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 Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  But. This is what I did. This is the body I made. I am corpulent—rolls of brown flesh, arms and thighs and belly. The fat eventually had nowhere to go, so it created its own paths around my body. I am riven with stretch marks, pockets of cellulite on my massive thighs. The fat created a new body, one that shamed me but one that made me feel safe, and more than anything, I desperately needed to feel safe. I needed to feel like a fortress, impermeable. I did not want anything or anyone to touch me. I did this to myself. This is my fault and my responsibility. This is what I tell myself, though I should not bear the responsibility for this body alone.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  We would hang out in his bedroom and flip through worn copies of his older brother’s Playboy and Hustler magazines. I studied these naked women, mostly young white blond thin taut. Their bodies seemed alien, unreal. I knew it was wrong to look at these women displaying such wanton nakedness, but I couldn’t look away. He clearly found these women exciting, sexually attractive, and I knew, even then, that I was nothing like them. I didn’t really want to be like those women but I wanted him to want me and I wanted him to look at me the way he looked at the magazines. He never did, and in his way, he punished me for what I wasn’t and couldn’t be. He punished me for being too young and too naïve, too adoring and too accommodating.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  16At thirteen, I went to boarding school. We had moved around a lot throughout my childhood, following my father and his successful career as a civil engineer. He built tunnels—the Eisenhower Tunnel in Colorado; subway lines in New York and Washington, DC; an outfall project in Boston. When my brothers and I visited him on construction sites, my dad would secure hard hats on our heads and take us belowground, so deep and dark, and show us how he, quite literally, was changing the world. His company was headquartered in Omaha, but whenever his district got a new project, he would be dispatched, and off we would go for a year or two—Illinois, Colorado, New Jersey, Virginia—and then back to Omaha we would return. I began exploring boarding schools so I might attend one school for all four years of high school. I was, I admit, also enamored with The Girls of Canby Hall series of books by Emily Chase. I would be like Shelley Hyde from Iowa, the fish out of water who still forged lifelong friendships with her new roommates as they had youthful adventures against the backdrop of their quintessentially New England campus. And then I was raped and I had to pretend to be someone I wasn’t and I wanted nothing more than to run away. Attending boarding school is how upper-middle-class girls run away, to be sure. If I went away for high school, I wouldn’t have to pretend to be a good girl who knew nothing of the world. I could be the nothing I had become, without having to explain myself. I could continue clinging tightly, desperately, to my secret and my guilt and my shame. Because I was so shy and withdrawn, because of all the moving around throughout my childhood, the only people I had to leave behind were my family. I didn’t have any friends to miss. I didn’t have a particular local high school I had been yearning to attend for years. I didn’t even know where we would be living for my freshman year, if my dad was transferred again. I was only thirteen, but it was surprisingly easy to decide that I wanted to leave home.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  The first shock of pain practically brought me to the floor. “This will teach you,” she said as she beat away, hitting my back, shoulders, thighs, and backside. I bit my lip, trying to keep from screaming, hoping that would shorten the number of blows. But after what seemed like endless whacks, I couldn’t hold in my cries. When she finally stopped, Sister Catherine put the giant piece of hose back into the bag before allowing me to stand up. “Get out,” she ordered. I left the corridor in front of her and headed downstairs to the Little Sisters’ bathroom, where I washed away the tears from my face, drank some water, and smoothed my hair with my hands. The welts on my thighs were still rising, but I couldn’t see the damage because we had no full-length mirror. Alone, I crossed the yard to St. Therese’s House, arriving late for lunch. For once, the rule of silence saved me from questions from the Little Sisters. What happened would remain my secret. I didn’t want anyone to know that I had gotten the Big Punisher. It was too mortifying. Did she beat Leonard, too? I wondered. From the corner of my eye, I could see he was sitting at his table. There was no way to find out. It would be nearly fifty years before I asked him that question. “Yes,” he said. “So she told you, too, that you were never to speak to me?” It was a question that I had turned over in my mind for half a century. He nodded his head. It cemented a friendship that had forever been platonic. The pain subsided and over the next few hours the welts diminished, but not my anxiety. