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

  “I understand, Larry, why you’ve given up on your dad and what a terrible blow it was for you to be turned down when you had pinned your hopes on living with him. But where did your plans come from? You’re going to school to study for a profession and to have a better life for yourself. Where did that idea come from?” “It came from me. I decided that I had to be my own father and take control of my own life, that I couldn’t rely on anyone, that I was the only one who was responsible for me.” “What does that mean, ‘be your own father’?” “Just that! I realized that I had no father. It was up to me to do it for me. Or else sink.” He grimaced. “I decided not to sink!” Larry’s statement was stark, clear, at once chilling and inspiring. “What about your mom?” “I feel sorry for my mom. I used to watch her cry and I would yell at her to stop crying and she couldn’t stop and I knew it but I kept up. When I gave up on my dad I began to see my mom in a different way. You could say that I began to see her as she really was.” “How is that?” “What I finally understand is how my dad rewrote history. I knew it before but I didn’t pay attention. My mom had a good dream when she married my dad. She wanted a husband and a happy family. She wanted her children to have a stable home. When I realized that my dad had bullshitted me, I took another look at what a sad life she had and I realized that he had almost destroyed her—and that I had helped him.” Larry’s face was very sober. “I’m thoroughly ashamed of myself for how mean I was to her for years. I’ve apologized and tried to make up by being helpful when I can. She’s a decent, honest, kind woman. But she’s not a strong person, and it’s taken her a long time to get the strength to get rid of my dad. She was beaten down.” “And now?” “She’s better, but she’s had a tough time. I see her more these days.” “Do you find a lot in common?” I was somewhat skeptical, knowing his mother’s tendency to hover. “My mom still doesn’t get it that I’m an adult. She’s a worrier and her life has not made things any easier. But she does her best. She tries to help me with my tuition, but she earns very little money teaching Spanish. Also my little sister is running up a lot of medical bills. But she got me my first computer. She also sends me small sums of money from time to time. It means a lot to her and it means a lot to me. Because every time she gives me something, she goes without something else that she needs.”

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  My sister and I still call the old mail carrier “the chicken man,” and years later even a mention of how the city government ganged up on the chicken man could inspire Mamaw’s trademark vitriol: “Fucking zoning laws. They can kiss my ruby-red asshole.” The move to Middletown created other problems, as well. In the mountain homes of Jackson, privacy was more theory than practice. Family, friends, and neighbors would barge into your home without much warning. Mothers would tell their daughters how to raise their children. Fathers would tell sons how to do their jobs. Brothers would tell brothers-in-law how to treat their wives. Family life was something people learned on the fly with a lot of help from their neighbors. In Middletown, a man’s home was his castle. However, that castle was empty for Mamaw and Papaw. They brought an ancient family structure from the hills and tried to make it work in a world of privacy and nuclear families. They were newlyweds, but they didn’t have anyone to teach them about marriage. They were parents, but there were no grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins to help them with the workload. The only nearby close relative was Papaw’s mother, Goldie. She was mostly a stranger to her own son, and Mamaw couldn’t have held her in lower esteem for abandoning him. After a few years, Mamaw and Papaw began to adapt. Mamaw became close friends with the “neighbor lady” (that was her word for the neighbors she liked) who lived in a nearby apartment; Papaw worked on cars in his spare time, and his coworkers slowly turned from colleagues to friends. In 1951 they welcomed a baby boy—my uncle Jimmy—and showered him with their new ma terial comforts. Jimmy, Mamaw would tell me later, could sit up at two weeks, walk at four months, speak in complete sentences just after his first birthday, and read classic novels by age three (“A slight exaggeration,” my uncle later admitted). They visited Mamaw’s brothers in Indianapolis and picnicked with their new friends. It was, Uncle Jimmy told me, “a typical middle-class life.” Kind of boring, by some standards, but happy in a way you appreciate only when you understand the consequences of not being boring. Which is not to say that things always proceeded smoothly. Once, they traveled to the mall to buy Christmas presents with the holiday throng and let Jimmy roam so he could locate a toy he coveted. “They were advertising it on television,” he told me recently. “It was a plastic console that looked like the dash of a jet fighter plane. You could shine a light or shoot darts. The whole idea was to pretend that you were a fighter pilot.” Jimmy wandered into a pharmacy that happened to sell the toy, so he picked it up and began to play with it. “The store clerk wasn’t happy.