More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
My mother loves to argue, and love is the only argument you can win by saying yes.
All fathers believe they are God, and I took it for granted that my father especially believed it.
If he lived on earth, he would have a white truck, plastered with bumper stickers of Calvin peeing on a smaller Calvin who is not a Catholic.”
“No!” he shouted. Like all men of enormous personal appetites, he loved to shout the word “no” at other people.
“Besides,” he says, “the craziness was in the house. It was like a weather, or an endless guitar solo, or a radio broadcast that never stops playing. I knew once you left, it would be all right.”
All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth. Its hands are full of the crispest and most persuasive currency. Its mouth is full of received, repeating language. The we closes its ranks to protect the space inside it, where the air is different. It does not protect people. It protects its own shape.
The story of a family is always a story of complicity. It’s about not being able to choose the secrets you’ve been let in on. The question, for someone who was raised in a closed circle and then leaves it, is what is the us, and what is the them, and how do you ever move from one to the other?
“I can see right through you,” my father used to tell me when I was little, and the cringe of that feeling, of being transparent to God and everyone, was so strong that I swore off all forms of autobiography for a long time. How could I be sure I was telling the truth about myself when he claimed to know me better than I did? How could I state anything with absolute certainty—whether I liked a particular song, or wanted to get up and go for a walk, or even whether I was hungry or thirsty?
It is probably the last conversation like this the seminarian and I will have. After his ordination, particular friendships with women will be discouraged. I understand why, but in a wider sense, it is frightening. If you are not friends with women, they are theoretical to you.
The voices that ring hardest in our heads are not the perfect voices. They are the voices with an additional dimension, which is pain.
And the answer, “Then I would die,” while we, the children who would be left behind, watched from the corners of the room.
On my way out the doors, I walk past the holy water and almost dip my hand in to genuflect and make the sign of the cross. Memories of religion reside mostly in the body, as if it’s a light gold sport that you played during childhood in a vacant lot.
“I know everything you’re thinking,” he would say to me, like a hypnotist. “Everything that’s in your mind. You’re never, ever going to say something I’m not expecting, because you’re exactly like me.”
The desire to describe voice, gesture, skin color, is a desire to eat, take over, make into part of the pattern. I am happy every time to see a writer fail at this. I am happy every time to see real personhood resist our tricks. I am happy to see bodies insist that they are not shut up in this book, they are elsewhere. The tomb is empty, rejoice, he is not here.
I know all women are supposed to be strong enough now to strangle presidents and patriarchies between their powerful thighs, but it doesn’t work that way. Many of us were actually affected, by male systems and male anger, in ways we cannot always articulate or overcome.
Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, Who would I be if I hadn’t been frightened? What hurt me, and what would I be if it hadn’t?