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t recall laughing or talking with Leonard. I barely slept that night, still clueless over how I’d broken the rule that Sister Catherine had devised, fearing that a childhood friendship might blossom into a romance as we grew into our teenage years. But she’s my godmother. I’m supposed to be special to her. Why has she turned on me? Not long after that hideous day, Sister Catherine entered our refectories and addressed the thirty-nine of us. “Little Brothers and Sisters,” she said. The tone of her voice was pleasant, as though she had a surprise in store for us. “How would you like to be more like your Big Brothers and Sisters? Wouldn’t you like that?” “Yes, Sister Catherine.” The reply was instant and unanimous, as it always was when she asked a leading question. A new rule was coming now. I could just sense it. “Well,” she continued, “the Big Brothers don’t speak to the Big Sisters, and the Big Sisters don’t speak to the Big Brothers. If you would like to be just like them, then from now on, the Little Sisters will not speak to the Little Brothers, and the Little Brothers won’t speak to the Little Sisters.” It was done.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  “Brother Sebastian has complained about you. He says that you’re chasing him.” I gulped, not sure how to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. She went on, her voice not so much accusatory as admonishing. “Now you know the rule about particular friendships, don’t you, dear?” How well I did. It had been another one of those manipulations by Sister Catherine—a “suggestion” from her that she got us children to agree to, thus making it one more ironclad rule. In this case, no longer were we allowed to have a particular friendship or hold each other’s hands. At the time, my best friend was Claudette. We’d spend hours in innocent play together, and I enjoyed holding hands and skipping with her. Now this was forbidden. But I found a way to break the rule without getting caught. As we skipped along the rutted gravel road that led from one meadow to another, I made sure there was plenty of space between us—that is, until we were behind the thicket of elderberry bushes and brambles. Then I’d grasp her hand, and for a few hundred feet out of sight of a spying Angel, we would swing our clasped hands back and forth, throwing our heads back and laughing. When the scrub trees gave way to the open field, I loosened my grip on her hand and we emerged into the view of the Angel, an appropriate distance apart. No one ever caught us. My parents as Sister Elizabeth Ann and Brother James Aloysius. Now as I stood before Sister Catherine in her office, I could feel the heat rise in my body as she chastised me for “chasing” Brother Sebastian. As to why I might find him so riveting, there was never a conversation about nature, about my body and why it was changing. Not even with the onset of menstruation a year earlier had Sister Catherine taken the opportunity to discuss human reproduction with me. But then, perhaps from her point of view, since I was in training to be the bride of Christ, in essence having been betrothed to Him from the time I was an infant, what need did I have to know anything about such matters of the flesh? Not long after this encounter, Brother Sebastian was gone. I searched everywhere for him, but he wasn’t at First Breakfast, nor was he in the sacristy or the refectory during dinner. Then I pieced the puzzle together. He’d been kicked out. Is it because of me? The ache in my heart took weeks to mend. I pondered over why it was that the people I most loved were taken away—first Betty Sullivan, and now the man named Charles Forgeron, because he was no longer Brother Sebastian. Could Brother James Aloysius and Sister Elizabeth Ann face the same fate? Sister Catherine often praised various Big Brothers and Sisters, pointing out their detachment from their children, but it didn’t escape me that my parents were never mentioned.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  After that, he tried to never leave me alone. He tried to save me from myself. Ha! Ha! Ha! I’m better, I told him. I’m done with all that, I told him. I was better, I suppose. I was better about hiding what I was doing. He couldn’t follow me everywhere. I learned how to be very quiet. We were better, or as better as we ever were going to be, and then I graduated and I moved and he didn’t follow and I was finally living alone and I could do whatever I wanted. I was an accomplished professional, so it was easier than ever to hide in plain sight. In the new town no one really knew me. I had “friends,” but it’s not like they came over to my apartment or had gotten to know me well enough to see that anything was off. When we’d go out to dinner, friends remarked that I always went to the bathroom after I ate. “I have a bad stomach,” I demurred, politely. It was a half-truth. Immediately, I was extraordinarily on the rebound, involved with a guy. The one time he caught me throwing up he said, “I’m glad you’re working on the problem.” For him, the real problem was my body, and he never let me forget it. He punished me and I liked it. Finally, I thought. Finally. He made his cruel comments and gave me “advice,” which only reminded me that everything wrong with my body was, indeed, my fault. “Why are you with this asshole?” so many people—friends, strangers who saw us together in public—asked. The longer I stayed with him, the worse he made me feel, and the better he made me feel because, at last, someone was telling me a truth about myself I already knew. Something had to give. Something always gives. My grief began