The Candy House

by Jennifer Egan

realized that the person Damon had reminded me of was myself: another white male who’d managed to blow through countless advantages and opportunities and fail catastrophically. The knowledge that he’d fared worse than I had was depressing, literally. I became depressed.

My ability to stay sober was more than explained by my ACE score, the metric for Adverse Childhood Experiences, which in my case was an almost unheard-of zero. Loving family; no incarceration, addictions, or domestic violence—all of which raised the question of why I’d turned to drugs in the first place.

and anyway, we’re all in our fifties—do people even ask what we’re “doing” anymore? Hasn’t that already been decided?

my failure, so much failure—failure everywhere I looked. I had tried, Lord, I had tried. But it wasn’t enough; it was nothing.

While our exchange is not entirely friendly, there is the encouraging fact that we’ve reached line seven without awkwardness, defining awkwardness as conversation consisting of a series of futile attempts to solve the problem of what to say next.

We fell into chastened silence. We were learning something right then: People project their internal states onto the landscape. Our father was sixty-five. He’d been through a lot. He still had plenty of vitality, but not enough to reinvent his business. All he could see was an end.

We were twenty-three and twenty-four, still near enough to college that functioning as adults felt like pulling something off.

I imagine threading my way among Rollerbladers and dancers and grifters and stoned teens, past acres of sunbathers shielding their eyes to study their screens while invisible entities study them in return.

Tim Breezely drinks because he’s depressed, but that isn’t a word he would use. Tim drinks to feel happy. He drinks because, after several bourbons, he’s overcome by a sensation of soaring lightness, as if he’d finally set down a pair of heavy valises he didn’t realize he was carrying.

But my problem is the same one had by everyone who gathers information: What to do with it? How to sort and shape and use it? How to keep from drowning in it? Not every story needs to be told.

Tim Breezely will soon divorce—they’ll all divorce—everyone will divorce. An entire generation will throw off the fetters of rote commitment in favor of invention, hope—and we, their children, will try to locate the moment we lost them and worry that it was our fault.

I have “memories” that are really just pictures from the albums our mother loved to make,

She was not unique, but neither was she alone. Reading might have saved her.