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Now that I’m a lawyer, I marvel that we never considered a medical malpractice suit against the doctor who operated unnecessarily on her back. But Mamaw wouldn’t have allowed it: She didn’t believe in using the legal system until you had to. Sometimes I’d see Mom every few days, and sometimes I’d go a couple of weeks without hearing from her at all. After one breakup, she spent a few months on Mamaw’s couch, and we both enjoyed her company. Mom tried, in her own way: When she was working, she’d always give me money on paydays, almost certainly more than she could afford. For reasons I never quite understood, Mom equated money with affection. Perhaps she felt that I would never appreciate that she loved me unless she offered a wad of spending money. But I never cared about the money. I just wanted her to be healthy. Not even my closest friends knew that I lived in my grandma’s house. I recognized that though many of my peers lacked the traditional American family, mine was more nontraditional than most. And we were poor, a status Mamaw wore like a badge of honor but one I’d hardly come to grips with. I didn’t wear clothes from Abercrombie & Fitch or American Eagle unless I’d received them for Christmas. When Mamaw picked me up from school, I’d ask her not to get out of the car lest my friends see her—wearing her uniform of baggy jeans and a men’s T-shirt—with a giant menthol cigarette hanging from her lip. When people asked, I lied and told them that I lived with my mom, that she and I took care of my ailing grandmother. Even today, I still regret that far too many high school friends and acquaintances never knew Mamaw was the best thing that ever happened to me. My junior year, I tested into the honors Advanced Math class—a hybrid of trigonometry, advanced algebra, and pre-calculus. The class’s instructor, Ron Selby, enjoyed legendary status among the students for his brilliance and high demands. In twenty years, he had never missed a day of school. According to Middletown High School legend, a student called in a bomb threat during one of Selby’s exams, hiding the explosive device in a bag in his locker. With the entire school evacuated outside, Selby marched into the school, retrieved the contents of the kid’s locker, marched outside, and threw those contents into a trash can. “I’ve had that kid in class; he’s not smart enough to make a functioning bomb,” Selby told the police officers gathered at the school. “Now let my students go back to class to finish their exams.” Mamaw loved stories like this, and though she never met Selby, she admired him and encouraged me to follow his lead. Selby encouraged (but didn’t require) his students to obtain advanced graphing calculators—the Texas Instruments model 89 was the latest and greatest.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I developed a passion for this science, which is too close to man ever to be absolute, but which, though subject to fad and to error, is constantly corrected by its contact with the immediate and the nude. Leotychides approached things from the most positive and practical point of view; he had developed an admirable system for reduction of fractures. We used to walk together at evening along the shore; this man of universal interests was curious about the structure of shells and the composition of sea mud. But he lacked facilities for experiment and regretted the Museum at Alexandria, where he had studied in his youth, with its laboratories and dissection rooms, its clash of opinions, and its competition between inventive minds. His was a clear, dry intelligence which taught me to value things above words, to mistrust mere formulas, and to observe rather than to judge. It was this bitter Greek who taught me method. In spite of the legends surrounding me, I have cared little for youth, and for my own youth least of all. This much vaunted portion of existence, considered dispassionately, seems to me often a formless, opaque, and unpolished period, both fragile and unstable. Needless to say I have found a certain number of exquisite exceptions to the rule, and two or three were admirable; of these, Mark, you yourself will have been the most pure. As for me, I was at twenty much what I am today, but not consistently so. Not everything in me was bad, but it could have been: the good or the better parts also lent strength to the worse. I look back with shame on my ignorance of the world, which I thought that I knew, and on my impatience, and on a kind of frivolous ambition and gross avidity which I then had. Must the truth be told? In the midst of the studious life of Athens, where all pleasures, too, received their due, I regretted not Rome itself but the atmosphere of that place where the business of the world is continually done and undone, where are heard the pulleys and gears in the machine of governmental power. The reign of Domitian was drawing to a close; my cousin Trajan, who had covered himself with glory on the Rhine frontier, ranked now as a popular hero; the Spanish tribe was gaining hold in Rome. Compared with that world of immediate action, the beloved Greek province seemed to me to be slumbering in a haze of ideas seldom stirred by change, and the political passivity of the Hellenes appeared a somewhat servile form of renunciation.

