Yearning

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Girls (2016)

  Suzanne sat cross-legged in the dirt beside me, her fingers grazing mine. Our faces cupped and attentive as tulips. —It was one of those slurry days we offered up to the shared dream, a violence in our aversion to real life; though it was all about connecting, tuning in, we told ourselves. Mitch had dropped off some acid, sourced from a lab tech at Stanford. Donna mixed it with orange juice in paper cups and we drank it for breakfast, so the trees seemed to thrum with energy, the shadows purpling and wet. It was curious, later, to think of how easily I fell into things. If there were drugs around, I did them. You were in the moment—when everything back then happened. We could talk about the moment for hours. Turn it over in conversation: the way the light moved, why someone was silent, dismantling all the layers of what a look had really meant. It seemed like something important, our desire to describe the shape of each second as it passed, to bring out everything hidden and beat it to death. Suzanne and I were working on the childish bracelets the girls had been trading among ourselves, collecting them up our arms like middle-schoolers. Practicing the V stitch. The candy stripe. I was making one for Suzanne, fat and wide, a poppy-red chevron on a field of peach thread. I liked the calm collection of the knots, how the colors vibrated happily under my fingers. I got up once to get Suzanne a glass of water, and there was a domestic gentleness in that act. I wanted to meet a need, put water in her mouth. Suzanne smiled up at me as she drank, gulping so fast I could see her throat ripple. Helen’s cousin Caroline was hanging around that day. She seemed more knowing than I had ever been at eleven. Her bracelets shook with the kiss of cheap metal. Her terry-cloth shirt was the pale yellow of a lemon slushie and showed her small stomach, though her knees were scraped and ashy like a boy’s. “Far-out,” she said when Guy tipped a paper cup of juice to her lips, and like a windup toy, she kept repeating this phrase when the acid began to hit. I’d started to detect the first signs in myself, too, my mouth filling with saliva. I thought of the flooded creeks I’d seen in childhood, the death cold of the rainwater as it came swift over the rocks. I could hear Guy spinning nonsense on the porch. One of his meaningless stories, the drug making his bluster echo. His long hair pulled into a dark knot at the base of his skull. “This fella was banging on the door,” he was saying, “shouting that he’d come to take what was his, and I was like aw, hell, big fuckin’ deal,” he droned, “I’m Elvis Presley,” and Roos was nodding along.

• From Action (2014)

  The first time I came down with a persistent case of celibacy, I tried to fight it. I was like a mulish office cold sufferer insisting she’s just fine, saying of course I can work, as sodden tissues explode from her pockets and her eyelids hover at sunset-horizon-level. Is that person likely to nail a big account capably, given that her head feels like the contents of her overtaxed nostrils and she’s not giving herself time to let it pass? No, and I was even less likely of capable nailing during that bout of sexual indifference and all the ones that followed. In that case, I was twenty-one and had just completed my customary three-week, post-ruinous-breakup seminar on how to bone people who aren’t actively in love with me, which is a bit what I imagine an extended continental vacation (a real one, this time) feels like. By the end, the novelty wears off, just as it’s intended to: Three weeks is time enough to tire of your trip abroad, which is a necessary part of returning to the normal keel of your life without constantly being all wistful, like, Man, wish I were in perfect old France right now. Fuck this apartment—there aren’t even croque madames at any of the restaurants in my neighborhood. Similarly, it’s the exact right duration of time for noticing, Huh–why is it that I’m not actively salivating over this obviously gorgeous person in my bed? Oh, right. It’s because it has been my singular myopic focus to do just that, with as many people as possible, for the same amount of time that it would take me to complete an accredited Harvard extension class called “Gene Expression: A Hands-on Approach”; I miss edifying myself about more than just other people’s bods… and I also haven’t checked to see if my apartment is still there, for that matter, and isn’t rent due pretty soon? Congrads!! Now that you’ve relegated sex back to the equivocal plane of all the other lovely ways to spend your time, it doesn’t seem so intimidating. When I do this, I am reminded that there’s no such thing as being “rusty,” which can bear repeating after long-term monogamous sex.

• From Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996)

