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 Folding Star (1994)

  "Nothing," I said, and walked away from him, my mouth turned down at the corners like a child in the silence before a wall. I stood looking over his twisted bedding, sucking in deep breaths; wondering abstractly who'd been sleeping here. Matt kept away from me, stacked up tapes with the noisy briskness of someone pretending to do housework. After a while I went over to him and gave him a kiss. "Actually I'm terribly hungry," I said. He gave his crooked smile of relief. "Run out and get some burgers." "Okay. I don't have any money." And I dug with an inverted kind of pride into my jeans pocket and displayed a palmful of coins that would buy nothing, the change one expects a beggar or busker to be grateful for. Matt did something similar, though he brought out a bookie's roll of banknotes with large rudimentary sums jotted on the top one. He pulled a couple of thousands off and tucked them into my waistband, as if I were a stripper; then kissed me again. When I got back with the warm polystyrene boxes, he was on the phone. "Yeah . . . that's right . . . the American guy . . . Yes, really sexy . . . he's not a jerk . . . oh, a jock . . . Yeah, he's a jock all right . . . " He gave me a wink, head cocked to hold the receiver whilst he tipped the packeted condiments out of the bag. "Okay, here he is. . . Ed, yeah . . . This one's for you," he said, a finger on the secretary's hold button. "Who is it?" "Some guy from Ostend." "What's he want?" "You're an American college-boy, okay, he just needs talking off." I ducked away puzzled. "Come on, he's paying good money. His dick's in his hand. Just tell him how sexy you are." Matt held the receiver out to me, and I gestured wanly at my cheeseburger, already cooling after its journey from the Bishop's Palace. "Eat while you work," he said. I sat down. "But I'm not American . . . " There was no help for it. "Hello?" I said in a suspicious growl. "Oh hi! Is that Ed, right?" The man was speaking in a heavy American accent himself, but with homely Flemish vowels. "Yep." I settled myself and turned my head so that I couldn't see Matt. The scope for confusion was so great that I found myself taking it quickly and self-mockingly, like something done as a dare. I'd never rung a sex-talk line—I didn't know what the conventions were. "So, where are you from, Ed?" the man from Ostend asked with patient excitement.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Then why did you come here, for god's sake?" I suppose I should have foreseen such casual and incurious asking of the hardest questions. I had the sense again of being guided deep down by motives too tenuous to explain. It was something to do with growing up in a singer's household, to the daily accompaniment of art, and with this little old city being famous for its music and pictures; I couldn't quite admit to myself the uncertainty I felt already at its deadness, its air of a locked museum, the recognition that what had happened had all been centuries ago. I said, "Well, I wanted to use my Dutch—my mother's family was Dutch, I studied it at school. I think you learn these things, then you discover a use for them." Over the past month of muttered revision I had imagined conversations that ran more smoothly, where the cheery exempla of the grammar book gave way to passionate declarations. He started to refer to all the money I had, and I said, "But that's everything I've got, I'm terribly poor!" I patted the pad of notes zipped in my jacket pocket and he looked at me with a friendly scepticism, that said he knew about the traveler's cheques folded among my shirts in the hotel cupboard, and my reliable background, how I could never fall through the net. And it was with a little bourgeois shock that I finally read the message of his eyes, the pupils shrunk to black pinpoints. I didn't know whether to mention it or not, wasn't totally sure I was right. Drugs frightened me and moved me to an impotent desire to help. I bought both the following rounds—I couldn't pretend that they weren't within my means; he accepted them with a hint of irritation, as though to have thanked me would have been an admission of his dependency. I was the victim of a con, in a way, someone who didn't know him, a fresh fool, on the first night of my capricious little exile, drunk and hungry for contact. Sometimes he scratched at his chest with a thumbnail, and the tiny crackle of chest-hairs under the cotton of his polo-shirt filled me with a wondering sense of his whole body, as keen as if he'd been leaning by me naked. I offered him a cigarette, but he shook his head contemptuously. "I've got to get hold of some money," he said, looking away from me, pretending to accept my plea of poverty. I saw it was all over, I hadn't worked out for him; he hadn't even told me his name. I thought of him simply as Rose. Rose of the Rose Tattoo! I suspected it wasn't worth explaining the literary joke. I muttered, "What is it you're on?" He was silent, I'd have thought rather vain if I hadn't felt his desperation. "Bad stuff," he said at last, firmly, but he wouldn't reveal what.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  look like an even bigger lightweight if I asked for it back— suppose she said, “No!” Suppose she said, “Fucl^you!” Then what?