to subside. I was way too old for this shit, I realized. The heartburn had started up and I realized I needed to stop punishing myself. I had finally, after more than thirty years, found a best friend who saw the best and worst parts of me, and even if I didn’t talk about what was going on, she was there and I could have told her and it would have been fine. That’s a powerful thing, knowing you can reveal yourself to someone. It made me want to be a better person. I wanted to stop, but wanting and doing are two different things. I had a routine. I starved myself all day and then I ate a huge meal and then I purged myself of that meal. I made myself empty and I loved that empty feeling. I ignored my yellowed teeth and my hair falling out and the acid burns on my right fingers and the scabs on my knuckles. “Why is my hair falling out?” I asked the Internet, as if I didn’t already know.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I was failing myself; this was not where I wanted to be. “You grow up here?” asked the mother, cigarette smoke curling out of her nearly toothless mouth. Caught off guard by her question I replied, “Yes, near here,” realizing with panic that was not the answer I should have given. “Ya? Where?” “Right around the corner.” Now I was in the quicksand with no way to get out. “That house next door?” “Yes.” “With Feeney and them guys?” I nodded, caught in the truth, but knowing I’d never in a hundred years be stepping foot in that house again. “Crazy people, all o’ them. But I had nuttin’ against ’em. They moved. You still with ’em?” “Oh, no.” I let out a half laugh, as though the suggestion were ludicrous, while trying to think of a way I could escape from this conversation, this house, this atmosphere, this netherworld I found repulsive. With a quick thank you, I rushed back to the solitude and safety of my own space, a sense of shame and failure gnawing at me. But not for long. I learned my lesson, put that experience into its proper place as part of the ups and downs of gaining a foothold in the real world, and moved on. Sometimes my striving wings failed me, and that’s when my roots once again took over. Learning by trial and error was a tortuous affair. After years of indoctrination, my first instinct upon entering the world had been one of distrust. Don’t let your guard down; everyone is out to harm you. However, once I had broken through that barrier of self-protection, discernment—how to differentiate the good citizen from the con artist—became the next hurdle. Loans to “friends” that were never paid off brought to life how the asset of a virtue can morph into a liability—generosity can be exploited. But each setback was, in fact, a step forward; each disappointment a lesson learned. I was discovering that good and evil came in myriad shades of gray. 57 Half Nun, Half Mother 1967–1968 I was full of confidence the day I signed the one-year lease on an apartment in the Back Bay section of Boston. Out of the YWCA, on my own, nineteen years old, earning money, and more comfortable about my role in the world, as long as, that is, no one asked me about my past. Which was an impossibility, so I made up answers—my father was a teacher, I’d say, making sure to head the conversation in another direction so I wouldn’t have to answer the inevitable follow-up questions: “Where?” and “What does he teach?” There were four of us in this lease together: three girls whom I barely knew, but who were friends of each other, and me. One of the girls was dating a pitcher for the Red Sox, and we were always at sports parties that went well into the night.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  After hauling myself up onstage, I sat down on a tiny wooden chair and the tiny wooden chair cracked and I realized, I am going to vomit and I am going to fall on my ass in front of all these people. After the humiliation I had just endured, I realized I was going to have to stay silent on both counts. I threw up in my mouth, swallowed it, and then did a squat for the next two hours. I am not sure how I did not burst into tears. I wanted to disappear from that stage, from that moment. The thing about shame is that there are depths. I have no idea where the bottom of my shame resides. By the time I got back to my hotel room, my thigh muscles were shredded, but I was also impressed with how strong those muscles are. My body is a cage, but this is my cage and there are moments where I take pride in it. Still, alone in that hotel room, I sobbed and sobbed. I felt so worthless and so embarrassed. Words cannot convey. I sobbed because I was angry at myself, at the event organizers and their lack of forethought. I sobbed because the world cannot accommodate a body like mine and because I hate being confronted by my limitations and because I felt so utterly alone and because I no longer need the layers of protection I built around myself but pulling those layers back is harder than I could have ever imagined. 