  She had hoped for a life like that. My father’s mother, on the other hand, had hoped that her seven sons would all become priests. 72 The average age of the wives in the new suburb was twenty-six. The average age of the husbands was thirty-two. Most families made between $4,000 and $7,000 a year. The average income was $5,100. That was $2,000 higher than the national average in 1950. My father made $4,600 that year, working as a laboratory assistant for the Gas Company. Seventy-five percent of the buyers were purchasing their first house. They used credit to buy a car and furniture. By 1953, 98 percent of the households had a television set. No one had any money. 73 In 1952, a reporter for the local paper interviewed an average resident of the new suburb. He lived on Hayter Street. He had a wife, a son, and a daughter. He was thirty-two. He earned $4,400 a year. Including property taxes and insurance, he paid $70 a month for his three-bedroom house. He paid $19 a month on his new television set and $48 a month for his new furniture. His wife knew only her next-door neighbors until she joined a sewing club on her block. There she met five more of her neighbors. He and his wife were registered Democrats, but they had voted that November for Eisenhower. He said he and his wife were looking for a church, but they didn’t know which one. They wanted to get involved in the community, he said, but they wanted to get the grass growing in their front yard first. 74 A majority of registered voters in the new suburb voted for Eisenhower in 1952. [image "Image" file=Image00006.jpg] 75 There wasn’t much crime in these neighborhoods. If you had asked residents what their new community needed, many would have said it needed to control dogs. Dogs were bought, or picked up from the county animal shelter, because parents thought it would be good for their children. Dogs would teach responsibility. They didn’t. Most children were too young to train a dog, and parents didn’t have enough time. Some dogs ran loose during the day. Some bit mail carriers and delivery men. Some were just a general nuisance, digging in gardens and fouling lawns. Young dogs that were tied up barked or howled incessantly. The constant noise pitted neighbor against neighbor. Because the new suburb was unincorporated, the county animal control department was responsible for picking up and impounding strays. But the county could do nothing about barking dogs. 76 Parents wanted the county to do something about covering the open ditches between neighborhoods. The ditches had been dug out by a backhoe when the houses were built, to drain the wetter parts of the new development. When it rained, the ten-foot-deep ditches would fill with water. In the spring, the ditches would fill with cattails and the tadpoles that boys would catch.

• From The Girls (2016)

  I was confused, in these moments, but translated them into further proof: Suzanne was prickly with other people because they didn’t understand her like I did. I didn’t say it out loud to myself or even think about it too much. Where things were heading with Suzanne. The dredge of discomfort I got when she disappeared with Russell. How I didn’t know what to do without her, seeking out Donna or Roos like a lost kid. The time she came back smelling of dried sweat and roughly wiped herself between the legs with a washcloth, like she didn’t care I was watching. I got up when I saw how nervously Caroline fingered the bracelet I’d given her. “I’ll take a cigarette,” I said, smiling at Caroline. Suzanne hooked her arm in mine. “But we’re gonna feed the llamas,” Suzanne said. “Don’t want them to starve, do you? Waste away?” I hesitated, and Suzanne reached out to play with a part of my hair. She was always doing that: picking burrs off my shirt, once wedging a fingernail between my front teeth to dislodge a bit of food. Breaching the boundaries to let me know they didn’t exist. Caroline’s desire to be invited was so blatant that I felt almost ashamed. But it didn’t stop me from following Suzanne outside, shrugging an apology at Caroline. I could feel her watching us go. The hooded attentions of a child, that wordless understanding. I saw that disappointment was already something familiar to Caroline. —I was scanning the contents of my mother’s refrigerator, the glass jars mortared with dried spills. The fumes of cruciferous vegetables, roiling in plastic bags. Nothing to eat, as usual. Little things like this reminded me why I’d rather be somewhere else. When I heard my mother shuffling in the front door, the razzle of her heavy jewelry, I tried to slink off without crossing paths. “Evie,” she called, coming into the kitchen. “Wait up a minute.” I was out of breath from the bike ride from the ranch and at the tail end of being stoned. I tried to blink an ordinary number of times, to present a blank face that would give her nothing. “You’re getting so tan,” she said, lifting my arm, and I shrugged. She idly brushed the hair on my arm back and forth, then paused. There was an uncomfortable moment between us. It occurred to me: she’d finally caught on to the trickle of money that had been disappearing. The thought of her anger didn’t scare me. The act had been so preposterous that it took on the safety of the unreal. I’d almost started to believe that I had never really lived here, so strong was the feeling of disassociation as I crept through the house on my errands for Suzanne. My excavation of my mother’s underwear drawer, sifting through the tea-colored silks and pilly lace until I closed in on a roll of bills banded with a hair tie.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  “They moved away.” “Do you miss them?” “Yes, I do.” They pulled up to Miri’s house. “Thanks for the ride,” she called, getting out of the car. “My pleasure, Miss Mirabelle.” Dr. O was everyone’s favorite, which is why Miri couldn’t help wishing she had a father just like him. Somewhere Miri had a father but she didn’t know where. What kind of guy leaves his seventeen-year-old pregnant girlfriend and never even sees his baby? She’d asked Rusty more than once when she was little, “Where is my daddy? Who is my daddy?” She could tell, even then, Rusty wasn’t going to answer that question. [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00006.jpg] [image "Elizabeth Daily Post" file=Image00006.jpg] JOY TO THE WORLDDEC. 15 — The blanket of snow dumped on Elizabeth over the past two days seems not to have deterred bundle-laden shoppers. With Christmas lights strung across streets, stores gaily decorated for the season, and the ever-present sound of carols, shoppers seemed bent on proving they could have a good time no matter what the weather. Leaving their cars behind because of dangerous driving conditions, they waited last night for buses downtown on Broad Street, contributing to the heavy burden already placed on public transportation during and after Friday’s snowstorm. “It’s Christmas,” said Myrtle Carter, trying to balance her packages while keeping track of two young children. “Joy to the world, and all that.” 2 [image "image" file=Image00005.jpg] [image file=Image00005.jpg] MiriSunday was frigid, gray and windy. At Newark Airport a new low of six degrees was recorded at 7 a.m. But Miri, asleep in her bed under a puffy quilt, didn’t give two figs about the weather. She was dreaming of the mystery boy she’d danced with last night. She was good at that, at deciding what she’d dream about, then doing it. When her alarm went off at 8 a.m. she reached out and turned it off. She threw on her robe and hustled to the kitchen where she prepared two eggs boiled exactly three minutes, dark rye toast slathered with butter, fresh-squeezed orange juice and coffee with real cream and two sugars. She decorated the tray with a paper doily and a flower plucked from the arrangement on the hall table, a gift from Rusty’s boss and his wife. Her mother’s real name was Naomi, but because of her auburn hair, which was long and thick, everyone called her Rusty. People turned to stare when she walked by, as if maybe she was a movie star. Too bad Miri didn’t get her mother’s hair or her green eyes. Nobody stared when she walked by. When she presented the breakfast tray, Rusty acted all surprised, like she’d forgotten it was her birthday. Miri thought about the bed jackets displayed at Nia’s. If she had had the money she’d have bought one so Rusty could have breakfast in bed in style on her birthday. “That was delicious,” Rusty said when she’d finished her breakfast. Miri held out the gift from Nia’s Lingerie.