—I heard myself mumbling, Marlon Brando—style, “Don’t worry about it. One thing I know how to do is steal.” And without another word, I headed back to the mall. Be fore I left, I thought I caught a flicker of respect in her eyes. It gave me hope. (And a partial erection.) I was back in ten minutes with a pair of lightweight goose downs, army green and waterproof. When I handed hers over, I could tell she was impressed. With any luck, I wouldn’t have to knock off a gas station to make her forget my cowardice. I could probably kill a man with my bare hands and it wouldn’t matter now. Too-chicken- to-licl^. It might as well have been tattooed on my forehead. What do you do when you’re branded and you know you’re a man? Michele’s eyes grew huge under her Beatles cap. At some point, she’d dumped the rose-petal grannies, and I didn’t miss them. She squeezed the sleeping bag, then smiled. “You . . . you stole these?” “No big thing.” I shrugged, and pretty much stood still while she hugged me. I didn’t want to look too eager. Didn’t want her to know what I felt. Most of all, I didn’t want her to accidentally touch my ass. The credit card was in my back pocket. The last thing I needed was her finding out I charged the bags to my mother. DANI SHAPIRO Bed of Leaves l^ater, she will remember the leaves. The way they scratch and crumble against her back. The way her panties are smudged with dirt and she will have to ball them up and stuff them into her knapsack where her mother won’t find them. Years later, as a woman, there will be a moment at the end of each summer when the scent of fresh-mowed grass will fill her lungs through an open car window, and she will close her eyes and her tongue will go soft, her inner thighs moist like the pale insides of a half-baked cake. Eddie Fish is unbuttoning her shirt. There have been boys before this moment, boys who have stuck their fingers be tween her blouse and jeans, tugging the fabric loose, pushing their hands up around her bra and cupping her breasts. There have been boys—two, to be exact—who have unzipped her

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "How did she come to you?" After all, she wasn't strictly a member of the family herself. Then I saw that I had entered a room whose door I had always tiptoed past before—nothing to do with Lilli, but with Paul's wife, whose death had offered Lilli her role. Paul wiped his bowl with a piece of bread and took his time to answer. "When Marcel's mother died, he was only six, he needed someone to look after him." It was a scenario from which he had interestingly omitted himself. He looked at me with a hint of a challenge—defused a moment later by his mock-pedantic tone: " 'Ah yes,' you will say, 'but how was it that the person chosen to look after him was Lilli Vivier?' " I nodded, and then shrugged to say I didn't really need to know. "Well, there are two answers to that question. The short-term answer is that she had lost her husband less than a year before, she didn't want to carry on working on a farm, she had been . . . rather unwell herself. When Marcel's mother died, she wrote to me. We met, and came to our present arrangement." He pushed back his chair and turned it so as to look out at the chilly suspension of the fog. "There is a long-term answer too, if you want to hear it." If I did, it was only as a distraction, or for the sake of talk, or to avoid thinking fruitlessly about another question which so far had no kind of answer at all. "If you want to tell me." "I can tell you today. I wouldn't want to if she was actually here." He raised the palm of his hand towards me in a gesture of deference and restraint. "It goes back to the war again." "Well, I would be interested in that." I recalled how Lilli had stiffened and left the room when I had finally asked about Paul's war-time visits to Orst. "I feel very ashamed at how little I know about it; I've never quite taken it in." In Belgium I had barely heard the epoch mentioned, unless under the pressure of questioning, or when Helene had given me her vaguely sensational impressions of Orst's death.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  NATHAN ENGLANDER From "Peep Show" A / >llen Fein is on his way to Port Authority when he stubs his toe and scuffs his shoe—puts a nick in a five-hundred- dollar investment. He pulls out a handkerchief and spit-shines his toe cap, cursing with every pass of the cloth. The scuffing, the nick, has bumped Allen from the flow to which he is accustomed. And he looks around Forty-second Street at the gentrified theaters and the wholesome shops, the kind a family can enter in the bright light of day. Where are all the hucksters who used to stand outside promising nirvana and shaken booty, forbidden acts and creamy thighs? So busy has Allen been with his own transformation that he’s missed the one going on around him. He blushes at the thought, wondering how little Ari Fein berg had ever become Allen Fein, Esq., in fancy oxblood wingtips. When had he become a grown man, on his way home to a loving wife, a pregnant wife, a beautiful blond Gen tile wife, who laughed when he didn’t know how to work the Christmas lights, who bought a candle with a picture of Jesus on it when it came time for the memorial for his father? (“They were out of the little white ones,” Claire had said. “Can’t you just turn Jesus toward the wall?”) Allen straightens his tie and picks up his briefcase. He takes another look around and asks himself: As polished, as straight, as on the up-and-up as Forty-second Street now appears, is it still the same inside? And then the man says it. “Buddy,” he says. “Mac,” he says. “Upstairs. Girls. Live girls inside.” “What?” Allen says, catching the sign in the window: a gi ant neon token with “25(i” flashing in its center. “That’s right, buddy,” the man says. “Twenty-five cents for a spherical miracle. New York’s only three-hundred-and- sixty-degree all-around stage. Just follow the stairs, you can’t get lost—all the arrows lead to one place.” And Allen goes in, glancing only for a second to see if fate has mustered an officemate or neighbor to descry his ascent. He heads into a stairwell and makes his way to the second floor. When he enters the hall, he faces a towering figure behind a podium. Behind this giant, the hallway opens into a large room containing a single, massive, pillarlike structure, with doors to individual booths spaced evenly all around. Allen smiles at the man as if the two were in on a joke, as if his visit were an understandable bit of mischief, the kind of thing he could tell Claire about. Yes, if he feels guilty enough he’ll tell Claire he went inside. Allen fishes out a quarter and places it on top of the podium.

