I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

She saw it over and over again in her male patients, she said—it could probably qualify as an epidemic among American men: this stubborn reluctance to embrace our wholeness—this stoic denial that we had come from our mothers as well as our fathers. It was sad, really—tragic. So wasteful of human lives, as our wars and drive-by shootings kept proving to us; all one had to do was turn on CNN or CBS News. And yet, it was comic, too—the lengths most men went to to prove that they were “tough guys.” The gods must look down upon us, laughing and crying simultaneously.