• From Cultish (2021)

  A recent college graduate from California who’d relocated to New York City for a job in PR, Abbie missed the co-ops she’d lived in as a student at UC Santa Cruz. By her mid-twenties, Abbie was looking to press a spiritual reset button. That’s when she dropped into a Tibetan mindfulness class and quickly fell in love with its teachings of “basic goodness”—the idea that all beings are born whole and worthy, but become lost along the way. That’s why we meditate: to get our basic goodness back. Abbie was hungry to learn more, but extended meditation retreats were expensive. So when an instructor told her about the opportunity to spend three months with Shambhala for free, working and living in a small pastoral town, it seemed like just the “journey” she was looking for. Shambhala had dozens of meditation centers and retreats all over the world; Vermont was one of their largest. Abbie couldn’t wait to get out of the city. She booked her ticket. Right away, there was a lot to love about Shambhala—the camaraderie, the teachings of generosity and acceptance, even the trees seemed too good to be true. “I remember when I first landed in Vermont, I had never seen so many shades of green,” Abbie told me over coffee, two years after defecting. Shambhala was founded in the 1970s by Tibetan monk and meditation guru Chögyam Trungp a. Largely responsible for bringing Tibetan Buddhism to the West, Trungpa had studied comparative religion at Oxford and earned a reputation, even among many non-Shambhalans, as an enlightened genius. He counted among his pupils the poet Allen Ginsberg, author John Steinbeck, David Bowie, and Joni Mitchell. “I’m confused now how to feel about him because his books are amazing,” Abbie confessed. “He was a master of language. A poet.” But Trungpa also had a raging alcohol problem, which everyone knew and quietly accepted. Complications from alcohol abuse are what ultimately led to his death in 1987 at the age of forty-eight, after which his son, known as the Sakyong, took his place. Trungpa didn’t try to hide his addiction; in fact, he found ways to work it into his teachings. Notoriously, Shambhala celebrations overflowed with booze and debauchery. “In the Buddhism world, the Shambhalas are known as the party Buddhists,” Abbie recounted with ambivalence. Trungpa also famously slept with many of his students, some of whom became Abbie’s teachers. “There was no way that stuff was all consensual,” she winced. “But everyone was just like, ‘Oh, it was the seventies.’” Trungpa was the nucleus of the Shambhala “mandala.” This was the organization’s chain of command: a sea of plebeian practitioners and a pecking order of teachers above them.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  A few years later, I hadn’t thought much more about a career but had nearly completed degrees in English literature and human biology. I was driven less by achievement than by trying to understand, in earnest: What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain. Meaning, while a slippery concept, seemed inextricable from human relationships and moral values. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land resonated profoundly, relating meaninglessness and isolation, and the desperate quest for human connection. I found Eliot’s metaphors leaking into my own language. Other authors resonated as well. Nabokov, for his awareness of how our suffering can make us callous to the obvious suffering of another. Conrad, for his hypertuned sense of how miscommunication between people can so profoundly impact their lives. Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life. Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining? Heading into my sophomore summer, I applied for two jobs: as an intern at the highly scientific Yerkes Primate Research Center, in Atlanta, and as a prep chef at Sierra Camp, a family vacation spot for Stanford alumni on the pristine shores of Fallen Leaf Lake, abutting the stark beauty of Desolation Wilderness in Eldorado National Forest. The camp’s literature promised, simply, the best summer of your life. I was surprised and flattered to be accepted. Yet I had just learned that macaques had a rudimentary form of culture, and I was eager to go to Yerkes and see what could be the natural origin of meaning itself. In other words, I could either study meaning or I could experience it. After delaying for as long as possible, I finally chose the camp. Afterward, I dropped by my biology adviser’s office to inform him of my decision. When I walked in, he was sitting at his desk, head in a journal, as usual. He was a quiet, amiable man with heavy-lidded eyes, but as I told him my plans, he became a different person entirely: his eyes shot open, and his face flushed red, flecks of spit spraying. “What?” he said. “When you grow up, are you going to be a scientist or a…chef?”