79There is a price to be paid for visibility and there is even more of a price to be paid when you are hypervisible. I am opinionated, and as a cultural critic I share my opinions regularly. I am confident in my opinions and believe I have a right to share my point of view without apology. This confidence tends to upset people who disagree with me. Rarely are my actual ideas engaged. Instead, my weight is discussed. “You are fat,” they say. Or, because, for example, I share that I love tiny baby elephants in my Twitter bio, they make an elephant joke where I, of course, am the elephant. While on a publicity tour in Sweden, I mentioned on Twitter that the Swedes had their own version of The Biggest Loser. A random stranger suggested I was the American export for the show. The harassment is a constant, whether I am talking about something serious or trivial. I am never allowed to forget the realities of my body, how my body offends the sensibilities of others, how my body dares to take up too much space, and how I dare to be confident, how I dare to use my voice, how I dare to believe in the value of my voice both in spite of and because of my body.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  * * * One afternoon, with Mercedes on my mind, I opened the cabinet in our common room and retrieved a bottle of clear nail polish whose sole function was to patch up runs in our stockings. I, however, had a different motive for getting it. No one was around—I was safe. But to ensure privacy, I clasped the tiny bottle in my hand and retreated to my cubicle, closing the curtain behind me. There I applied a thin coat of the clear polish to each fingernail, feeling like a woman of the world. I stared at the sheen on my nails for a few moments and then headed to the sink to rinse off the incriminating evidence of vanity. Rubbing my hands together with a bar of soap under the running water, I saw with horror that the shiny coat remained on each finger. Panicking, I grabbed a scrub brush and an abrasive cleaner, but to no avail. A sickening feeling lurched inside me as I realized that somehow I was going to get caught. Sure enough, during Latin class the very next morning, Sister Mary Laurence spied my fingers. I anticipated a summons to Sister Catherine’s office, but none was forthcoming. When the day went by without any repercussion, I thanked the whole court of heaven. A few days later, as we postulants gathered for Chapter Meeting, Sister Catherine spoke as I knelt in front of her. “Dear Sister in the Immaculate Heart of Mary, you show no signs of embracing religious life. You are worldly in your behavior. You are not an exemplary postulant.” The tone in her voice was modulated, but I got the message. The spy network in action had tipped off Sister Catherine about the polish on my fingernails. I felt sick. There wasn’t a harsher accusation at the Center than that of being worldly. It was a sentencing—Sister Catherine was announcing that I was a failure, unable to live up to the gold standard she had established for me. That set me apart from the rest of the postulants. And I knew she was right. I was incapable of measuring up because deep inside me I abhorred the life that I was expected to embrace. No longer could I sublimate my dreams of life in the world. The experience of mingling for ten days with the Spanish choir had thrust me into a new world of desire, a lust for what I had been indoctrinated to believe was evil. I no longer cared. I wanted it—a life in the world and all that went with it. 45 Sentencing 1965 T here was a knock on the wall outside my cubicle. “Sister Catherine would like to see you in her office, dear,” Sister Colette said softly. Nothing more. What could I have done this time? The usual nervousness grabbed my insides and instinctively I turned to prayer.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I cannot bring myself to detail the things he did to me before I was broken. It’s too much, too humiliating. But with each new transgression we committed, I lost more of my body. I fell further from the possibility of the word “no.” I became less and less the good girl I had been. I stopped looking at my reflection in the mirror because I felt nothing but guilt and shame when I did. And then there was that terrible day in the woods. And I finally did say no. And it did not matter. That’s what has scarred me the most. My no did not matter. I wish I could tell you I never spoke to Christopher again, but I did. That may be what shames me most, that after everything he did to me, I went back, and allowed him to continue using me until my family moved a few months later. I allowed him to continue using me because I didn’t know what else to do. Or I let him use me because after what happened in the woods, I felt so worthless. I believed I didn’t deserve any better. I was marked after that. Men could smell it on me, that I had lost my body, that they could avail themselves of my body, that I wouldn’t say no because I knew my no did not matter. They smelled it on me and took advantage, every chance they got. 14I do not know why I turned to food. Or I do. I was lonely and scared and food offered an immediate satisfaction. Food offered comfort when I needed to be comforted and did not know how to ask for what I needed from those who loved me. Food tasted good and made me feel better. Food was the one thing within my reach.