• From Collected Essays (1998)

  Ott ley's concluding sentence. This is perfectly true, and yet the reader feels, by the time he has reached it, that all Mr. Ottley means to say is that America has learned that, given education (and the possibility of Cadillacs), American whites and Ne groes can be polite to one another. Surely, out of the fantastic racial history acted out on our continent we must make some thing more meaningful than this. What we can make of our unique experience depends on our willingness to accept the bitterness in which this experience was gained-the price we paid, both black and white, and the effect it has had on us. We look upon this experience with shame, but it is out of what has been our greatest shame that we may be able to create one day our greatest opportunity. Reporter, November 27, 1951 The Crusade of Indignation NEGROES ON THE MARCH. A Frenchman's Report on the American Negro Struggle. By Daniel Guerin. George L. Weismann. $r. s o. GooDBYE TO UNCLE ToM. By J. C. Furnas. William Sloane Associates. $6. T HE LOVE of money," St. Paul once wrote, with a fairly typical lack of precision, "is the root of all evil." This formulation seems to leave a great many evils out of account, and it docs not even raise the question of just why the human heart, in which this love of money lives, should be so base. Nor docs it raise the question of what money is, what is its power, what it means to people or states. With so many knotty questions thus neatly disposed ot� people who share Paul's attitude about money can also believe-as he, being bigoted in quite another direction, did not-that people will be made better as their economic state improves . It is an extremely attractive theory, and most of us have at one time or another espoused it. Only-in order to bring about this economic utopia, one needs a band of people who do not care about money-or power?-who will carry out the necessary operation of taking the money fr om those who now have an abundance of it and distributing it among those who have too little. In this operation-the love of money persisting so tena ciously-blood is likely to be shed. And the shedding of blood will probably prove to be the operation's most real achieve ment. When things go back to what may be called normal, it will be seen that the people who were to be made better still persist in loving money and in trying-no matter what it may do to themselves, their neighbors, or their children-to make it. People who approach the Negro problem fr om this doctri naire point of view arc always embarrassed by at least two tacts. One is that Negroes love money quite as much as whites do, and rather more than they love one another.

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

  These bizarre alliances crop up like mushrooms over the postseparation landscape. They are powerful because they assuage the loneliness and hurt felt by one child and one parent. By becoming each other’s trusted companions-in-arms, they support one other. To their credit, children tended to make such alliances with the parent who seemed to be suffering most and needed help. Those children who participated were likely to be more insecure than the siblings who refused to get involved. Often the best candidate was a child like Larry who prior to the divorce was a loner with few friends and outside interests. Such youngsters find the parent’s attention dazzling. In following these alliances over the years, I find that the vast majority are short-lived and can even boomerang. Children are capricious allies. They soon become bored or ashamed of their mischief. Not one alliance lasted through adolescence and most crumbled within a year or two. Larry’s alliance with his father lasted somewhat longer because his mother was easily cowed by his father and it took her several years to find the strength to control her son. Until she called the police, she had not been able to punish or restrain his bad behavior. In any case, most children find their way back to age-appropriate activities as they enter adolescence, and this, as the co-optive parent finds, turns the tables. With time they are likely to turn against the parent who encouraged them to misbehave. As one sixteen-year-old girl, who had attacked her father five years earlier for all kinds of sinful behavior, told me, “I don’t want to make my mom sound rotten but she was very persuasive. We were terrible to my dad. I’m still surprised that he was willing to forgive us after all that we said and did to him. I really appreciate all that he did for us.” There is great advantage in allowing natural maturation to take its course and to avoid overzealous intervention to break these alliances, which are usually strengthened by efforts to separate the allies. In this, the alliance may be akin to a moderate case of flu that mobilizes the immune system and generates antibodies. It is not a fulminant cancer requiring radical surgery or limb amputation, especially by poorly trained surgeons.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  We too are often haunted by a sense of worthlessness, of not really deserving the good things in life. We all have moments of great doubt about ourselves. These emotions can lead to obsessive thoughts that dominate our minds. They make us curtail what we experience as a way to manage our anxiety and disappointments. They make us turn to alcohol or any kind of habit to numb the pain. Without realizing it, we assume a negative and fearful attitude toward life. This becomes our self-imposed prison. But this is not how it has to be. The freedom that Chekhov experienced came from a choice, a different way of looking at the world, a change in attitude. We can all follow such a path. This freedom essentially comes from adopting a generous spirit— toward others and toward ourselves. By accepting people, by understanding and if possible even loving them for their human nature, we can liberate our minds from obsessive and petty emotions. We can stop reacting to everything people do and say. We can have some distance and stop ourselves from taking everything personally. Mental space is freed up for higher pursuits. When we feel generous toward others, they feel drawn to us and want to match our spirit. When we feel generous toward ourselves, we no longer feel the need to bow and scrape and play the game of false humility while secretly resenting our lack of success. Through our work and through getting what we need on our own, without depending on others, we can stand tall and realize our potential as humans. We can stop reproducing the negative emotions around us. Once we feel the exhilarating power from this new attitude, we will want to take it as far as possible. Years later, in a letter to a friend, Chekhov tried to summarize his experience in Taganrog, referring to himself in the third person: “Write about how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop and how one fine morning he awakes to find that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer the blood of a slave but that of a real human being.” The greatest discovery of my generation is the fact that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. —William James Keys to Human Nature We humans like to imagine that we have an objective knowledge of the world. We take it for granted that what we perceive on a daily basis is reality—this reality being more or less the same for everybody. But this is an illusion. No two people see or experience the world in the same way. What we perceive is our personal version of reality, one that is of our own creation. To realize this is a critical step in our understanding of human nature. Imagine the following scenario: A young American must spend a year studying in Paris.