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  CREAMED CHICKEN ON TOAST POINTS WITH BUTTERED PEAS PORK CHOP WITH CREAMED MUSHROOM SAUCE CHOPPED STEAK WITH CREAMY MUSHROOM SAUCE TUNA CASSEROLE WITH CREAMED CORN Everything was creamy. Ugh! She hated creamy sauces. At the very bottom was a children’s menu. SPAGHETTI WITH BUTTER GRILLED CHEESE HOT DOG It would be embarrassing to order off the children’s menu but better than ordering creamed something or other and not eating a bite. Frekki leaned over and whispered, “The menu is so goyish, but they’ll make you grilled cheese if you’d like.” The waitress gave Miri a look when she ordered grilled cheese but Frekki came to her rescue. “She can have whatever she wants,” Frekki told the waitress. “Just charge me for a second tuna casserole and bring her the grilled cheese.” Miri might like this woman, if only she were allowed to. Frekki smoked an Old Gold while they were waiting for their food, her diamond ring sparkling in the sunlight, her nails polished dark red to match the color of her lipstick. “Nasty habit,” Frekki said, as she flicked an ash into the glass ashtray on the table. “Take it from me. Don’t start.” Miri had already decided she wouldn’t, even though it looked so sophisticated. All the movie stars smoked. Rusty limited herself to two a day, one after lunch and one after dinner. Henry smoked. Leah didn’t. Corinne didn’t but Dr. O and Daisy did. Irene didn’t. Ben Sapphire smoked a cigar after dinner. Then there was Mason and his Luckies. Everyone left the restaurant at about the same time and headed across the way to the Paper Mill Playhouse, an old mill turned into a theater, where Frekki snapped a picture of Miri, her coat unbuttoned to show off her birthday sweater and Rusty’s pearls. Before they were shown to their seats, Frekki bought Miri a souvenir program. At one point during the performance Frekki looked over at her and smiled. They came out humming “The Desert Song,” the most popular song in the operetta. “I’ve always wanted a daughter,” Frekki said. “I have two sons but they wouldn’t be caught dead at an operetta.” “Maybe they’ll get married and you’ll have daughters-in-law who’ll go with you.” “That’d be nice, though daughters-in-law don’t always like their husbands’ mothers.” “But if you’re nice to them…” Miri thought of Irene and Leah, who liked each other. “Yes, maybe,” Frekki said. “I hope so. But that’s still years away. You’ll have to meet the boys. They’re seventeen and nineteen. It’s good for a girl to have boy cousins.” Cousins, Miri thought. I have boy cousins. After the show they stopped for ice cream at Gruning’s on the Hill. There was a line waiting for tables. But Frekki said, “Oh, look…” and she pointed to a table. Miri followed her gaze to a table with a man seated facing them. He waved to Frekki. Was this Frekki’s husband, Dr. J. J.

• From Pleasure Activism (2017)

  “I once sat on Octavia Butler’s face. It was stitched onto a pillow in a tent in Dubai, and we were in public, but I still flush at the sheer longing I felt in that moment. I met her once and saw her smile. … Octavia Butler was crushable. … I know that Octavia Butler had a beautifully freaky mind and that she, like me, used masturbation to move through her creative blocks.”