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  In other ways, I was intimately aware of every single pound that accumulated and clung to my body. And everyone around me was also intimately aware. My family’s concern became a constant chorus of nagging, always well intended, but mostly a reminder of how I was a failure in the most basic of my human responsibilities—maintaining my body. They were relentless in asking me what I was going to do about my “problem.” They offered advice. They tried tough love. They offered to send me to specialists and spas. They offered financial incentives and new wardrobes and new cars. There is nothing they would not have done to help me solve the problem of my body. They mean well, my parents. They love me. They understand the world as it is, and how there is no room for people of my size. They know that the older I get, the harder it will become to live at this size. They worry about my health and my happiness. They are good parents. My parents also want to understand—they are intellectual, smart, practical. They want my weight to be a problem they can address with the intellect they apply to other problems. They want to understand how I could have let this happen, let my body become so big, so out of control. We have that in common. And still. They are my personal Obesity Crisis Intervention team. They have been actively pursuing the problem of my body since I was fourteen years old. I love them so I accept this, sometimes with grace and sometimes without. It is only now, in my early forties, that I have started to put my foot down and say, when they try to broach the conversation of my body, “No. I will not discuss my body with you. No. My body, how I move it, how I nourish it, is not your business.” There was a time when every conversation included some kind of question about my weight. My parents, and my father in particular, make inquiries as to whether I am dieting, exercising, and/or losing weight as if all I am is my big fat body. But they love me. This is what I remind myself so I can forgive them.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  What I was unprepared for, upon entering my thirteenth year, was finding myself thrust into a world I had no idea how to maneuver—an attraction to boys. The first inkling came through books, as I devoured an array of new arrivals in our library—books on sports figures, mostly famous football players, like Joe Bellino who played for Navy, and Knute Rockne who’d been a star at Notre Dame. Sitting on my bed, I would turn the pages, gazing at the photographs of the handsome athletes in their team uniforms, with their husky builds and their good looks. This growing interest I shared with no one, least of all Sister Catherine. Her constant exhortation that we share with her, as she put it, “the deepest yearnings of your soul” added to my wariness. Much as I craved to be loved and accepted by her, I had come to the realization that, for reasons beyond my comprehension, I was blighted in her eyes. Concomitant with my new obsession with books about athletes and boys was my fading appetite for reading the lives of the saints. I read Tom Playfair so many times that I had memorized the first few pages. “Tommy!” No answer. “Tommy—do you hear me? Get up this moment, sir. Do you think this house is a hotel? Everyone’s at breakfast except yourself.” That’s what life was like out in the world, I figured. But my love affair with these new books was to be short-lived. One day, I was summoned to Sister Catherine’s office. “Anastasia,” Sister Catherine said in a tone that meant business. “You are no longer to read any books about football. Those books were meant for the Little Brothers. Do you hear me?” “Yes, Sister Catherine,” I said. It made no sense. If I wasn’t supposed to read books about football, why did Father take us to watch the high school football games in Clinton and Leominster on Saturday mornings? Sister Catherine went on. “And you’ve read Tom Playfair enough. From now on, all books on boys are out of bounds for you as well. You may leave.” I left her office disheartened and with a feeling of having been trapped. Who told her I was reading those books? Which Angel? I was left guessing. Sister Catherine may have outwitted herself because once she banished the books that were the source of my innocent musings about boys, my fascination turned to the real men around me. Brother Sebastian became my first crush, the Big Brother I had adored as a small child when he told me bedtime stories about the lives of the saints. For reasons I didn’t understand, I began to find him irresistible. I’d pass by the chapel where he worked as the sacristan in the hopes of catching a glimpse of him, sure that my preoccupation was my own secret. So I was more than shocked when, summoned once again to Sister Catherine’s office, she came to the point directly.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  44I start each day with the best of intentions for living a better, healthier life. Every morning, I wake up and have a few minutes where I am free from my body and my failings. During these moments, I think, Today, I will make good choices. I will work out. I will eat small portions. I will take the stairs when possible. Before the day starts, I am fully prepared to tackle the problem of my body, to be better than I have been. But then I get out of bed. Often, I rush to get ready and begin my day because I am not a morning person and I hit snooze on my alarm several times. I don’t eat breakfast because I’m not hungry or I don’t have time or there is no food in the house, which are all excuses for not being willing to take proper care of myself. Sometimes, I eat lunch—a sandwich from Subway or Jimmy John’s. Or two sandwiches. And chips. And a cookie or three. And it’s fine, I tell myself, because I haven’t eaten all day. Or I wait until dinner and then the day is nearly done and I can eat whatever I want, I tell myself, because I have not eaten all day. At night, I have to face myself and all the ways I have failed. Most days, I haven’t exercised. I haven’t made any of the good choices I intended to make when the day began. Whatever happens next doesn’t matter, so I binge and eat even more of whatever I want. As I fall asleep, my stomach churning, the acids making my heartburn flare, I think about the next day. I think, Tomorrow, I will make good choices. I am always holding on to the hope of tomorrow. 