How to Apologize: Reflections on Forgiveness, Self-Forgiveness, and the Paradox of Doing the Right Thing

“It’s permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn’t do, pitiful, beautiful human.”

“An honorable human relationship… in which two people have the right to use the word ‘love,'” Adrienne Rich wrote, “is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.”

And yet if the two pillars of friendship and loving relation are truth and tenderness, as Emerson believed, something terrible and irreconcilable happ...