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  And there I’d be, while they snored up one side and down the other in the room across the hall. I’d tiptoe all over the bedroom, gazing for a while out the window, watching the sky turn black, the stars come out. I’d quietly open all the drawers of all the dressers in the room, take out things, examine them, put them back. I didn’t dare jump on the bed, although sometimes I said “Chicka-chicka China” to myself out of boredom. I tried counting sheep like on the cartoons, but I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t for the life of me imagine what sheep looked like. I knew but I didn’t know, just as I couldn’t conjure up the faces of my long-lost parents and siblings. I was wide-awake, staring out at the vast Milky Way while the grown-ups snored on and on and the moon rose and sank. The strange thing was, I always asked to go there. I don’t remember them ever inviting me, or my parents suggesting it. It was me. From far away the idea of their house was magical to me, all those nooks, all those crannies, all those things to play with — the button jars, the lowboy with a little drawer full of marbles, the flower arrangements, the rotating fan. So, every July I got dropped off on a Sunday and picked up the following Sunday. By Tuesday I’d be counting the hours, sitting on the backyard glider, staring at the black lawn jockey and the flagstone path that took you to the garden, the broken bird bath with a pool of rusty, skanky water in it. Their yard had as much stuff in it as their house did, only the yard stuff was filthy, full of dirt and rainwater. The last time I went there my parents drove off on a Sunday afternoon as I stood on the gravel sidewalk and waved, already regretting my visit. My grandma fed us, dinner was the usual ordeal of gravy rivulets and tainted food, and then they turned Bonanza on. I lay on the living room floor, in the cleared-out space in the center; on either end of the couch were Grandma and Ralph. She was knitting an afghan and he was sharpening a stack of scissors. We were watching my favorite show. The dad, Ben, had a buckskin, Hoss had a black horse, and Little Joe had a pinto pony. They had Hop Sing for a servant, in place of a mom. Back home my little brother would be humming to himself through the whole show, “Umbuddy-umbuddy-umbuddy-ummm Bonanza,” and everyone would be telling him to shut up. My mom would be smoking her cigarettes and drinking beer out of a bottle, my dad would have his socks off and be stretching his bare toes, drinking his beer out of a glass. My sister would be trying to do homework at the dining room table.

• From The Girls (2016)

  The flashing neon snake outside the club, the red apple that cast an alien glow on the passersby. One of the other girls burned off Suzanne’s moles backstage with a caustic pencil. “Some girls hated being up there,” she said, tugging a dress over her nakedness. “Dancing, the whole thing. But I didn’t think it was so bad.” She assessed the dress in the mirror, cupping her breasts through the fabric. “People can be so prudish,” she said. She made a lewd face, laughing a little at herself, and let her breasts drop. She told me, then, how Russell fucked her gently and how sometimes he didn’t, and how you could like it either way. “There’s nothing sick about that,” she said. “The people who act so uptight, who act like it’s so evil? They’re the real perverts. It’s like some of the guys who’d come to see us dance. All mad at us that they were there. Like we’d tricked them.” Suzanne didn’t often talk about her hometown or family, and I didn’t ask. There was a glossy pucker of scar tissue along one of her wrists that I’d seen her tracing with a tragic pride, and once she slipped and mentioned a humid street outside Red Bluff. But then she caught herself. “That cunt,” she called her mother, peaceably. My dizzy solidarity overwhelmed me, the weary justice in her tone—I thought we both knew what it was to be alone, though it seems silly to me now. To think we were so alike, when I had grown up with housekeepers and parents and she told me she had sometimes lived in a car, sleeping in the reclined passenger seat with her mother in the driver’s side. If I was hungry, I ate. But we had other things in common, Suzanne and I, a different hunger. Sometimes I wanted to be touched so badly I was scraped by longing. I saw the same thing in Suzanne, too, perking up like an animal smelling food whenever Russell approached. —Suzanne went into San Rafael with Russell to look at a truck. I stayed behind—there were chores, and I threw myself into them with an eagerness born of fear. I didn’t want to give them any excuse to make me leave. Feeding the llamas, weeding the garden, scrubbing and bleaching the kitchen floors. Work was just another way to show your love, to offer up the self. Filling the llamas’ trough took a long time, the water pressure sluggish at best, but it was nice to be out in the sun. Mosquitoes hovered around my bare skin and I kept having to shiver them off. They didn’t bother the llamas, who just stood there, as sultry and heavy-lidded as screen sirens. I could see Guy beyond the main house, messing with the bus engine with the low-stakes curiosity of a science fair project. Taking breaks to smoke cigarettes and do downward dog.

• From The Girls (2016)