• 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 Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  But they weren’t prepared to be friendly, to be such suckers as unreservedly to take my part. What, after all, had I been doing at Sandbourne? And as I could not mention Arthur I had been a little vague and capricious, and taken refuge in my bandages. An amazing number of other things were going on at the station too, and I was encouraged not to consider myself special. It took a senior officer, seeing that my father was an ‘Hon’, to make the connection with my grandfather, to enquire if ‘by any chance’ I was related to the former Director of Public Prosecutions whom he remembered, and thence to soften into cautious sycophancy. What was more horrifying, though, was how, in the company of the police, my vulnerable, brutalised state was not soothed but exacerbated; the feeling that anyone might turn on me came over me again as I worried about James. To show my confidence and calm him I had suppressed my vulgar need to know what had happened. Now I began to want calming myself. James’s diaries were always a good read and at Oxford I had made no pretence of not knowing what was in them. Nowadays he kept a more spasmodic record, was often weeks behind, and I found less opportunity to keep up. This was a shame, since they had for me the famous fascination of containing a good deal about myself. They pandered to my heart-throb image—‘Will adorable’, ‘W. looked fabulous’—though there was always a certain risk, as in hesitating at the door of a room where one is being discussed. There were pages—‘W. insufferable’, ‘What a jerk! No regard for my feelings’—where I was obliged to see myself from another point of view. It was like suddenly finding out that someone I knew quite well had been leading a double life: the delectable blond super-stud I loved so much was really a selfish little rich boy, vain, spoilt and even, on one stinging occasion, ‘grotesque’. None of this was quite innocent. Like all diaries it envisaged a reader. The odious Robert Smith-Carson had read long sections of it about himself when James was so infatuated with him, and was both pleased and alarmed by the Wagnerian pitch of the entries (whole paragraphs delirious with exclamations: ‘Weh! Weh! Schmach! Sehnsucht!’ and so on). Other passages had an obscure biblical fervour: one which began ‘His thighs are like bronze doors’ I had subsequently annotated with exclamation marks of my own. My readings were also somehow allowed for, and the baroque candour of the diaries enabled James (who could never bear an argument or cross words) to tell me what he thought of me, without ever letting on in so many words that he was doing so. Between us we enacted a secret charade, a charade whose very subject was ‘secrecy’.

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  Idolatry and sin are, in the last analysis, a failure of responsibility. They are a way of declining the divine summons to reflect God’s image. They constitute an insult, an affront, to the loving, wise Creator himself. The Great Playwright has composed a drama and written a wonderful part especially for us to play; and, like a spoiled and silly child, we have torn up the script and smirked our way through a self-serving but ultimately self-destructive plot of our own. As we know in other walks of life, when people duck out of their assigned responsibilities, someone else will take them over instead, and no good will come of it. When humans sin, they hand to nondivine forces a power and authority that those forces were never supposed to have. And that is why, if God’s plan is to rescue and restore his whole creation, with humans as the active agents in the middle of it, “sins” have to be dealt with. That is the only way by which the nondivine forces that usurp the human role in the world will lose their power. They will be starved of the oxygen that keeps them alive, that turns them from ordinary parts of God’s creation into distorted and dangerous monsters. You can see this in the obvious examples: money, sex, and power itself. Like fire, these “forces” are good servants but bad masters. Not for nothing were they treated as gods and goddesses in the ancient world—as indeed many people treat them today (though without using that language), sacrificing to them and obeying their every command. These “powers” need to be overcome not so that we can live disembodied lives in which they play no part, but so that we can live fully human lives in which they make their contribution as and when appropriate. They stop being demons when they stop being gods. But behind all specific “powers” or “forces” many Jewish and Christian thinkers have recognized a darker, more nebulous power that drives ordinary people to do horrible things. It is not surprising that many liberal-minded Western thinkers who had stopped believing in the old medieval caricatures of the “devil” found themselves reaching for very similar language by the end of the twentieth century. The horrors of that century, never mind our own so far, are hard to explain simply as the sum total of foolish human behavior. Sometimes the Bible refers to this dark force simply as “sin” (singular) as opposed to the “sins” (plural) that humans commit when they behave in a less than fully human fashion. Sometimes it uses the semipersonal language of “the satan” (a Hebrew term that means “the accuser,” the one who lures people into error and then blames them for it). But the point is this.