45I often try to create goals for myself that go beyond what I hope to accomplish for my body in a given day. I will lose x number of pounds by the time I go home for Thanksgiving or Christmas or before I go to Australia or before I next see my loved one. I will lose x number of pounds before I go on book tour. I will lose x number of pounds before the new semester starts. I will lose x number of pounds before I go to the Beyoncé concert. I create these goals and make half-hearted attempts to meet these goals, but I never do, and then I enter a spiral of feeling like a failure for not ever being able to be better, to get smaller. I reserve my most elaborate delusions and disappointments for myself.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I don’t know how things got so out of control, or I do. This is my refrain. Losing control of my body was a matter of accretion. I began eating to change my body. I was willful in this. Some boys had destroyed me, and I barely survived it. I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure another such violation, and so I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away. Even at that young age, I understood that to be fat was to be undesirable to men, to be beneath their contempt, and I already knew too much about their contempt. This is what most girls are taught—that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I am not comfortable in my body. Nearly everything physical is difficult. When I move around, I feel every extra pound I am carrying. I have no stamina. When I walk for long periods of time, my thighs and calves ache. My feet ache. My lower back aches. More often than not, I am in some kind of physical pain. Every morning, I am so stiff I contemplate just spending the duration of the day in bed. I have a pinched nerve, and so if I stand for too long, my right leg goes numb and then I sort of lurch about until the feeling returns. When it’s hot, I sweat profusely, mostly from my head, and then I feel self-conscious and find myself constantly wiping the sweat from my face. Rivulets of sweat spring forth between my breasts and pool at the base of my spine. My shirt gets damp and sweat stains begin seeping through the fabric. I feel like people are staring at me sweating and judging me for having an unruly body that perspires so wantonly, that dares to reveal the costs of its exertion. There are things I want to do with my body but cannot. If I am with friends, I cannot keep up, so I am constantly thinking up excuses to explain why I am walking slower than they are, as if they don’t already know. Sometimes, they pretend not to know, and sometimes, it seems like they are genuinely that oblivious to how different bodies move and take up space as they look back at me and suggest we do impossible things like go to an amusement park or walk a mile up a hill to a stadium or go hiking to an overlook with a great view. My body is a cage. My body is a cage of my own making. I am still trying to figure my way out of it. I have been trying to figure a way out of it for more than twenty years.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  During a tattoo, pain is constant and sometimes it lasts hours, but it doesn’t necessarily register the same way pain normally does. I am not to be trusted on this. I do not register pain as most people do, which is to say, my tolerance is high. It is probably too high. But the pain of a tattoo is something to which you have to surrender because once you’ve started, you cannot really go back or you’ll be left with something not only permanent but unfinished. I enjoy the irrevocability of that circumstance. You have to allow yourself this pain. You have chosen this suffering, and at the end of it, your body will be different. Maybe your body will feel more like yours. I’m overweight. I hope to not always be, but for now, this is my body. I am coming to terms with that. I am trying to feel less shame about that. When I mark myself with ink, or when I have that done to me, I am taking some part of my skin back. It is a long, slow process. This is my fortress. 54To tell the story of my body is to tell you about shame—being ashamed of how I look, ashamed of my weakness, the shame of knowing it is in my power to change my body and yet, year after year, not changing it. Or I try, I do. I eat right. I work out. My body becomes smaller and starts to feel more like mine and not a cage of flesh I carry with me. That’s when I feel a new kind of panic because I am seen in a different way. My body becomes a different source of discussion. I have more wardrobe options and there is that intoxicating moment when a much smaller pair of pants slips over my body and a shirt drapes easily over my shoulders. The vanity nestled in the cave of my chest swells. In such moments, I see myself in the mirror, narrower, more angular. I recognize the me I could have, should have, would have been and want to be. That version of myself is terrifying and maybe even beautiful, so I panic, and within days or weeks, I undo all the progress I’ve made. I stop going to the gym. I stop eating right. I do this until I feel safe again. Most of us have these versions of ourselves that terrify us. We have these imperfect bodies we don’t quite know how to cope with. We have these shames we keep to ourselves because to show ourselves as we are, no more and no less, would be too much.