  He went to the main house every once in a while to get another beer from Russell’s stash, checking to make sure everyone did their chores. He and Suzanne were like the head counselors, keeping Donna and the others in line with a stray word or glance. Operating as satellite versions of Russell, though Guy’s deference was different from Suzanne’s. I think he stayed around because Russell was a way to get things he wanted—girls, drugs, a place to crash. He wasn’t in love with Russell, didn’t cower or pant in his presence—Guy was more like a sidekick, and all his blustery tales of adventure and hardship continued to star himself. He approached the fence, his beer and cigarette in the same hand, his jeans low on his hips. I knew he was watching me, and I concentrated on the hose, the warm fill of water in the trough. “The smoke keeps ’em away,” Guy said, and I turned as if I’d just noticed his presence. “The mosquitoes,” he said, holding out his cigarette. “Yeah,” I said, “sure. Thanks.” I took the cigarette over the fence, careful to keep the hose trained on the trough. “You seen Suzanne?” Already Guy assumed I’d know her movements. I was flattered to be the keeper of her whereabouts. “Some guy in San Rafael was selling his truck,” I said. “She went with Russell to look at it.” “Hm,” Guy said. Reaching to take his cigarette back. He seemed amused by my professionalism, though I’m sure he saw, too, the worship that hijacked my face whenever I spoke of Suzanne. My half-hitch step those times I hurried to her side. Maybe it confused him not to be the focus of all that desire—he was a handsome boy, used to the attention of girls. Girls who sucked in their stomachs when he put his hand down their jeans, girls who believed the jewelry he wore was the pretty evidence of his untapped emotional depths. “They’re probably at the free clinic,” Guy said. He mimed scratching his crotch, his cigarette waving around. He was trying to get me to snicker at Suzanne, collude in some way—I didn’t respond, beyond a grim smile. He tilted back on the heels of his cowboy boots. Studying me. “You can go on and help Roos,” he said in between the final slugs of his beer. “She’s in the kitchen.” I’d already finished my chores for the day, and working with Roos in the hot kitchen would be tedious, but I nodded with a martyr’s air. Roos had been married to a policeman in Corpus Christi, Suzanne had told me, which seemed about right. She floated around the border with the dreamy solicitude of beaten wives, and even my offer of help with the dishes was met with a mild cower. I scrubbed gelatinous fug from their biggest stew pot, the colorless scraps of food gumming up the sponge. Guy was punishing me in his petty fashion, but I didn’t care.

• From What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire (2013)

  "A man eleven years younger than me, a boy really, who I had an affair with. I'm married ten years this week. I'm thirty-eight. We only saw each other maybe once a month, sometimes longer between. And we never talked by phone or email unless we were arranging to meet. Now I've broken it off. And I buy all kinds of outfits for him that he'll never see. The way he would look at me when I opened the door is what I hunger for. Or the afternoon he taught me how to really give a blow job, in my backyard next to my pool, the sun shining on us — I have never in my life wanted a cock in my mouth as badly as with that man. In replays now that it's over, I slide my mouth over a dildo I keep hidden. With my husband, I'm just making love."

• From Cultish (2021)

  “The prayers were so strange, all in another language,” Tasha, now twenty-nine, tells me over macadamia milk lattes at an outdoor café in West Hollywood. … Tasha, a first-generation Russian American Jew who experienced an agonizing lack of belonging her entire childhood, was struck by this yoga group’s sense of closeness, so she peeked her head into the lobby and asked the receptionist who they were. “The front-desk girl started telling me the basics; the phrase ‘the science of the mind’ was used a lot,” Tasha reflects. “I didn’t know what it meant, I just remember thinking, ‘Wow, I really want to try that.’” … “It felt ancient,” she says, “like I was a part of something holy.”

• From Holy Ghost Girl (2012)

  Everyone talked about heaven as a place where time stood still, but other than saying it had streets of gold, no one said much else about it. I imagined an embalmed sort of place. No color. No feeling. No gravity. People and angels flying off at random. I passed a neighbor’s house, tiny and cramped with a warren of rooms, each added on as time and money permitted. On the other side of the highway, a field of turned earth rolled on forever, or at least as far as I could see. Somewhere on the other side of all this, the world waited. The world with its music and books and cities and violence and terrible beauty. … My next thought came to me with a certainty so clear and strong it frightened me: I did not want to go to heaven. I didn’t mean it. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But I wasn’t sorry. Surely God knew that. I turned into the drive of the roadside cemetery.

• From When Breath Becomes Air (2016)

  At Stanford, I had the good fortune to study with Richard Rorty, perhaps the greatest living philosopher of his day, and under his tutelage I began to see all disciplines as creating a vocabulary, a set of tools for understanding human life in a particular way. Great literary works provided their own sets of tools, compelling the reader to use that vocabulary. For my thesis, I studied the work of Walt Whitman, a poet who, a century before, was possessed by the same questions that haunted me, who wanted to find a way to understand and describe what he termed “the Physiological-Spiritual Man.” As I finished my thesis, I could only conclude that Whitman had had no better luck than the rest of us at building a coherent “physiological-spiritual” vocabulary, but at least the ways in which he’d failed were illuminating. I was also increasingly certain that I had little desire to continue in literary studies, whose main preoccupations had begun to strike me as overly political and averse to science. One of my thesis advisers remarked that finding a community for myself in the literary world would be difficult, because most English PhDs reacted to science, as he put it, “like apes to fire, with sheer terror.” I wasn’t sure where my life was headed. My thesis—“Whitman and the Medicalization of Personality”—was well-received, but it was unorthodox, including as much history of psychiatry and neuroscience as literary criticism. It didn’t quite fit in an English department. I didn’t quite fit in an English department. Some of my closest friends from college were headed to New York City to pursue a life in the arts—some in comedy, others in journalism and television—and I briefly considered joining them and starting anew. But I couldn’t quite let go of the question: Where did biology, morality, literature, and philosophy intersect? Walking home from a football game one afternoon, the autumn breeze blowing, I let my mind wander. Augustine’s voice in the garden commanded, “Take up and read,” but the voice I heard commanded the opposite: “Set aside the books and practice medicine.” Suddenly, it all seemed obvious. Although—or perhaps because—my father, my uncle, and my elder brother were all doctors, medicine had never occurred to me as a serious possibility. But hadn’t Whitman himself written that only the physician could truly understand “the Physiological-Spiritual Man”? The next day, I consulted a premed adviser to figure out the logistics. Getting ready for medical school would take about a year of intense coursework, plus the application time, which added up to another eighteen months. It would mean letting my friends go to New York, to continue deepening those relationships, without me. It would mean setting aside literature. But it would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.

