coat with a hat at an angle on her head, and a thin man beside her wearing a dark suit and a dog collar. And I not only saw the minister and his wife, said Austerlitz, I also saw the boy they had come to meet. He was sitting by himself on a bench over to one side. His legs, in white knee-length socks, did not reach the floor, and but for the small rucksack he was holding on his lap I don’t think I would have known him, said Austerlitz. As it was, I recognized him by that rucksack of his, and for the first time in as far back as I can remember I recollected myself as a small child, at the moment when I realized that it must have been to this same waiting room I had come on my arrival in England over half a century ago. As so often, said Austerlitz, I cannot give any precise description of the state of mind this realization induced; I felt something rending within me, and a sense of shame and sorrow, or perhaps something quite different, something inexpressible because we have no words for it, just as I had no words all those years ago when the two strangers came over to me speaking a language I did not understand. All I do know is that when I saw the boy sitting on the bench I became aware, through my dull bemusement, of the destructive effect on me of my desolation through all those past years, and a terrible weariness overcame me at the idea that I had never really been alive, or was only now being born, almost on the eve of my death. I can only guess what reasons may have induced the minister Elias and his wan wife to take me to live with them in the summer of 1939, said Austerlitz. Childless as they were,

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  Both my manias and depressions had violent sides to them. Violence, especially if you are a woman, is not something spoken about with ease. Being wildly out of control—physically assaultive, screaming insanely at the top of one’s lungs, running frenetically with no purpose or limit, or impulsively trying to leap from cars—is frightening to others and unspeakably terrifying to oneself. In blind manic rages I have done all of these things, at one time or another, and some of them repeatedly; I remain acutely and painfully aware of how difficult it is to control or understand such behaviors, much less explain them to others. I have, in my psychotic, seizurelike attacks—my black, agitated manias—destroyed things I cherish, pushed to the utter edge people I love, and survived to think I could never recover from the shame. I have been physically restrained by terrible, brute force; kicked and pushed to the floor; thrown on my stomach with my hands pinned behind my back; and heavily medicated against my will.

• From The Master and Margarita (1966)

  For the summer, he was threatening to organize clubs of fresh-water canoeing and alpinism. And so today, during lunch break, this manager comes in . . . ‘. . . with some son of a bitch on his arm,’ the girl went on, ‘hailing from nobody knows where, in wretched checkered trousers, a cracked pince-nez, and . . . with a completely impossible mug! . . .’ And straight away, the girl said, he recommended him to all those eating in the affiliate’s dining room as a prominent specialist in organizing choral-singing clubs. The faces of the future alpinists darkened, but the manager immediately called on everyone to cheer up, while the specialist joked a little, laughed a little, and swore an oath that singing takes no time at all, but that, incidentally, there was a whole load of benefits to be derived from it. Well, of course, as the girl said, the first to pop up were Fanov and Kosarchuk, well-known affiliate toadies, who announced that they would sign up. Here the rest of the staff realized that there was no way around the singing, and they, too, had to sign up for the club. They decided to sing during the lunch break, since the rest of the time was taken up by Lermontov and checkers. The manager, to set an example, declared that he was a tenor, and everything after that went as in a bad dream. The checkered specialist-choirmaster bawled out: ‘Do, mi, sol, do!’—dragged the most bashful from behind the bookcases, where they had tried to save themselves from singing, told Kosarchuk he had perfect pitch, began whining, squealing, begging them to be kind to an old singing-master, tapped the tuning fork on his knuckle, beseeched them to strike up ‘Glorious Sea’. Strike up they did. And gloriously. The checkered one really knew his business. They finished the first verse. Here the director excused himself, said: ‘Back in a minute . . .’, and disappeared. They thought he would actually come back in a minute. But ten minutes went by and he was not there. The staff was overjoyed—he had run away! Then suddenly, somehow of themselves, they began the second verse. They were all led by Kosarchuk, who may not have had perfect pitch, but did have a rather pleasant high tenor. They sang it through. No director! They moved to their places, but had not managed to sit down when, against their will, they began to sing. They tried to stop—no way. After three minutes of silence, they would strike up again. Silence—strike up! Then they realized that they were in trouble. The manager locked himself in his office from shame! Here the girl’s story was interrupted—the valerian had not done much good.

• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  She would feel degraded; she would feel herself gradually losing all sense of pride, of common decency, even, so that when she returned in the evening to Morton she would not want to look the old house in the eyes. She would not want to face those pictures of Gordons that hung in its hall, and must turn away, lest they by their very silence rebuke this descendant of theirs who was so unworthy. Yet sometimes it seemed to her that she loved more intensely because she had lost so much—there was nothing left now but Angela Crossby. 2 Watching this deadly decay that threatened all that was fine in her erstwhile pupil, Puddle must sometimes groan loudly in spirit; she must even argue with God about it. Yes, she must actually argue with God like Job; and remembering his words in affliction, she must speak those words on behalf of Stephen: ‘Thine hands have made me and fashioned me together round about; yet Thou dost destroy me.’ For now in addition to everything else, she had learnt of the advent of Roger Antrim. Not that Stephen had confided in her, far from it, but gossip has a way of travelling quickly. Roger spent most of his leisure at The Grange. She had heard that he was always going over from Worcester. So now Puddle, who had not been much given to prayer in the past, must argue with God, like Job. And perhaps, since God probably listens to the heart rather than to the lips, He forgave her. 3 Stupid with misery and growing more inept every day, Stephen found herself no match for Roger. He was calm, self-assured, insolent and triumphant, and his love of tormenting had not waned with his manhood. Roger was no fool; he put two and two together and his masculine instinct deeply resented this creature who might challenge his right of possession. Moreover, that masculine instinct was outraged. He would stare at Stephen as though she were a horse whom he strongly suspected of congenital unsoundness, and then he would let his eyes rest on Angela’s face. They would be the eyes of a lover, possessive, demanding, insistent eyes—if Ralph did not happen to be present. And into Angela’s eyes there would come an expression that Stephen had seen many times. A mist would slowly cloud over their blueness; they would dim, as though they were hiding something. Then Stephen would be seized with a violent trembling, so that she could not stand any more but must sit with her hands clasped tightly together, lest those trembling hands betray her to Roger.

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  One of the best cases in point is the current confusion over the use of the increasingly popular term “bipolar disorder”—now firmly entrenched in the nomenclature of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), the authoritative diagnostic system published by the American Psychiatric Association—instead of the historic term “manic-depressive illness.” Although I always think of myself as a manic-depressive, my official DSM-IV diagnosis is “bipolar I disorder; recurrent; severe with psychotic features; full interepisode recovery” (one of the many DSM-IV diagnostic criteria I have “fulfilled” along the way, and a personal favorite, is an “excessive involvement in pleasurable activities”). Obviously, as a clinician and researcher, I strongly believe that scientific and clinical studies, in order to be pursued with accuracy and reliability, must be based on the kind of precise language and explicit diagnostic criteria that make up the core of DSM-IV. No patient or family member is well served by elegant and expressive language if it is also imprecise and subjective. As a person and patient, however, I find the word “bipolar” strangely and powerfully offensive: it seems to me to obscure and minimize the illness it is supposed to represent. The description “manic-depressive,” on the other hand, seems to capture both the nature and the seriousness of the disease I have, rather than attempting to paper over the reality of the condition. Most clinicians and many patients feel that “bipolar disorder” is less stigmatizing than “manic-depressive illness.” Perhaps so, but perhaps not. Certainly, patients who have suffered from the illness should have the right to choose whichever term they feel more comfortable with. But two questions arise: Is the term “bipolar” really a medically accurate one, and does changing the name of a condition actually lead to a greater acceptance of it? The answer to the first question, which concerns accuracy, is that “bipolar” is accurate in the sense that it indicates an individual has suffered from both mania (or mild forms of mania) and depression, unlike those individuals who have suffered from depression alone. But splitting mood disorders into bipolar and unipolar categories presupposes a distinction between depression and manic-depressive illness—both clinically and etiologically—that is not always clear, nor supported by science. Likewise, it perpetuates the notion that depression exists rather tidily segregated on its own pole, while mania clusters off neatly and discreetly on another. This polarization of two clinical states flies in the face of everything that we know about the cauldronous, fluctuating nature of manic-depressive illness; it ignores the question of whether mania is, ultimately, simply an extreme form of depression; and it minimizes the importance of mixed manic-and-depressive states, conditions that are common, extremely important clinically, and lie at the heart of many of the critical theoretical issues underlying this particular disease.

• From Trash (1988)

  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. Version_2 Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Introduction Deciding to Live - Preface to the First Edition River of Names Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee Mama Gospel Song I’m Working on My Charm Steal Away Monkeybites Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know Demon Lover Her Thighs Muscles of the Mind Violence Against Women Begins at Home A Lesbian Appetite Lupus Compassion INTRODUCTION Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories T he central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who had left the seventh grade the year before, worked as a waitress, and was just a month past fifteen when she birthed me. That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow oddly deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it. My family’s lives were not on television, not in books, not even comic books. There was a myth of the poor in this country, but it did not include us, no matter how I tried to squeeze us in. There was this concept of the “good” poor, and that fantasy had little to do with the everyday lives my family had survived. The good poor were hardworking, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable. We were the bad poor. We were men who drank and couldn’t keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes. My cousins quit school, stole cars, used drugs, and took dead-end jobs pumping gas or waiting tables. I worked after school in a job provided by Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, stole books I could not afford. We were not noble, not grateful, not even hopeful. We knew ourselves despised. What was there to work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed. Everything I write comes out of that very ordinary American history.

