The Latecomer

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

He wasn’t in despair; he was just tumbling, perpetually tumbling, relentlessly at the mercy of that terrible weightlessness and the betrayal of gravity. No one could conceivably understand that, so what could be the point of telling them?

When the world is tipping beneath you and you are tumbling even when you are sitting, even when you are sleeping (especially when you are sleeping), any place is the same as any other place.

All this, like every other private thing, he would tell only one person, who would one day tell us.

(She also ended up switching her major to child psychology, which in time would afford her not the slightest insight into any of her children, at least not when it mattered.)

It was supposed to just happen in the way it had always happened, something along the lines of open legs, insert penis, bring forth offspring.

she had no idea how to be a parent. None. She knew only, thanks to her own parents, how not to be one.

It was less an affair than a parallel marriage with different terms, and Salo had no idea what, if anything, his mother knew about it.

Individually they were a credit to themselves, if not to her. But as a family, they were still a failure.

I have given too much, our mother thought. And she had asked far, far too little in return.

The truth was that I just didn’t particularly “see myself” anywhere at all.