• From Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir (2004)

  The new bookstore in town had an entire section devoted to Anton LaVey and Alistair Crowley—real live warlocks, with shaved heads and scary beards. I’d sit on the floor reading them for hours. One afternoon I looked up and realized I was alone, that the cashier had locked up, gone to lunch, forgotten me. The door opened from the inside, I looked up and down the street, looked back at the register, gleaming and stuffed with cash, decided it was a sacred place, that I wouldn’t take anything, because I wanted to be able to return, and after the supermarket I knew how hard it was to go back once you crossed a line. Within a few months I moved on to mysteries. I preferred Sherlock Holmes to Agatha Christie, because in his world even the tiniest bit of dust was a clue. I convinced a friend that the best way to spend our summer afternoons was to write our own. We collaborated on a story about a murder set in Scotland and Egypt, the two most exotic locales we could imagine. In a couple years I moved on to Vonnegut, and I convinced another friend, Warren, to collaborate on a science fiction novel, to which we added pages daily. By the time I was sixteen and my father wrote me for the first time and I learned that he called himself a writer, I was already on my way, though perhaps part of me latched on to the chance to outdo him. The summer I bought Jekyll and Hyde a distant cousin I’d never seen before or since appeared at my grandmother’s with some other vague relatives one Sunday. Corey was a little older and had no fingers on his right hand, just little knobs where they should be. Not even a thumb. I knew not to stare, offered to take this cousin for a walk. I was a good kid. We circled the house, I glanced at his hand when he wasn’t looking, thought how hard it must be—how did he work a button, hold a spoon? Why didn’t he wear a glove? I didn’t mind walking with him, we wouldn’t run into anyone I knew, not on my grandmother’s lawn. Already I knew where to position myself in relation to those less fortunate—not to stare, not to treat them any differently, not to even mention what’s right there in front of us. I’m compassionate, kind, considerate, brave, somewhat clean—a walking, talking Boy Scout oath, whatever, fine by me, just as long as I’m not confused with the freak. Each year they lined us up in the elementary school cafeteria, to be measured and weighed, and though I’m chronically skinny at least I’m always average height, thank God for that. Between my mother’s rotating cast of boyfriends, and being nominally Protestant in an Irish Catholic stronghold, and the food stamps, and the frayed clothes, I’m already teetering painfully close to not fitting in, anywhere.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  It was an “I’m sorry” that convinced me to take that fateful car ride with Mom more than a decade earlier. And I began to understand why I used words as weapons: That’s what everyone around me did; I did it to survive. Disagreements were war, and you played to win the game. I didn’t unlearn these lessons overnight. I continue to struggle with conflict, to fight the statistical odds that sometimes seem to bear down on me. Sometimes it’s easier knowing that the statistics suggest I should be in jail or fathering my fourth illegitimate child. And sometimes it’s harder—conflict and family breakdown seem like the destiny I can’t possibly escape. In my worst moments, I convince myself that there is no exit, and no matter how much I fight old demons, they are as much an inheritance as my blue eyes and brown hair. The sad fact is that I couldn’t do it without Usha. Even at my best, I’m a delayed explosion—I can be defused, but only with skill and precision. It’s not just that I’ve learned to control myself but that Usha has learned how to manage me. Put two of me in the same home and you have a positively radioactive situation. It’s no surprise that every single person in my family who has built a successful home—Aunt Wee, Lindsay, my cousin Gail—married someone from outside our little culture. This realization shattered the narrative I told about my life. In my own head, I was better than my past. I was strong. I left town as soon as I could, served my country in the Marines, excelled at Ohio State, and made it to the country’s top law school. I had no demons, no character flaws, no problems. But that just wasn’t true. The things I wanted most in the entire world—a happy partner and a happy home—required constant mental focus. My self-image was bitterness masquerading as arrogance. A few weeks into my second year of law school, I hadn’t spoken to Mom in many months, longer than at any point in my life. I realized that of all the emotions I felt toward my mother—love, pity, forgiveness, anger, hatred, and dozens of others—I had never tried sympathy. I had never tried to understand my mom. At my most empathetic, I figured she suffered from some terrible genetic defect, and I hoped I hadn’t inherited it. As I increasingly saw Mom’s behavior in myself, I tried to understand her. Uncle Jimmy told me that, long ago, he’d walked in on a discussion between Mamaw and Papaw. Mom had gotten herself in some trouble and they needed to bail her out. These bailouts were common, and they always came with theoretical strings attached. She had to budget, they’d tell her, and they’d put her on some arbitrary plan they’d designed themselves. The plan was the cost of their help.