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  You know that it was because of a physical infirmity [in Greek, weakness of the flesh] that I first announced the gospel to you; though my condition put you to the test, you did not scorn or despise me, but welcomed me as an angel of God, as Christ Jesus. What has become of the goodwill you felt? For I testify that, had it been possible, you would have torn out your eyes and given them to me. (4:13–15) Was Paul’s “physical infirmity” an isolated incident or was it part of the wider “thorn in the flesh” mentioned in 2 Corinthians 12:7? First, “thorn” (Greek skolops) means more than a minor pinprick. It is, as a standard Greek lexicon explains, “‘something pointed’ such as a ‘(pointed) stake,’ then something that causes serious annoyances, thorn, splinter, etc., specifically of an injurious foreign body.” Second, Paul makes a connection between his ecstatic (literally, “standing out of the body”) experiences and that “thorn/stake in the flesh.” He begins by describing “visions and revelations of the Lord” when he was “caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body” and was permitted to hear “things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat” (12:1–3). He continues: Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” (12:7–9) We italicized “weakness” and “flesh” there in 2 Corinthians 12:7–9 to link it with those same words italicized above in Galatians 4:13. We think, therefore, that Paul had some recurrent illness that may have precipitated or accompanied ecstatic experience. But what was that humbling illness? Our answer depends on another, earlier book by William Mitchell Ramsay, his St. Paul the Traveler and the Roman Citizen. He combined Galatians 4:13 with 2 Corinthians 12:7 and proposed that Paul’s recurring illness “was a species of chronic malaria fever,” which tends to recur in very distressing and prostrating paroxysms, whenever one’s energies are taxed for a great effort. Such an attack is for the time absolutely incapacitating: the sufferer can only lie and feel himself a shaking and helpless weakling, when he ought to be at work. He feels a contempt and loathing for self, and believes that others feel equal contempt and loathing.2 He adds, as collaborating evidence for his diagnosis, that Paul’s phrase “a stake in the flesh”—that is his translation of skolops—“is the peculiar headache which accompanies the paroxysms [of chronic malarial fever]: within my experience several persons, innocent of Pauline theorizing, have described it as ‘like a red-hot bar thrust through the forehead.’”3

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  Masturbation is taboo, arguably more taboo than sex itself, and the stigma of self-pleasure reliably interferes with our sexual well-being. While masturbation could not be more natural (as pleasure-drunk babies, we touch ourselves constantly), learning that other people masturbate, and that it’s normal, good, and healthy, is a process that takes far longer than it needs to, wreaking havoc in its wake. Over the course of our sexual and emotional development, we are left to figure out masturbation on our own, with some help from unrealistic porn, but not before internalizing that we are sick freaks for doing it, or that it’s a depressing substitute for REAL sex. Masturbation is a vital pathway to transforming our sexual relationships with others, ourselves, and the universe. Because to understand and transform our sex lives, we must first understand and transform our relationship with self-pleasure—good sex starts with us. Ash, a twenty-eight-year-old queer, trans sex educator, is a vehement masturbation enthusiast. It’s no coincidence, then, that they are one of the few people I spoke with while researching this book who is deeply satisfied with their sex life. The satisfaction extends far beyond the scope of sex; self-connection is transformative. Masturbation gave Ash a blueprint to map sexual encounters into deeply pleasurable ones. “Masturbation was the first sex I ever had, and it’s responsible for probably eighty percent of my lifetime orgasms,” they told me. “Because of touching myself, I know how I like to be touched, and can teach other people. I know what I like to think about when I get myself off, which has informed the fantasies I share and act out with other people. But as I’ve gotten older and the quality and intimacy of my partnered sex has improved, my masturbation has morphed from a necessary sexual outlet to an—even more necessary—outlet for stress relief that has very little to do with my sex life.” When they are feeling sexual, they have sex with their partner. But when they’re feeling “stressed, or dissociated, or disconnected from my body, or grumpy, or when I’m dealing with chronic illness pain or period pain,” they masturbate. “Either way,” Ash said, “it’s an invaluable self-connection that I don’t plan to ever give up.” For many of us whose partnered sex remains largely unsatisfying, focusing our attention on solo sex knocks two big action items off our list: we can both learn to enjoy being in our bodies more (making it easier to opt out of bad partnered sex) and improve the partnered sex we are having, as we’ll know what to ask for.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  But that is a partial truth. The full truth is that my grandparents struggled in their new life, and they continued to do so for decades. For starters, a remarkable stigma attached to people who left the hills of Kentucky for a better life. Hillbillies have a phrase—“too big for your britches”—to describe those who think they’re better than the stock they came from. For a long time after my grandparents came to Ohio, they heard exactly that phrase from people back home. The sense that they had abandoned their families was acute, and it was expected that, whatever their responsibilities, they would return home regularly. This pattern was common among Appalachian migrants: More than nine in ten would make visits “home” during the course of their lives, and more than one in ten visited about once a month.9 My grandparents returned to Jackson often, sometimes on consecutive weekends, despite the fact that the trip in the 1950s required about twenty hours of driving. Economic mobility came with a lot of pressures, and it came with a lot of new responsibilities. That