My Favorite Terrible Thing

by Madeleine Henry

My cynicism has been shaped by a lifetime of being overlooked, starting with parents who drank until it killed them when I was a teen.

I would hate to give this life to my daughter

The best part of this apartment is the packed bookshelves. I have every genre except nonfiction, which feels too preachy. I get enough of that in real life—people who think they’re better than me, telling me what’s true.

Because she’s learned how to make a living out of being forgettable. Out of being white space. Out of being everyone and no one.

“You need to rip your story out of real life.” She said that all tensions in a novel, all emotions, have to come from somewhere real in order to resonate with people. “Careful,” she warned, “because if you do it right, you might rip yourself out of the real world too.” Almost too prescient.

In my experience, goal-oriented types are the most prone to miss something obvious. Because they only see one thing at a time. They focus on their current project. The rest can slip past them.

“Last weekend is what happens when I get stuck in a good memory. The bad ones? Those are worse than nightmares because I know my memories are real.”

“Most people have strong feelings, then let them go,” she says. “It’s part of becoming an adult. Learning how to—lose. Bad ideas. Friendships that ran their course. Goals that aren’t worth it in the end. Growing up is giving up on the right things.”

I’d never had sex with a woman before, definitely not with anyone as elegant as Siobhan. Siobhan, who was from Connecticut but who’d gone to middle school in London. Siobhan, who wore pearl studs, played squash, and had two Tibetan mastiffs at home, Valentine and Watson. Her privilege was like a perfume. We had sex standing up. She leaned back against her door, pushing her pelvis toward me. Her back arched like syrup dripping off a spoon. Afterward, we lay on her bed, drenched in moonlight. She fell asleep with one hand on my breast, one smooth leg crooked over my thighs. I slipped out of her place before she woke up.

“And now we’re finding that trauma isn’t just about what happens to you. It’s about what doesn’t happen. It’s about all the good times that you didn’t have. All the good people who weren’t there. It’s harder to measure what never existed, but that’s what we’re starting to do. We’re measuring what was missing. We’re taking the dimensions of those holes and their consequences. The results are extraordinary. Tragic and extraordinary. We’re finding that the longer people go without certain crucial and nourishing experiences, the deeper the damage.