I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

Okay, bitch, thanks anyway. Give it the fuck back to me and I’ll be on my way.

“Make us,” I say. “You’re already made and what a mess.”

And for another thing, Leo talking about abstinence is like Donald Trump talking about altruism.

The Uses of Enchantment, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, The King and the Corpse.

“In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I’ll tell you about it because I am here and you are distant.”

I’m twenty-five years old, Dominick, and I can’t even say that I ever had one real girlfriend. Isn’t that pitiful?

I figured I’d take my Percoset prescription and that Happy Holidays bottle of Scotch I’d gotten and just Kevorkian myself.

“Your museum of pain. Your sanctuary of justifiable indignation.”

You are a meticulous steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you. Or, if you prefer, we could call you a scrupulous coroner.”

But what are our stories if not the mirrors we hold up to our fears?”

“Life is not a series of isolated ponds and puddles; life is this river you see below, before you. It flows from the past through the present on its way to the future.

“Life is a river,” she repeated. “Only in the most literal sense are we born on the day we leave our mother’s womb. In the larger, truer sense, we are born of the past—connected to its fluidity, both genetically and experientially.”

I love you, Ma. I hate you. . .

Something I was just starting to figure out myself: how much I hated my mother for putting me on guard duty my whole life. For making me their sentry. . . .

And the repetition had already begun to lull me, numb me—make me feel the blows a little less each time they savaged him. . . .

Renovate your life, the old myths say, and the universe is yours.

that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed.

I am not a smart man, particularly, but one day, at long last, I stumbled from the dark woods of my own, and my family’s, and my country’s past, holding in my hands these truths: that love grows from the rich loam of forgiveness; that mongrels make good dogs; that the evidence of God exists in the roundness of things. This much, at least, I’ve figured out. I know this much is true.