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I laughed and thought of running out late to Dawn, under the wood's edge; I felt a certain delicacy, as if the tables were turned, and held back from contributing my own oddly similar anecdotes in support of what he said. I thought I'd quite like to see photographs of him at that age. There was something of the same self-conscious bravery in him now. "Well, I won't spin it out, but I crept round, and the trees were all coming into leaf—you couldn't see far through the wood, and I couldn't in fact see anybody at all. I wondered what I would do if I did meet someone, and exactly how it was that whatever they did was done. If ever I go back there—oh, with Lilli and Marcel, on a Sunday morning!—I hear the wind in the trees and that reminds me in an instant of what it was like, alone, entering an empty avenue. The light was beginning to go, and so, I thought, must I; I knew that after dark was more likely to be the time, but I started to think none the less that my inadvertent school informant was wrong about the place. Then I saw a man stride across the glade straight in front of me—a young man, I would think now, probably about twenty-five, but old to a boy of course." I sighed resentfully, and remembered my own provoking faux-pas about Paul's age, out at St Vaast. "He caught sight of me and without slowing up called out a greeting, and went on into the trees. "I wasn't sure quite what had happened. I stood there for some time weighing up things like what time it was against the obvious fact that he appealed to me, even if he wasn't my absolute ideal; which in turn was balanced by the likelihood that he was only out for a walk—a workman from town perhaps. But in that case there could certainly be no harm in following him. "So I did take the path under the trees, and there, just a few paces on, the man had stopped—he was half-hidden by a great beech-trunk he was leaning behind. And so—one thing happened; and then another thing . . ." I felt slightly cheated by this brisk curtailment, as though the dusk and the foliage hid these happenings from me—but perhaps glad, too, that Paul hadn't forced himself to say. I merely hummed approval. "Well, they were the first shocks of sexual reality for me—a man's large hands, a man's rough chin and cheeks, as well as all the rest. I was not a little confused, my dear Edward, and terribly aware of doing wrong. But I found I was excited by the risk.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I pushed myself free of him and sat up. "For god's sake don't go on about that," I said. "That's all over long ago. I can't think what I ever saw in the little shit." I walked out into the main room, improvising as I went; I didn't want to watch his reactions. "He's so . . . so arrogant, and lazy, he's impossible to teach. He's got a girlfriend. I mean . . . He's not attractive, his mouth is horrible, as everyone says, it's virtually deformed ... ." My flesh was prickling and I had tears in my eyes from the confusion of play-acting and heresy. I kept myself hunched away when Cherif padded after me and hugged me from behind in his turn. When I swung into Long Street I nearly tripped on a busy little terrier that yapped in alarm and scampered aside. I looked up and there was the bearded figure of Old Gus. He came on with his glaring swagger, his stick slicing as if at grass-stalks. I stepped aside myself, and as I was just by him he halted and said amiably, "Could you spare me a few francs?" I pretended for a moment not to have heard, but then in an old muddle of principle and superstition dug my hand into my pocket and brought out all my change, quite a bit, a couple of quid, started to pick among it and then just gave it all to him. I felt an immediate certainty of worth, of providence's palm being greased and of a prompt reward, an hour of new sweetness with Luc. Old Gus pocketed the money, and stared at me with his withering eye. "Bastard!" he barked, with hatred and ferocity, smacked his stick against the pavement, turned on his heel and stamped off. I stood there grinning out of sheer alarm and an odd sense of shame, and then went slowly on towards the house. I peered about defiantly, but I felt my surroundings had instinctively sided with Old Gus. The austere facades were clouded for me by this brief injustice; their vigilant high windows looked on an offender, someone who brought no credit to them. I answered them back, but for a moment I hated the street and the long perspective of failure to which it had condemned me. I stopped to collect myself and spurred myself on with the beautiful new idea of an outing.