stigma came from both directions: Many of their new neighbors viewed them suspiciously. To the established middle class of white Ohioans, these hillbillies simply didn’t belong. They had too many children, and they welcomed their extended families into their homes for too long. On several occasions, Mamaw’s brothers and sisters lived with her and Papaw for months as they tried to find good work outside of the hills. In other words, many parts of their culture and customs met with roaring disapproval from native Middletonians. As one book, Appalachian Odyssey , notes about the influx of hill people to Detroit: “It was not simply that the Appalachian migrants, as rural strangers ‘out of place’ in the city, were upsetting to Midwestern, urban whites. Rather, these migrants disrupted a broad set of assumptions held by northern whites about how white people appeared, spoke, and behaved . . . the disturbing aspect of hillbillies was their racialness. Ostensibly, they were of the same racial order (whites) as those who dominated economic, political, and social power in local and national arenas. But hillbillies shared many regional characteristics with the southern blacks arriving in Detroit.”10 One of Papaw’s good friends—a hillbilly from Kentucky whom he met in Ohio—became the mail carrier in their neighborhood. Not long after he moved, the mail carrier got embroiled in a battle with the Middletown government over the flock of chickens that he kept in his yard. He treated them just as Mamaw had treated her chickens back in the holler: Every morning he collected all the eggs, and when his chicken population grew too large, he’d take a few of the old ones, wring their necks, and carve them up for meat right in his backyard. You can just imagine a well-bred housewife watching out the window in horror as her Kentucky-born neighbor slaughtered squawking chickens just a few feet away.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Our kids go to foster care but never stay for long. We apologize to our kids. The kids believe we’re really sorry, and we are. But then we act just as mean a few days later. We don’t study as children, and we don’t make our kids study when we’re parents. Our kids perform poorly in school. We might get angry with them, but we never give them the tools—like peace and quiet at home—to succeed. Even the best and brightest will likely go to college close to home, if they survive the war zone in their own home. “I don’t care if you got into Notre Dame,” we say. “You can get a fine, cheap education at the community college.” The irony is that for poor people like us, an education at Notre Dame is both cheaper and finer. We choose not to work when we should be looking for jobs. Sometimes we’ll get a job, but it won’t last. We’ll get fired for tardiness, or for stealing merchandise and selling it on eBay, or for having a customer complain about the smell of alcohol on our breath, or for taking five thirty-minute restroom breaks per shift. We talk about the value of hard work but tell ourselves that the reason we’re not working is some perceived unfairness: Obama shut down the coal mines, or all the jobs went to the Chinese. These are the lies we tell ourselves to solve the cognitive dissonance—the broken connection between the world we see and the values we preach. We talk to our children about responsibility, but we never walk the walk. It’s like this: For years I’d dreamed of owning a German shepherd puppy. Somehow Mom found me one. But he was our fourth dog, and I had no clue how to train him. Within a few years, all of them had vanished—given to the police department or to a family friend. After saying goodbye to the fourth dog, our hearts harden. We learn not to grow too attached. Our eating and exercise habits seem designed to send us to an early grave, and it’s working: In certain parts of Kentucky, local life expectancy is sixty-seven, a full decade and a half below what it is in nearby Virginia. A recent study found that unique among all ethnic groups in the United States, the life expectancy of working-class white folks is going down. We eat Pillsbury cinnamon rolls for breakfast, Taco Bell for lunch, and McDonald’s for dinner. We rarely cook, even though it’s cheaper and better for the body and soul. Exercise is confined to the games we play as children. We see people jog on the streets only if we leave our homes for the military or for college in some distant place. Not all of the white working class struggles. I knew even as a child that there were two separate sets of mores and social pressures. My grandparents embodied one type: old-fashioned, quietly faithful, self-reliant, hardworking.

• From The Best American Erotica 2001 (2001)

  there and then, like a stack of cards flipping through the wind, a hallucination, she sees the initials of every man who will ever become her lover. There are so many—perhaps dozens! More than she can possibly imagine. She is filled with the knowl edge of what she does not know. Eddie kisses her throat, his lips dry and papery, then jumps up and rummages for his briefs beneath a pile of fallen leaves. He looks down at Jennie and she squints at him, blinded by the sunlight behind his shoulder. From where she lies, he seems like a giant. “I—I didn’t use anything, Eddie,” she falters. He stumbles on one leg, awkward as he pulls on his under pants. “What did you say?” he asks, stopping. “I’m sorry—I didn’t use anything,” she says, this time with greater conviction. “Jesus, Jennie!” He punches the air. “How could you—” “I didn’t know.” “But I thought you were—” Tears stream down her face. The light, the woods, are re fracted, kaleidoscopic. Eddie Fish’s face becomes a blur. “You bitch!” she hears, as if from a great distance. He is walking away from her, heels crunching against the leaves. “If anything happens, it’s not my problem, do you hear me?” Slowly, she gathers her things. She pulls her bra from the branch, stuffs