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  I walked into the pub. He was there at the bar, talking to the bartender, and he offered me a seat on the barstool next to him, a broad smile across his face. A drink was awaiting me. What I next remember is waking up in my own bed in the pitch black, naked, in pain and aware that a man was getting out of my bed. I was jolted out of my sleepiness and stared in shocked silence as the man slipped into his trousers, picked up his shoes, and tiptoed out of my bedroom. His gait, the eyeglasses— they told me who he was, the broker who had offered to buy me a drink. The apartment door shut behind him, and I lay motionless, racking my brain to try to recreate the events of the prior evening. For hours I lay awake—too stunned to cry, too mortified to call anyone. How did this happen? How could I have let it happen? The next morning, I was the first to arrive at the office, taking my place at the receptionist’s desk that faced the elevators, and thus allowed me to greet each person who arrived. Long after normal starting hours, the elevator door opened and out stepped the criminal of the prior evening. I grabbed a telephone as though I were engaged in conversation, refusing to look at him as he strode past my desk and on to his elegant office. Will he apologize to me? I wondered. How naïve I was to think there might be any remorse in that man. Did he think perhaps that I had no idea what had transpired, that I was dead to the world when he sneaked out of my apartment? I wanted to scream at him, to punch him in the face, but that would entail sharing my nightmare with the whole office. Would anyone even believe me? I had never heard of such a thing happening to a person—it would be my word against his—he the big producer versus me the pretty receptionist who wore miniskirts. A combination of shame and the fear of retaliation silenced me. I was deliberately ignorant of the array of drugs that were popular among students and young working professionals—Quaaludes, LSD, glue, and a cornucopia of drugs I learned about when I saw the movie of the late 1960s, “Valley of the Dolls.” The fear of losing control in a world I was still learning to navigate tempered any curiosity I might have had about experimenting with these drugs. I confided only in my English girlfriend, who in turn told me he’d tried to rape her on one occasion when he offered her a ride home. It was comforting to share the nightmare with someone who understood—we were now kindred victims of barbarism. But this remained our secret—I did not share it even with my family for over four decades.

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  I don’t know what my parents noticed about me in the year before high school. Since we had moved, I no longer had to go to a school where everyone called me Slut. Instead, there were new torments, new bullies, and even more motivation for me to run, run, run as far away from myself as possible. I applied to several boarding schools and got into them all. One, Lawrenceville, accepted me as part of the first class of girls to attend the school when it went coed, but the thought of attending a school with so many boys was too much. I ended up going to Exeter because my cousin Claudine had just graduated from there and she seemed fine and the school seemed fine and because my parents liked the school’s reputation. At such a young age, I absolutely took for granted that I would be attending one of the most elite and expensive high schools in the country, if not the world. All that mattered was that I would be able to run away. Left to my own devices at boarding school, I lost any semblance of control over what I put into my body. Suddenly, there were all kinds of food available to me. The dining hall was an all-you-can-eat extravaganza. Certainly, the offerings were generally bad—damp and malodorous, as is the nature of industrially prepared food—but there were vast quantities available. And there was a salad bar. And there were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. And breakfast cereal. And limitless soda machines. And dessert options. And The Grill, a campus greasy spoon where, for a few dollars, I could get a burger, French fries, and a frappé. And there was the convenience store downtown, where I could buy a huge submarine sandwich. And a Woolworth’s with an actual lunch counter. I could order pizza, and within thirty minutes, it would be delivered to my dorm and I could eat the entire thing by myself and there was no one to stop me from my naked, shameless indulgence. The freedom of being able to eat, so extravagantly and without limit, offered me the only true pleasure I knew in high school. I was presented with an orgy of food and I indulged in all of it. I reveled in eating whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I reveled in the steam of biting into a salty French fry and the slick hot ooze of melted cheese on a hot slice of pizza and the thick cold sweetness of a frappé. I craved that pleasure and indulged myself as often as I could.

