The Heart's Invisible Furies

by John Boyne

In my mother’s opinion, Jack Smoot and Seán MacIntyre were as different as chalk and cheese, so it surprised her that they were such good friends. Where Seán was outgoing and affable to the point of innocence, Smoot was a darker and more reticent figure, given, she would discover, to prolonged periods of brooding and introspection that occasionally veered toward despair. “The world,” he would remark to her a few weeks into their acquaintance, “is a terrible place and it was our misfortune to be have been born into it.”

These 2 characters become important later. Good to know how they are described initially.

“What you know about women,” replied Maude, “could be written in large font on the back of a postage stamp and there’d still be room for the Lord’s Prayer.

Max was living proof that it doesn’t matter if people love you or loathe you; as long as they know who you are, you can make a good living.

“Why do they hate us so much anyway?” I asked after a lengthy pause. “If they’re not queer themselves, then what does it matter to them if someone else is?” “I remember a friend of mine once telling me that we hate what we fear in ourselves,” she said with a shrug. “Perhaps that has something to do with it.”

Sex hovered around the edges of our lives like an anxious guest at a party.

His cheeks were sunken, as were his eyes, and a dark oval of purple-red sent a hideous bruise along his chin and down his neckline. A line came into my mind, something that Hannah Arendt had once said about the poet Auden: that life had manifested the heart’s invisible furies on his face. He looked a hundred years old. He looked like a man who had died several months earlier. He looked like a soul in pure torment.

“But I’m glad we adopted you,” he added. “You’re a good boy. A kind boy. You always were.” I felt a curious sensation inside myself and was unable to identify it until, on further examination, I realized that I was a little moved. This was probably the nicest thing he had ever said to me in the forty-nine years that we’d known each other. “And you weren’t a bad father,” I lied. “All things considered.”

You won’t understand this but it’s something that every girl realizes at some point in her life, usually when she’s around fifteen or sixteen. Maybe it’s even younger now. That she has more power than every man in the room combined, because men are weak and governed by their desires and their desperate need for women but women are strong. I’ve always believed that if women could only collectively harness the power that they have then they’d rule the world.

I love this sentiment!