The Long Goodbye: A Memoir

by Meghan O'Rourke

I’m not sure that I buy this, but psychologists theorize that grief is sometimes connected to your general level of anxiety and the kind of attachments—secure, insecure, avoidant, ambivalent—you have to others. My anxiety level has always been high. As a toddler, I hated the feeling that my socks were wrinkling under my feet, and in the morning would ask my parents to take my shoes off and put them on over and over until I felt my socks were not, as I put it, “scrabbled.” The world frightened me: when there was lightning outside my window, I took it personally. It seemed that everything was here only to be lost. The world was beautiful and it would be taken from me; I would die, and so would everything I loved. People seemed loud, drunk, violent, unpredictable.