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

  Paula looked down, then squared her jaw and looked directly at me. “Here’s the whole story. I’m not proud of it but it’s really what happened. I went right back to drinking after Racer was born. Of course, Brad had never stopped. There were times, more than once, when I just lost track of Racer when we were partying. Then I’d remember through the haze that I had a baby and I’d sober up fast and try to figure out where Racer was and what he needed. But it wasn’t pretty. I was getting more and more upset at myself and Brad. And we were drinking more. Our fights escalated to really nasty. One day when Racer was two Brad was babysitting while I was at work. Both of us had partied all night. Brad fell asleep, and Racer wandered outside. He tootled down the street right into a busy intersection. The police found him and somebody told them who Racer was. This cop came to the store where I was working, carrying Racer. I’ll never forget Racer’s face. He looked so lost and so scared. ‘Lady, is this your little boy? You’re lucky he’s still alive.’ That cop looked at me like I was dirt. I freaked out.” As she told me the episode Paula twisted her hands together and her voice thickened. “My God, Paula, what a nightmare.” She nodded, hardly able to speak. “That did it. That night I told Brad that we both had to stop drinking because our son’s life was in danger. He tried to laugh off what had happened, like it was no big deal. I couldn’t stand that. So I grabbed the baby, took my purse and his diaper bag, got in the car, and left. I called my mom from a gas station and told her that Racer and I were coming. Thank God she didn’t ask for details. We arrived at midnight. She took one look and put us both to bed. We’ve been here ever since.” Paula’s face was strained and withdrawn. “So there I was—no money, no training, no job, no home, no nothing, with a child to support and raise. I was just where my mom was when I was four. All that I had sworn to avoid had happened in spades.” Social critics have been quick to say that children of divorce have more divorces because they are less committed to marriage. I see no evidence of that. They fervently want to avoid divorce in their own adult lives, dreading it even more if they have children. Yet despite a conscious resolution to not follow in their parents’ footsteps, many do end their marriages amid great suffering. It’s the arrival of the nightmare they feared. Like their peers from intact families whose marriages don’t work out, they are often devastated. Recovery is slow because the divorce confirms what they’ve always believed—failure is inevitable and cannot be prevented.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Will it be all right? It's so many years since I saw a film . . . I have an idea perhaps I should be protecting him from something." "I'm sure it will be fine," I said. It wasn't my kind of thing, but I had a proper reverence for the ripped pecs of Kurt Burns, the subhuman star of the whole successful series, who had reared up all over town in the past few days with oiled bust and machine-gun aflame. "How's the little fellow getting on?" Maurice asked robustly, across the table. "He's fine. He's a lot happier," his father said, which gave me a keener sense of just how unhappy he must have been before. "He's still a bit wheezy. But if you think what he was like a year ago . . . " "Is he showing any inclination to read books?" said Maurice, not quite gently enough. "The poor child has been so slowed down with drugs, Maurice," said Mrs Vivier, "it is hardly surprising if his work has suffered." It was an unexpected flash, which Echevin appreciated even as he smothered it. "You'd have to ask our friend Edward about that," he said. Maurice turned to me after a second's bafflement, and I hastily confessed that I was indeed Marcel's English tutor, and was doing what I could to . . . "He's getting on fine," I said loyally. "What he needs most is confidence." (And there was the simple substance of a million end-of-term reports.) Maurice ducked to his soup, and took several spoonfuls rapidly and without appreciation, as if it were the school food he must be used to. "So when are you going to let us have him back?" That was when the coin dropped for me; within a few moments the two of us had been revealed to each other as colleagues of a kind, though he stood at the centre of the great self-exalting machine, whilst I was picking up the damaged and difficult fragments that its noisy shuttling shook loose. Perhaps at dusk, with closer attention, I would be able to see him from my window, pacing the illuminated classroom and holding forth on Yeats. "I'm so sorry," I said. "I hadn't realised that you were at St Narcissus." I hadn't realised, in fact, that the staff of a Jesuit school need not all be cold-eyed clergymen. "We'll see how he's doing at the end of the spring," said Echevin. I was so keen to ask about Luc that I fell completely silent. I felt that if I even mentioned his name I would turn crimson, or my fly would burst open, ricocheting buttons off the wine-glasses, or the Athena on my tie would turn and give a wink.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  The kids in Middletown absorb that conflict and struggle with it. In this, as in so much else, the Scots-Irish migrants resemble their kin back in the holler. In an HBO documentary about eastern Kentucky hill people, the patriarch of a large Appalachian family introduces himself by drawing strict lines between work acceptable for men and work acceptable for women. While it’s obvious what he considers “women’s work,” it’s not at all clear what work, if any, is acceptable for him. Apparently not paid employment, since the man has never worked a paying job in his life. Ultimately, the verdict of his own son is damning: “Daddy says he’s worked in his life. Only thing Daddy’s worked is his goddamned ass. Why not be straight about it, Pa? Daddy was an alcoholic. He would stay drunk, he didn’t bring food home. Mommy supported her young’uns. If it hadn’t been for Mommy, we’d have been dead.”15 Alongside these conflicting norms about the value of blue-collar work existed a massive ignorance about how to achieve white-collar work. We didn’t know that all across the country—and even in our hometown—other kids had already started a competition to get ahead in life. During first grade, we played a game every morning: The teacher would announce the number of the day, and we’d go person by person and announce a math equation that produced the number. So if the number of the day was four, you could announce “two plus two” and claim a prize, usually a small piece of candy. One day the number was thirty. The students in front of me went through the easy answers—“twenty-nine plus one,” “twenty-eight plus two,” “fifteen plus fifteen.” I was better than that. I was going to blow the teacher away. When my turn came, I proudly announced, “Fifty minus twenty.” The teacher gushed, and I received two pieces of candy for my foray into subtraction, a skill we’d learned only days before. A few moments later, while I beamed over my brilliance, another student announced, “Ten times three.” I had no idea what that even meant. Times ? Who was this guy? The teacher was even more impressed, and my competitor triumphantly collected not two but three pieces of candy. The teacher spoke briefly of multiplication and asked if anyone else knew such a thing existed. None of us raised a hand. For my part, I was crushed. I returned home and burst into tears. I was certain my ignorance was rooted in some failure of character. I just felt stupid . It wasn’t my fault that until that day I had never heard the word “multiplication.” It wasn’t something I’d learned in school, and my family didn’t sit around and work on math problems. But to a little kid who wanted to do well in school, it was a crushing defeat. In my immature brain, I didn’t understand the difference between intelligence and knowledge. So I assumed I was an idiot.