• From Little Sister: A Memoir (2019)

  “Brother Sebastian has complained about you. He says that you’re chasing him.” I gulped, not sure how to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. She went on, her voice not so much accusatory as admonishing. “Now you know the rule about particular friendships, don’t you, dear?” How well I did. It had been another one of those manipulations by Sister Catherine—a “suggestion” from her that she got us children to agree to, thus making it one more ironclad rule. In this case, no longer were we allowed to have a particular friendship or hold each other’s hands. At the time, my best friend was Claudette. We’d spend hours in innocent play together, and I enjoyed holding hands and skipping with her. Now this was forbidden. But I found a way to break the rule without getting caught. As we skipped along the rutted gravel road that led from one meadow to another, I made sure there was plenty of space between us—that is, until we were behind the thicket of elderberry bushes and brambles. Then I’d grasp her hand, and for a few hundred feet out of sight of a spying Angel, we would swing our clasped hands back and forth, throwing our heads back and laughing. When the scrub trees gave way to the open field, I loosened my grip on her hand and we emerged into the view of the Angel, an appropriate distance apart. No one ever caught us. [image file=Image00025.jpg] My parents as Sister Elizabeth Ann and Brother James Aloysius. Now as I stood before Sister Catherine in her office, I could feel the heat rise in my body as she chastised me for “chasing” Brother Sebastian. As to why I might find him so riveting, there was never a conversation about nature, about my body and why it was changing. Not even with the onset of menstruation a year earlier had Sister Catherine taken the opportunity to discuss human reproduction with me. But then, perhaps from her point of view, since I was in training to be the bride of Christ, in essence having been betrothed to Him from the time I was an infant, what need did I have to know anything about such matters of the flesh? Not long after this encounter, Brother Sebastian was gone. I searched everywhere for him, but he wasn’t at First Breakfast, nor was he in the sacristy or the refectory during dinner. Then I pieced the puzzle together. He’d been kicked out. Is it because of me? The ache in my heart took weeks to mend. I pondered over why it was that the people I most loved were taken away—first Betty Sullivan, and now the man named Charles Forgeron, because he was no longer Brother Sebastian. Could Brother James Aloysius and Sister Elizabeth Ann face the same fate?

• From Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (2017)

  When I went home for that first Thanksgiving holiday, my parents were shocked, as if I were unrecognizable, and maybe, to them, I was. They saw me plainly while looking right through me. I had gained at least thirty pounds in only two and a half months. Suddenly, I was very round, my cheeks and gut and thighs fleshy in ways they had never been. My clothes, the ones that did fit, strained at the seams. Though I didn’t want to go, my parents took me to a doctor who charitably declared that I was blossoming when so much more was happening to my body. He didn’t seem overly concerned, likely attributed my weight gain to being away from home for the first time. My parents had no idea what to do, but they were incredibly alarmed and immediately began to treat my body as something of a crisis. They tried to help me without realizing that this early weight gain was only the beginning of the problem my body would become. They had no idea at all about what created the problem. They knew nothing of my determination to keep making my body into what I needed it to be—a safe harbor rather than a small, weak vessel that betrayed me. 17During the first two years of high school, I ate and ate and ate and I became more and more lost. I started high school as nothing and then became less than nothing. I only had to pretend to be the girl I had been when I spoke to my parents on the phone or when I went home for breaks. The rest of the time, I didn’t know who I was. Mostly, I was numb. I was awkward. I was trying to be a writer. I was trying to forget what happened to me. I was trying to stop feeling those boys on and in my skin, how they laughed at me, how they laughed as they ruined me. I remember so little from high school, but in the past few years, as my profile as a writer has gotten more visible, I’ve started to hear from the kids I went to high school with and, oddly enough, they all remember me distinctly. They reach out via e-mail, or Facebook, or at events, and ask me, eagerly, if I remember them too. They share anecdotes that make me seem like I was interesting and not as unbearable as I remember myself. I don’t know what to make of the memories of other people or how to reconcile their memories with mine. I do know that I developed a sharp tongue in high school. I was quiet, but I could cut someone with words when I put my mind to it.