• From The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us (2023)

  They’re good girls with a twist; they’re all in touch with sexuality, but they have futures. By the time she wrote Forever , Judy was no longer pulling directly from her own experiences. She had come of age in the 1950s, when premarital sex represented a barrier that “nice girls” just didn’t cross. “When I was growing up, we had very firm rules about how far to go,” Blume wrote in Letters to Judy . “Nice girls didn’t go all the way. We were supposed to be virgins until we were safely married.” Although she knew girls who slipped up, Judy played within the lines, more or less. As she told a reporter for the Independent in 1999, “[I] was a virgin until I got married, or at least until I got engaged. But not even early in my engagement. Very late in my engagement,” she said. However, she was no stranger to sexual exploration. She was the envy of her friends because her parents trusted her to have her boyfriends over to their house in Elizabeth, where she’d make out with them in the sunroom. This gave her “years of kissing experience,” as she told a reporter in 1976. Blume later elaborated in the Independent , explaining that her mother and father allowed this because they were nervous about the dangers of “parking,” in which unsupervised high schoolers fooled around in dark cars. There were rumors of distracted kids getting attacked by bloodthirsty strangers. Just once, Judy decided to try it anyway. “I wanted to know what it would feel like to make out in a car,” she said. “No sooner had we pulled off the road than a cop was there at the window with a flashlight.” The policeman warned them that necking in the shadows was a recipe for getting assaulted. “He said, ‘Don’t do this—this is dangerous!’ ” Blume recalled. “And I said, ‘I know! I’ve never done it!’ ” She found other ways to sneak around the “nice girl” fence. “My friends and I played sexual games, sexual games between girlfriends, ending in orgasm,” she said in the same article. “I played with one friend—she and I took turns being the boy.” (Blume’s main characters in Wifey and 1998’s Summer Sisters have a similar history of same-sex exploration; like Judy, both protagonists grow up to sleep with and eventually marry men.) By the time Judy was a mother herself, the world had changed, as had her own perspective. Her marriage to John “lacked intimacy,” she told the Independent years after their divorce, and she found herself wondering what she had missed out on by settling down at an all but virginal age of twenty-one. She didn’t want Randy to have the same regrets. She knew that abstinence before the altar wasn’t realistic anymore, nor was it necessarily a recipe for an erotically fulfilling partnership. And so, Judy started imagining the new teenage girl: one who was nice—but also free.

• From Cultish (2021)

  These folks can be thought of as “nerds” because what they’re really doing is experimenting in corners of sexual culture that might not be considered conventionally cool or glamorous. Analogously, I like to think of certain cultish religious types as “spiritual nerds.” They’re the people who geek out on niche theological theories that others might not come across, who find themselves on a lifelong journey of reckoning with their life purpose and are willing to look outside the box to find it. “I’ve always been curious about the outskirts of society,” Abbie Shaw, the ex-Shambhalan, told me. “I grew up in a privileged family, a traditional synagogue, a big city. Now I’m a Buddhist and work on Skid Row.” There is nothing inherently wrong with spiritual nerdiness. Exploring different belief systems, taking nothing you’ve learned in Sunday school for granted, and coming to your own decisions is what so many twenty-first-century young people are already doing, to varying degrees. As Abbie said, “I’d been searching for a long time before Shambhala. I showed up and thought, ‘Let’s just see where this goes.’” But Abbie still struggles with how much unquestioned faith she had to put into her teachers. Sometimes she flashes back to a chant she had to recite daily called “the supplication for the Sakyong .” The chant reinforced members’ unending devotion to their leader, Trungpa’s successor, asking the Buddha to prolong his life. Abbie always had uneasy feelings about the Sakyong, and she bristled against this obligation to ritualistically exalt him. At the same time, she loved her community enough to assume the best and roll with it. Looking back, she’s disturbed by how long her trust was drawn out: “It was never supposed to be two years of my life,” she confessed. Sticking with the kink metaphor, there’s only one way to have a constructive, nontraumatizing experience using whips and bondage, and it’s by having a key component down pat: consent. You have to have a safe word so that your partner knows exactly when you want out. Kink fundamentally doesn’t work without this. Metaphorically, you need a safe word with religion, too. When you’re experimenting with faith and belief, there has to be room to ask questions, express your misgivings, and seek outside information, both early on and deep into your membership. “The most important thing to remember is that if something is legitimate, it will stand up to scrutiny,” Steven Hassan told me. In 2018, Abbie had already decided to leave Shambhala when a bombshell news story surfaced. That summer, the New York Times published a series of grievous report s accusing the Sakyong of sexual assault. A group of ex-Shambhala women united to bring forward their testimonies about not just the Sakyong, but also some high-ranking teachers. Abbie released a pensive exhale: “It was surreal to watch this whole community crumble.” Soon after the controversy, Abbie quietly slipped out of Vermont.