• From Trash (1988)

  Title Page Copyright Page Introduction Deciding to Live - Preface to the First Edition River of Names Meanest Woman Ever Left Tennessee Mama Gospel Song I’m Working on My Charm Steal Away Monkeybites Don’t Tell Me You Don’t Know Demon Lover Her Thighs Muscles of the Mind Violence Against Women Begins at Home A Lesbian Appetite Lupus Compassion INTRODUCTION Stubborn Girls and Mean Stories T he central fact of my life is that I was born in 1949 in Greenville, South Carolina, the bastard daughter of a white woman from a desperately poor family, a girl who had left the seventh grade the year before, worked as a waitress, and was just a month past fifteen when she birthed me. That fact, the inescapable impact of being born in a condition of poverty that this society finds shameful, contemptible, and somehow oddly deserved, has had dominion over me to such an extent that I have spent my life trying to overcome or deny it. My family’s lives were not on television, not in books, not even comic books. There was a myth of the poor in this country, but it did not include us, no matter how I tried to squeeze us in. There was this concept of the “good” poor, and that fantasy had little to do with the everyday lives my family had survived. The good poor were hardworking, ragged but clean, and intrinsically honorable. We were the bad poor. We were men who drank and couldn’t keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes. My cousins quit school, stole cars, used drugs, and took dead-end jobs pumping gas or waiting tables. I worked after school in a job provided by Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, stole books I could not afford. We were not noble, not grateful, not even hopeful. We knew ourselves despised. What was there to work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed. Everything I write comes out of that very ordinary American history. There is no story in which my family is not background, even as I have moved very far from both Greenville, South Carolina, and the poverty to which I was born. I remain my mother’s bastard girl, a woman who treasures her handmade family, my own adopted bastard child and the lover/partner who has nurtured and provoked me for more than fifteen years. We become what we did not intend, and still the one thing I know for sure is that only my sense of humor will sustain me.

• From The Girls (2016)

  said. “Next time I would do macaroons instead, coconut macaroons. Those mandarins were too hard to eat.” I was silent, shock making me wary. I slipped off my shoes and put them under my bed, side by side. I murmured good night, tilted my head to receive her kiss. “You want me to turn off the light?” my mother asked, pausing in the doorway. I shook my head. She shut the door gently. How conscientious she was, turning the handle so it clicked shut. I stared at my red feet, marked by the outline of my shoes. Thought about how strangled and strange they looked, all out of proportion, and who would ever love someone whose feet could look like this? — My mother spoke of the men she dated, after my father, with the desperate optimism of the born-again. And I saw the devout labor it took: she did exercises on a bath towel in the living room, her leotard striped with sweat. Licked her palm and sniffed to test her own breath. She went out with men whose necks raised boils where they cut themselves shaving, men who fumbled for the check but looked grateful when my mother removed her Air Travel Card. She found men like this and seemed happy about it. I’d imagine Peter, during our dinners with these men. Asleep with Pamela in a basement apartment in an unfamiliar Oregon town. Jealousy mingled strangely with a protectiveness for the two of them, for the child growing inside Pamela. There were only so many girls, I understood, that could be marked for love. Like that girl Suzanne, who commanded that response just by existing. — The man my mother liked best was a gold miner. Or that’s how Frank introduced himself, laughing, a scud of spit in the corner of his mouth. “Pleased to meet you, darlin’,” he said the first night, his big arm reining me toward him in a clumsy hug. My mother was giddy and a little drunk, as if life were a world where nuggets of gold were hidden in

• From An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)