her panties into her knapsack, buttons her blouse and yanks on her shorts. She sits back down against the tree and searches the ground for a sharp twig. When she finds it, she begins scratching her initials into the empty heart, dig ging deep into the bark. She works carefully, with the preci sion of an artist. She fills the whole perimeter, so there will be no room for anyone else. DODIE BELLAMY Spew Forth l_esperate times call for desperate measures. I was eating goat-milk ice cream at Veggie Kingdom when I first saw Anya. It was 1979. A petite woman in her early thirties walked from table to table smiling demurely—shoulder-length blond hair cascaded in soft waves about a pretty, perky face with an upturned nose—she looked like a cross between Michelle Pfeiffer and Lady of Lady and the Tramp. “That’s Anya,” someone said. The most incredible dress floated about her slight frame, layer upon irregular layer of pale blue chiffon, perforated throughout with holes, biggish ones, as if someone or something had once been trapped inside and punched its way out. “That’s Anya Steppes,” continued the man at the next table. “I love her dress,” I said. “It’s a replica of the native cos tume of Venus.” “Venus?” I blurted out. He leaned over his

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Are you interested in photography?’ ‘I am, rather,’ I answered, ‘but I don’t know a lot about it. I used to take photographs when I was at Oxford, but they’re nothing special, I don’t suppose.’ ‘Hold on to them, William, hold on to them!’ he warned. ‘Never destroy a photograph, William; it’s a bit of life sealed in for ever. If you become famous, which I’ve no doubt you will, people will want to see them. I’m being rediscovered myself, and I promise you they’ll buy anything. To be honest, I’ve sold a lot of tat lately, but at Christie’s they like it. I’m a sort of period figure, you see, and put something in those bit photography sales and you find the aura of the famous names rubs off on you. Their catalogue person calls me “the unacknowledged master of postwar male photography in Britain”. I fetch a price, now, you know. But then, and this is what I’m saying, I feel absolutely awful about it, I just want to have them all back.’ ‘I’ve told William he must come and see your studio,’ Nantwich declared. ‘My dear, of course. Let me just get a bit straight and I’ll be thrilled to see you. I’ve got a big job of work on à ce moment , but when that’s finished. And who knows, I might do a few little pickies of you—fully clothed, needless to say. I think you’d make an interesting subject for me. It’s such a very English look, that, the pink and gold number and the long, straight nose. None of your Master Whitehaven anonymous stuff, though. It’s a character study I want.’ For the second time I had the sensation of being somehow professionally appraised. “Well, we’ll see,’ I said, pleased to think of sitting again, but not keen to be rushed into some shady deal. ‘How’s the big job of work coming on?’ Nantwich asked with suspicious casualness. ‘Wonderful to have met you,’ piped Staines, with a switch of conversational direction worthy of Nantwich himself. We shook hands again and he was already leaving us. ‘Take care, Charles,’ he advised. My host was silent for a moment or two. ‘Bit of a cunt,’ he said. ‘But still really frightfully good.’ He looked very weary now, and I too prepared to leave. ‘Thank you so much for lunch, Charles; I have enjoyed it.’ He turned a surprised gaze on me. ‘You like the old Club?’ he asked. ‘Not too bad, is it?’ Fine hair-veins branched merrily over his pinkish cheeks, but his dark eyes were sunken and his big head looked heavy with impending sleep. I thought how I had seen him dead on the lavatory floor.

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

  I’d been hearing this from others and asked Lisa to explain what she meant. “It’s sort of a permanent identity, like being adopted or something like that. I guess you might say that our parents’ divorce was the formative event in our lives. It explains why I feel the way I do. The divorce is a permanent part of me and in some ways I’ll never get over it. But it’s good and bad news. The bad part is that as far as men are concerned, I always seem to be settling. Like even now I ask myself what am I doing living with a man who is twelve years older than me who has had two divorces? He’s nice but I’ll never fall in love with him. And he doesn’t love me. I worry about that.” Lisa shook her head slowly. “Look at it this way. I grew up unprepared for adult relationships, especially for being a woman with a man. No one taught me what I could expect or ask for. My mother never taught me about men. She didn’t know much herself. She never even taught me not to nag. And my father failed to keep his marriage vows. So it was hard for me to learn much from his marriage, although he’s been a great father and second husband. I have no idea how to be with a man. I have no idea what to expect. When my boyfriends have not been loving or kind or caring and I felt disappointed, I blamed me for being greedy and selfish. I told myself I was wrong for wanting more than I was getting, like I was supposed to be content. Kent told me I was trying to control him when I asked him to call if he was coming home late. I was dumb enough to believe him. I was incredibly naïve. “But look at the good news. I’ve had to become independent and strong. I can work well with change. When things get chaotic, I don’t lose my cool. I’m a good diplomat. I really had to be with my parents. I’m a good mediator in business and I can work with difficult people. I’m a great negotiator. Look at the lifetime of experience I have had keeping peace in my family. Also I learned at an early age to think for myself and to rely on myself. This may surprise you because I know that compared to a lot of others I’ve led a protected life. But I consider myself a survivor.”