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  At her cocktail parties and fancy dinners, she and her nephew probably even laughed about the unsophisticates of Ohio and how they clung to their guns and religion. I would not join forces with her. My answer was a pathetic attempt at cultural defiance: “No, I don’t go to Yale. But my girlfriend does.” And then I got in my car and drove away. This wasn’t one of my prouder moments, but it highlights the inner conflict inspired by rapid upward mobility: I had lied to a stranger to avoid feeling like a traitor. There are lessons to draw here, among them what I’ve noted already: that one consequence of isolation is seeing standard metrics of success as not just unattainable but as the property of people not like us. Mamaw always fought that attitude in me, and for the most part, she was successful. Another lesson is that it’s not just our own communities that reinforce the outsider attitude, it’s the places and people that upward mobility connects us with—like my professor who suggested that Yale Law School shouldn’t accept applicants from non-prestigious state schools. There’s no way to quantify how these attitudes affect the working class. We do know that working-class Americans aren’t just less likely to climb the economic ladder, they’re also more likely to fall off even after they’ve reached the top. I imagine that the discomfort they feel at leaving behind much of their identity plays at least a small role in this problem. One way our upper class can promote upward mobility, then, is not only by pushing wise public policies but by opening their hearts and minds to the newcomers who don’t quite belong. Though we sing the praises of social mobility, it has its downsides. The term necessarily implies a sort of movement—to a theoretically better life, yes, but also away from something. And you can’t always control the parts of your old life from which you drift. In the past few years, I’ve vacationed in Panama and England. I’ve bought my groceries at Whole Foods. I’ve watched orchestral concerts. I’ve tried to break my addiction to “refined processed sugars” (a term that includes at least one too many words). I’ve worried about racial prejudice in my own family and friends. None of these things is bad on its own. In fact, most of them are good—visiting England was a childhood dream; eating less sugar improves health. At the same time, they’ve shown me that social mobility isn’t just about money and economics, it’s about a lifestyle change. The wealthy and the powerful aren’t just wealthy and powerful; they follow a different set of norms and mores. When you go from working-class to professional-class, almost everything about your old life becomes unfashionable at best or unhealthy at worst. At no time was this more obvious than the first (and last) time I took a Yale friend to Cracker Barrel.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  We went through the hall and into the studio, Bobby for a moment halting and blocking my view before letting me too see what was going on. Staines, stooping over the tripod, his right eye jammed into the viewfinder, was aware of us, and flapped his left arm behind him to keep us back and have us observe professional etiquette while he was concentrating. ‘Try not to smile,’ he said. Leaning against a tall white plinth, shirtless, his skin lubricated, almost glittering in the studio lights, the top button of my trousers undone, Phil grew suddenly guilty and selfconscious. That deep and telling blush of his that I loved pumped up into his cheeks and forehead and into his short back and sides, and soaked downwards, over the strong shaft of his neck, fading into his glossy chest. On the way home we stopped off at the Volunteer, and had a beer outside on the pavement, caught up in that sad, erotic mood of an early evening in summer—working people going home, the first queens coming into the pub, dusty tiredness mixing with anticipation. I gazed up and down the street, said little, and from time to time looked ironically at Phil, I think shocked to find how easily he could be manipulated, slightly sick with a feeling that perhaps I wouldn’t be able to keep him. That afternoon I had turned him into pornography, and I was shaken to find Staines following my own instinct so literally, so instantaneously; proud, too, but with the unease of a sexual braggart. Phil himself had an air of compromised but defiant success about him.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  There was something bizarre about Yale’s social rituals: the cocktail receptions and banquets that served as both professional networking and personal matchmaking events. I lived among newly christened members of what folks back home pejoratively call the “elites,” and by every outward appearance, I was one of them: I am a tall, white, straight male. I have never felt out of place in my entire life. But I did at Yale. Part of it has to do with social class. A student survey found that over 95 percent of Yale Law’s students qualified as upper-middle-class or higher, and most of them qualified as outright wealthy. Obviously, I was neither upper-middle-class nor wealthy. Very few people at Yale Law School are like me. They may look like me, but for all of the Ivy League’s obsession with diversity, virtually everyone—black, white, Jewish, Muslim, whatever—comes from intact families who never worry about money. Early during my first year, after a late night of drinking with my classmates, we all decided to stop at a New Haven chicken joint. Our large group left an awful mess: dirty plates, chicken bones, ranch dressing and soda splattered on the tables, and so on. I couldn’t imagine leaving it all for some poor guy to clean up, so I stayed behind. Of a dozen classmates, only one person helped me: my buddy Jamil, who also came from a poorer background. Afterward, I told Jamil that we were probably the only people in the school who’d ever had to clean up someone else’s