  These discrepancies between what one is, what one is brought up to believe is the right way of behaving toward others, and what actually happens during these awful black manias, or mixed states, are absolute and disturbing beyond description—particularly, I think, for a woman brought up in a highly conservative and traditional world. They seem a very long way from my mother’s grace and gentleness, and farther still from the quiet seasons of cotillions, taffetas and silks, and elegant gloves that slid up over the elbows and had pearl buttons at the wrist, when one had no worries other than making sure that the seams in one’s stockings were straight before going to Sunday-night dinners at the Officers’ Club. For the most important and shaping years of my life I had been brought up in a straitlaced world, taught to be thoughtful of others, circumspect, and restrained in my actions. We went as a family to church every Sunday, and all of my answers to adults ended with a “ma’am” or a “sir.” The independence encouraged by my parents had been of an intellectual, not socially disruptive, nature. Then, suddenly, I was unpredictably and uncontrollably irrational and destructive. This was not something that could be overcome by protocol or etiquette. God, conspicuously, was nowhere to be found. Navy Cotillion, candy-striping, and Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers could not, nor were they ever intended to be, any preparation or match for madness. Uncontrollable anger and violence are dreadfully, irreconcilably, far from a civilized and predictable world. I had, ever since I could remember, inclined in the direction of strong and exuberant feelings, loving and living with what Delmore Schwartz called “the throat of exaltation.” Inflammability, however, always lay just the other side of exaltation. These fiery moods were, at least initially, not all bad: in addition to giving a certain romantic tumultuousness to my personal life, they had, over the years, added a great deal that was positive to my professional life. Certainly, they had ignited and propelled much of my writing, research, and advocacy work. They had driven me to try and make a difference. They had made me impatient with life as it was and made me restless for more. But, always, there was a lingering discomfort when the impatience or ardor or restlessness tipped over into too much anger. It did not seem consistent with being the kind of gentle, well-bred woman I had been brought up to admire and, indeed, continue to admire.

• From Tropic of Cancer (1934)

  One good number and after that the magazine’ll be finished. Are you game, Joe?” Grinning and chuckling we lift Marlowe to his feet and haul him to Carl’s room. When we turn on the lights there’s a woman in the bed waiting for Carl. “I forgot all about her,” says Carl. We turn the cunt loose and shove Marlowe into bed. In a minute or so there’s a knock at the door. It’s Van Norden. He’s all aflutter. Lost a plate of false teeth—at the Bal Nègre, he thinks. Anyway, we get to bed, the four of us. Marlowe stinks like a smoked fish. In the morning Marlowe and Van Norden leave to search for the false teeth. Marlowe is blubbering. He imagines they are his teeth. It is my last dinner at the dramatist’s home. They have just rented a new piano, a concert grand. I meet Sylvester coming out of the florist’s with a rubber plant in his arms. He asks me if I would carry it for him while he goes for the cigars. One by one I’ve fucked myself out of all these free meals which I had planned so carefully. One by one the husbands turn against me, or the wives. As I walk along with the rubber plant in my arms I think of that night a few months back when the idea first occurred to me. I was sitting on a bench near the Coupole, fingering the wedding ring which I had tried to pawn off on a garçon at the Dôme. He had offered me six francs for it and I was in a rage about it. But the belly was getting the upper hand. Ever since I left Mona I had worn the ring on my pinkie. It was so much a part of me that it had never occurred to me to sell it. It was one of those orange-blossom affairs in white gold. Worth a dollar and a half once, maybe more. For three years we went along without a wedding ring and then one day when I was going to the pier to meet Mona I happened to pass a jewelry window on Maiden Lane and the whole window was stuffed with wedding rings. When I got to the pier Mona was not to be seen. I waited for the last passenger to descend the gangplank, but no Mona. Finally I asked to be shown the passenger list. Her name was not on it. I slipped the wedding ring on my pinkie and there it stayed. Once I left it in a public bath, but then I got it back again. One of the orange blossoms had fallen off. Anyway, I was sitting there on the bench with my head down, twiddling the ring, when suddenly someone clapped me on the back. To make it brief, I got a meal and a few francs besides.

• From The Girls (2016)

  something of her inner self. I took her beauty personally. When we arrived home, the gravel crackling under the car wheels, she asked to use the bathroom. “Of course,” I said, vaguely thrilled to have her in my house, like a visiting dignitary. I showed her the nice bathroom, by my parents’ room. Tamar peeked at the bed and wrinkled her nose. “Ugly comforter,” she said under her breath. Until then, it had just been my parents’ comforter, but abruptly I felt secondhand shame for my mother, for the tacky comforter she had picked out, had even been foolish enough to be pleased by. I sat at the dining table listening to the muffled sound of Tamar peeing, of the faucet running. She was in there a long time. When Tamar finally emerged, something was different. It took me a moment to realize she was wearing my mother’s lipstick, and when she noticed me noticing her, it was as if I’d interrupted a movie she was watching. Her face rapt with the presentiment of some other life. — My favorite fantasy was the sleep cure I had read about in Valley of the Dolls. The doctor inducing long-term sleep in a hospital room, the only answer for poor, strident Neely, gone muddy from the Demerol. It sounded perfect—my body kept alive by peaceful, reliable machines, my brain resting in watery space, as untroubled as a goldfish in a glass bowl. I’d wake up weeks later. And even though life would slot back into its disappointing place, there would still be that starched stretch of nothing. Boarding school was meant to be a corrective, the push I needed. My parents, even in their separate, absorbing worlds, were disappointed in me, distressed by my mediocre grades. I was an average girl, and that was the biggest disappointment of all—there was no shine of greatness on me. I wasn’t pretty enough to get the grades I did, the scale not tipping heartily enough in the direction of looks or smarts. Sometimes I would be overtaken with pious impulses to do better, to try harder, but of course nothing changed. Other mysterious forces seemed to be in play. The window near my desk left open so I wasted math class watching the shudder of leaves. My pen leaking so I couldn’t take notes. The things I was good at had no real application: addressing envelopes in bubble