• 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 Folding Star (1994)

  I don't think anybody need know apart from me and him—and you. To be honest, I'm pretty certain his running off has nothing to do with him and me being . . . " (I couldn't quite pronounce Paul's happy version of events). "It's to do with other things. I don't want to muddy the water by appearing to incriminate myself." "Altidore could hardly object," said Paul, "after everything he's done. You know, the poor mother must be sick of being run away from. But I think you're quite right. You're being truthful to yourself, and that needn't call for exhaustive or unnecessary truthfulness to others." There was a long pause in which I ran mis-trustfully over this welcome advice. "I've never told anyone about my first affair, because it would have caused distress and served no purpose—it would have been . . . gratuitously honest." His discomfort was palpable, his determination dried his mouth and gave an odd new depth to his voice. I was being callous: he had planned to be listened to; but even so I wanted to let him off the hook, spare him these abrupt breaths and incessant mirror-checkings. Perhaps he could tell me about it on a later day, when we weren't so busy, weren't riding steadily above the speed-limit. "I do think that, don't you? One mustn't mistake brutality for honesty, as so many young people do nowadays, or impertinence for wit, incidentally! Oh, in my case it was a summer's passion, when I was seventeen too, as it happens—with an older man." So there he went with the oddly similar—and brought out lightly after nearly half a century, in a tone not practised but certainly rehearsed, it caught my sympathy. I could see what it had cost him, though not yet why. If I still failed to encourage him it was because I didn't want to seem crudely eager for the details—I didn't quite know in what terms to express an interest. I assumed an indefinably sham expression of sober receptiveness. "Tell me about it if you're sure you want to," I said. He nodded irritably, but then waited, as though struck unexpectedly by the margin of doubt my words allowed for. Or perhaps the rehearsed words had died on him, or turned into nonsense with time. My head was a little on one side, I was focusing on his predicament, which seemed to grow and become more inexpressible as a full minute passed, and then another. The tension became rather sickly and embarrassing then, and I couldn't look at him. I found myself shifting and gazing out of the side-window while my own briefly arrested spools of anxiety and regret started up again. I made some trivial remark, but he didn't reply, only held up his hand in that gesture of his that called for patience and consideration.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Nothing about him bears any resemblance to the people I admired growing up: His accent—clean, perfect, neutral—is foreign; his credentials are so impressive that they’re frightening; he made his life in Chicago, a dense metropolis; and he conducts himself with a confidence that comes from knowing that the modern American meritocracy was built for him. Of course, Obama overcame adversity in his own right—adversity familiar to many of us—but that was long before any of us knew him. President Obama came on the scene right as so many people in my community began to believe that the modern American meritocracy was not built for them . We know we’re not doing well. We see it every day: in the obituaries for teenage kids that conspicuously omit the cause of death (reading between the lines: overdose), in the deadbeats we watch our daughters waste their time with. Barack Obama strikes at the heart of our deepest insecurities. He is a good father while many of us aren’t. He wears suits to his job while we wear overalls, if we’re lucky enough to have a job at all. His wife tells us that we shouldn’t be feeding our children certain foods, and we hate her for it—not because we think she’s wrong but because we know she’s right. Many try to blame the anger and cynicism of working-class whites on misinformation. Admittedly, there is an industry of conspiracy-mongers and fringe lunatics writing about all manner of idiocy, from Obama’s alleged religious leanings to his ancestry. But every major news organization, even the oft-maligned Fox News, has always told the truth about Obama’s citizenship status and religious views. The people I know are well aware of what the major news organizations have to say about the issue; they simply don’t believe them. Only 6 percent of American voters believe that the media is “very trustworthy.”21 To many of us, the free press—that bulwark of American democracy—is simply full of shit. With little trust in the press, there’s no check on the Internet conspiracy theories that rule the digital world. Barack Obama is a foreign alien actively trying to destroy our country. Everything the media tells us is a lie. Many in the white working class believe the worst about their society. Here’s a small sample of emails or messages I’ve seen from friends or family: From right-wing radio talker Alex Jones on the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, a documentary about the “unanswered question” of the terrorist attacks, suggesting that the U.S. government played a role in the massacre of its own people.From an email chain, a story that the Obamacare legislation requires microchip implantation in new health care patients. This story carries extra bite because of the religious implications: Many believe that the End Times “mark of the beast” foretold in biblical prophecy will be an electronic device.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  When I untied it I found it to be, unlike anything else of his I had seen, an elegant fair copy, from which a compositor could easily have set type. Although it would have been allowed, I did not keep a journal over those six months. From the start I saw that what I wanted to say, although ‘hereafter, in a better world than this’ it might find other readers and do its good, would have brought nothing but scorn and salacity at the time. And later, long after the start, when I thought writing might earn some slight remission of my solitude and pent-up thoughts, I shunned it, mistrusted it like one of those friends to whom one is drawn and drawn again and yet each time comes away cheapened, wasted or over-indulged. My journal has always, since my childhood, been my close, silent and retentive friend, so close that when I lied to it I suffered inwardly from its mute reproach. Now, though, it seemed to hold out the invitation to something shameful—self-pity, and, worse, the exposure of my narrow, treadmill