mess. He just nodded his head in silent agreement. Even though my experiences were unique, I never felt like a foreigner in Middletown. Most people’s parents had never gone to college. My closest friends had all seen some kind of domestic strife in their life—divorces, remarriages, legal separations, or fathers who spent some time in jail. A few parents worked as lawyers, engineers, or teachers. They were “rich people” to Mamaw, but they were never so rich that I thought of them as fundamentally different. They still lived within walking distance of my house, sent their kids to the same high school, and generally did the same things the rest of us did. It never occurred to me that I didn’t belong, even in the homes of some of my relatively wealthy friends. At Yale Law School, I felt like my spaceship had crashed in Oz. People would say with a straight face that a surgeon mother and engineer father were middle-class. In Middletown, $160,000 is an unfathomable salary; at Yale Law School, students expect to earn that amount in the first year after law school. Many of them are already worried that it won’t be enough. It wasn’t just about the money or my relative lack of it. It was about people’s perceptions. Yale made me feel, for the first time in my life, that others viewed my life with intrigue.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "You may think it strange, but I have never much cared for sex, despite what I have been saying; nor would it have been easy for me. I live with my mother, who is now ninety-four but has only recently become fully blind. I have always relied on the clean and easy practice of what used to be called self-abuse. I'm proud to say that I have climaxed at least once every day since 1937. "Hot hunks 12 certainly lived up to its name! Please let me know if you have any further films with the admirable young Casey in . . ." The writing was clear, slanting, impatient. His was in every sense a busy professional hand. I could hardly think of a less appropriate person than Matt to confide in, though I understood the scientific attitude with which he would read a letter like this. His was a service industry, which entailed a certain respect for the fantasies it serviced. I had seen him at his silver-screened lap-top intently answering such queries; and listened to the muted rattling runs that followed the pause as he thought through some cruder provocation and gave a little cackle or a throaty "Oh yeah . . . " The trick, it seemed, was to be both direct and archly metaphorical, the result having an enthusiastic, illiterate tone, in its obscene way not unlike the work of my aunt Tina. Love was blindly introduced and as a prefix was fully interchangeable with fuck: love-poles were destined as a rule for love-holes, and at the end it was geysers of white-hot love-juice that (paradoxically) cooled the lovers down. I answered one or two of these enquiries myself and discovered a natural aptitude for it: "Pretty-faced Lance soon gags on Chad's massive love-meat, and Chad turns all his attentions to the youngster's pleading love-hole." Later on I tried variations drawn from Gerard Manley Hopkins: "Rick worships Cody's massive mansex . . . Doug and Darren dauntlessly double-fuck the freshman's dewy down-side . . ." I felt a little uneasy, though, in the half-world of Matt's room, treading on so many things. The long knots of the bedding looked a bit too squalid without him, lean and white, sprawled amongst them. I noticed more than before the musty smell of the bathroom where the soiled underwear that he stole and sold collected behind the door and stopped it from opening. There was something eerie, as the deaf woman banged and sang through the wall, about finding the right fuck-film and copying it on to a new tape on two parallel VCRs. I perched among the junk, wrapping stained jockey-shorts in tissue paper and adding an authenticating ticket whilst the machines worked almost silently, with steady red lights, and the ritual imagery of love-meat passed along the cables. The phone rang again. "Hello." "Hello! Matt's not there, right?" "Did you ring before? Is that Dirk?" "Oh yes it is."

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  The kids in Middletown absorb that conflict and struggle with it. In this, as in so much else, the Scots-Irish migrants resemble their kin back in the holler. In an HBO documentary about eastern Kentucky hill people, the patriarch of a large Appalachian family introduces himself by drawing strict lines between work acceptable for men and work acceptable for women. While it’s obvious what he considers “women’s work,” it’s not at all clear what work, if any, is acceptable for him. Apparently not paid employment, since the man has never worked a paying job in his life. Ultimately, the verdict of his own son is damning: “Daddy says he’s worked in his life. Only thing Daddy’s worked is his goddamned ass. Why not be straight about it, Pa? Daddy was an alcoholic. He would stay drunk, he didn’t bring food home. Mommy supported her young’uns. If it hadn’t been for Mommy, we’d have been dead.”15 Alongside these conflicting norms about the value of blue-collar work existed a massive ignorance about how to achieve white-collar work. We didn’t know that all across the country—and even in our hometown—other kids had already started a competition to get ahead in life. During first grade, we played a game every morning: The teacher would announce the number of the day, and we’d go person by person and announce a math equation that produced the number. So if the number of the day was four, you could announce “two plus two” and claim a prize, usually a small piece of candy. One day the number was thirty. The students in front of me went through the easy answers—“twenty-nine plus one,” “twenty-eight plus two,” “fifteen plus fifteen.” I was better than that. I was going to blow the teacher away. When my turn came, I proudly announced, “Fifty minus twenty.” The teacher gushed, and I received two pieces of candy for my foray into subtraction, a skill we’d learned only days before. A few moments later, while I beamed over my brilliance, another student announced, “Ten times three.” I had no idea what that even meant. Times ? Who was this guy? The teacher was even more impressed, and my competitor triumphantly collected not two but three pieces of candy. The teacher spoke briefly of multiplication and asked if anyone else knew such a thing existed. None of us raised a hand. For my part, I was crushed. I returned home and burst into tears. I was certain my ignorance was rooted in some failure of character. I just felt stupid . It wasn’t my fault that until that day I had never heard the word “multiplication.” It wasn’t something I’d learned in school, and my family didn’t sit around and work on math problems. But to a little kid who wanted to do well in school, it was a crushing defeat. In my immature brain, I didn’t understand the difference between intelligence and knowledge. So I assumed I was an idiot.