• From Summer Sisters (1998)

  Was she going to waste her Harvard degree on some career that wouldn’t pay chicken feathers or was she going to get out there and make him proud! “I am not going to law school,” Jocelyn told Vix. “I’ll get myself a decent day job, someplace where I have access to editing equipment, and I’ll make him proud my way!” Vix’s parents weren’t pushing for anything. Tawny had dropped out of her life, dropped out of all their lives, and her father’s hopes and dreams for her, if he had any, were never articulated. Maia thought she was lucky. “You don’t have to live up to anyone’s expectations but your own.” Caitlin called from Buenos Aires. “I’m studying dance.” “Dance?” “Yes. Flamenco. I think I’ve found my true calling.” “Flamenco dancing?” “Yes. I think it’s important to pursue my talents at this time. I can always take academic classes but the day will come when I won’t be able to dance.” The only kind of dancing she’d ever seen Caitlin do was disco. “Is this a career move?” Vix asked. “God, Vix … listen to yourself! Not everything has to lead to a career. I’d rather have talent than a career.” “You mean a career based on your talent?” “No … I mean just have the talent.” “But what would be the point?” “Not everything has to have a point. Some things just are.” “That doesn’t make any sense.” “Half of what I say doesn’t make any sense to you.” “I’m listening. I’m trying to understand.” “No, you’re not. You’ve already made up your mind.” “That’s not fair.” “Maybe it’s not … but that’s what I’m hearing.” “Tell me about Argentina.” “I adore it here. I adore Argentine men.” “Tell me you’re not going to be the next Evita.” “I’m not going to be the next Evita.” “Good.” “I suppose if I ask you to come for the summer you’ll refuse?” “Not necessarily.” “Vix … that would be incredible! Is it really a possibility?” “I don’t know. It all depends on jobs … and things … ” “Things being Bru?” “Things being things.” “You’ll let me know?” “I’ll let you know.” The children she interviewed were excited about sharing their ideas of heaven with her. Sometimes, in the middle of taping them, she’d find herself choking up, missing Nathan. Heaven? I’m gonna get there real soon. I could try to let you know what it’s like, if you tell me where you live. I’ll call , Hey, Victoria … and when you look up you’ll see me flying in the sky and I’ll be wearing this beautiful blue dress and my hair will be so long it’ll trail behind me. I might be on a horse, one of those angel horses with wings . I think you gotta work up there. You gotta sign up for either angel or messenger or something like that. You got so many people down here to watch out for.

• From Between the World and Me (2015)

  But oh, my eyes. When I was a boy, no portion of my body suffered more than my eyes. If I have done well by the measures of childhood, it must be added that those measures themselves are hampered by how little a boy of my captive class had seen. The Dream seemed to be the pinnacle, then—to grow rich and live in one of those disconnected houses out in the country, in one of those small communities, one of those cul-de-sacs with its gently curving ways, where they staged teen movies and children built treehouses, and in that last lost year before college, teenagers made love in cars parked at the lake. The Dream seemed to be the end of the world for me, the height of American ambition. What more could possibly exist beyond the dispatches, beyond the suburbs? Your mother knew. Perhaps it was because she was raised within the physical borders of such a place, because she lived in proximity with the Dreamers. Perhaps it was because the people who thought they were white told her she was smart and followed this up by telling her she was not really black, meaning it as a compliment. Perhaps it was the boys out there, who were in fact black, telling her she was “pretty for a dark-skin girl.” Your mother never felt quite at home, and this made the possibility of some other place essential to her, propelling her to The Mecca, propelling her to New York and then beyond. On her thirtieth birthday she took a trip to Paris. I am not sure you remember. You were only six. We spent that week eating fried fish for breakfast and cake for dinner, leaving underwear on the counter, and blasting Ghostface Killah. It had never occurred to me to leave America—not even temporarily. My eyes. My friend Jelani, who came up the same as me, once said that he used to think of traveling as a pointless luxury, like blowing the rent check on a pink suit. And I felt much the same, then. I was bemused at your mother’s dreams of Paris. I could not understand them—and I did not think I needed to. Some part of me was still back in that seventh-grade French class, thinking only of the immediate security of my body, regarding France as one might regard Jupiter.