• From The Girls (2016)

  “Why’d you hang out with them, then?” she asked. My first impulse was to avoid the subject. I’d have to pin down all the edges. Act out the whole morality play: the regret, the warnings. I tried to sound businesslike. “People were falling into that kind of thing all the time, back then,” I said. “Scientology, the Process people. Empty-chair work. Is that still a thing?” I glanced at her—she was waiting for me to go on. “It was partly bad luck, I guess. That it was the group I found.” “But you stayed.” I could feel the full force of Sasha’s curiosity for the first time. “There was a girl. It was more her than Russell.” I hesitated. “Suzanne.” It was odd to say her name, to let it live in the world. “She was older,” I said. “Not by much, really, but it felt like a lot.” “Suzanne Parker?” I stared across the fire at Sasha. “I looked some things up today,” she said. “Online.” I’d once lost hours to that kind of stuff. The fan sites or whatever you called them. The stranger corners. The website devoted to Suzanne’s artwork from prison. Watercolors of mountain ranges, puffball clouds, the captions filled with misspellings. I’d felt a pang, imagining Suzanne working with great concentration, but closed the website when I saw the photo: Suzanne, in blue jeans and a white T-shirt—her jeans stuffed with middle-aged fat, her face a vacant scrim. The thought of Sasha gorging on that macabre glut made me uneasy. Packing herself with particulars: the autopsy reports, the testimony the girls gave of that night, like the transcript of a bad dream. “It’s nothing to be proud of,” I said. Recounting the usual things—it was awful. Not glamorous, not enviable. “There wasn’t anything about you,” Sasha said. “Not that I could find.” I felt a lurch. I wanted to tell her something valuable, my existence traced with enough care that I would become visible. “It’s better that way,” I said. “So the lunatics don’t search me out.” “But you were there?” “I lived there. Basically. For a while. I didn’t kill anyone or anything.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  my ardor and zeal (if indeed worthy of the name) have been so careless and languid, that I confess I have failed innumerable times to execute my office properly, and had not He, of His boundless goodness, assisted me, all that zeal had been fleeting and vain. Nay, I even acknowledge, that if the same goodness had not assisted me, those mental endowments which the Lord bestowed upon me would, at His judgment-seat, prove me more and more guilty of sin and sloth. For all these reasons, I testify and declare that I trust to no other security for my salvation than this, and this only, viz. that as God is the Father of mercy, He will show Himself such a Father to me, who acknowledge myself to be a miserable sinner. As to what remains, I wish that, after my departure out of this life, my body be committed to the earth (after the form and manner which is used in this Church and city), till the day of a happy resurrection arrive. As to the slender patrimony which God has bestowed upon me, and of which I have determined to dispose in this will and testament, I appoint Anthony Calvin, my very dear brother, my heir, but in the way of honor only, giving to him for his own the silver cup which I received as a present from Varanius, and with which I desire he will be contented. Everything else belonging to my succession I give him in trust, begging he will at his death leave it to his children. To the Boys’ School I bequeath out of my succession ten gold pieces; as many to poor strangers; and as many to Joanna, the daughter of Charles Constans, and myself by affinity. To Samuel and John, the sons of my brother, I bequeath, to be paid by him at his death, each four hundred gold pieces; and to Anna, and Susanna, and Dorothy, his daughters, each three hundred gold pieces; to David, their brother, in reprehension of his juvenile levity and petulance, I leave only twenty-five gold pieces. This is the amount of the whole patrimony and goods which the Lord has bestowed on me, as far as I can estimate, setting a value both on my library and mova-bles, and all my domestic utensils, and, generally, my whole means and effects; but should they produce a larger sum, I wish the surplus to be divided proportionally among all the sons and daughters of my brother, not excluding David, if, through the goodness of God, he shall have returned to good behavior.