circuit of memories and longings. There was too my catastrophic change of station. I had fallen, and though my fall was brought about by a conspiracy, by a calculated spasm of malevolence, its effect on me at first was like that of some terrible physical accident, after which no ordinary thoughtless action could be the same again. The fall had its beginning in that very fast, dazed and escorted plunge from the dock after the sentence had been given, down and down the stone stairs from the courtroom to the cells. I had the illusion—so active is the faculty of metaphor at moments of crisis—of being flung, chained, into water: of a need to hold my breath. In a sense I kept on holding it for half a year. Chaps did keep journals there—little Joe his childlike weekly jottings for his wife eventually to see, ‘Barmy’ Barnes his notebooks of visions and apocalypses—but they were licensed by their childishness and barminess; whereas I had been violently removed from my rightful lettered habitat, and as an invisible and inner protest refused to write a syllable.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Nevertheless, parents send their children to these schools because they have little extra money, and the high school fails to send its students to college with alarming consistency. The people are physically unhealthy, and without government assistance they lack treatment for the most basic problems. Most important, they’re mean about it—they will hesitate to open their lives up to others for the simple reason that they don’t wish to be judged. In 2009, ABC News ran a news report about Appalachian America, highlighting a phenomenon known locally as “Mountain Dew mouth”: painful dental problems in young children, generally caused by too much sugary soda. In its broadcast, ABC featured a litany of stories about Appalachian children confronting poverty and deprivation. The news report was widely watched in the region but met with utter scorn. The consistent reaction: This is none of your damn business. “This has to be the most offensive thing I have ever heard and you should all be ashamed, ABC included,” wrote one commenter online. Another added: “You should be ashamed of yourself for reinforcing old, false stereotypes and not giving a more accurate picture of Appalachia. This is an opinion shared among many in the actual rural towns of the mountains that I have met.” I knew this because my cousin took to Facebook to silence the critics—noting that only by admitting the region’s problems could people hope to change them. Amber is uniquely positioned to comment on the problems of Appalachia: Unlike me, she spent her entire childhood in Jackson. She was an academic star in high school and later earned a college degree, the first in her nuclear family to do so. She saw the worst of Jackson’s poverty firsthand and overcame it. The angry reaction supports the academic literature on Appalachian Americans. In a December 2000 paper, sociologists Carol A. Markstrom, Sheila K. Marshall, and Robin J. Tryon found that avoidance and wishful-thinking forms of coping “significantly predicted resiliency” among Appalachian teens. Their paper suggests that hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly. We tend to overstate and to understate, to glorify the good and ignore the bad in ourselves. This is why the folks of Appalachia reacted strongly to an honest look at some of its most impoverished people. It’s why I worshipped the Blanton men, and it’s why I spent the first eighteen years of my life pretending that everything in the world was a problem except me. The truth is hard, and the hardest truths for hill people are the ones they must tell about themselves. Jackson is undoubtedly full of the nicest people in the world; it is also full of drug addicts and at least one man who can find the time to make eight chil dren but can’t find the time to support them.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Now that I’m a lawyer, I marvel that we never considered a medical malpractice suit against the doctor who operated unnecessarily on her back. But Mamaw wouldn’t have allowed it: She didn’t believe in using the legal system until you had to. Sometimes I’d see Mom every few days, and sometimes I’d go a couple of weeks without hearing from her at all. After one breakup, she spent a few months on Mamaw’s couch, and we both enjoyed her company. Mom tried, in her own way: When she was working, she’d always give me money on paydays, almost certainly more than she could afford. For reasons I never quite understood, Mom equated money with affection. Perhaps she felt that I would never appreciate that she loved me unless she offered a wad of spending money. But I never cared about the money. I just wanted her to be healthy. Not even my closest friends knew that I lived in my grandma’s house. I recognized that though many of my peers lacked the traditional American family, mine was more nontraditional than most. And we were poor, a status Mamaw wore like a badge of honor but one I’d hardly come to grips with. I didn’t wear clothes from Abercrombie & Fitch or American Eagle unless I’d received them for Christmas. When Mamaw picked me up from school, I’d ask her not to get out of the car lest my friends see her—wearing her uniform of baggy jeans and a men’s T-shirt—with a giant menthol cigarette hanging from her lip. When people asked, I lied and told them that I lived with my mom, that she and I took care of my ailing grandmother. Even today, I still regret that far too many high school friends and acquaintances never knew Mamaw was the best thing that ever happened to me. My junior year, I tested into the honors Advanced Math class—a hybrid of trigonometry, advanced algebra, and pre-calculus. The class’s instructor, Ron Selby, enjoyed legendary status among the students for his brilliance and high demands. In twenty years, he had never missed a day of school. According to Middletown High School legend, a student called in a bomb threat during one of Selby’s exams, hiding the explosive device in a bag in his locker. With the entire school evacuated outside, Selby marched into the school, retrieved the contents of the kid’s locker, marched outside, and threw those contents into a trash can. “I’ve had that kid in class; he’s not smart enough to make a functioning bomb,” Selby told the police officers gathered at the school. “Now let my students go back to class to finish their exams.” Mamaw loved stories like this, and though she never met Selby, she admired him and encouraged me to follow his lead. Selby encouraged (but didn’t require) his students to obtain advanced graphing calculators—the Texas Instruments model 89 was the latest and greatest.