I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

Because Ray was a bully, I showed him as often as possible that Thomas was the weaker brother. Fed him Thomas to save myself.

There’s a big aching hole in my chest now where my heart was And a hole in the sky where God used to be

She had no idea what they could or couldn’t afford. For another thing, from what he read and heard down at the shipyard, half the teachers at those colleges were Communists. And half the kids were on drugs.

“I was in a nine-year relationship with a substance abuser, that’s all. So I know all about running interference. Being someone else’s main line of defense.

It is the way we teach our children to cope with a world too large and chaotic for them to comprehend. A world that seems, at times, too random. Too indifferent. Of course, the religions of the world will do the same for you, whether you’re a Hindu or a Christian or a Rosicrucian. They’re brother and sister, really: children’s fables and religious parables.

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

“Well, yes, memory is selective, Dominick. An interpretation of the facts as we recall them, accurate or not. But what we select to remember can be very instructive. Don’t you think?”

during this process, you try not to disown your insights.”

“The point is this: that the stream of memory may lead you to the river of understanding. And understanding, in turn, may be a tributary to the river of forgiveness.

I closed my eyes, repeated that I’d be fine.

Get over it, I told myself. Ancient history.

“Just let me give you a hand with that house, all right?” he said. “Because that’s what I can handle right now. . . . That’s what I can contribute.”

If you want to file a personal claim, press one. If you want to file a business claim, press two. If your entire life’s going down the toilet, please stay on the line.

Dredging up your whole childhood as if you were dragging the bottom for a dead body. And then what? What was the point? . . .

Why was I even doing this? Because you’re looking for help, I reminded myself. For answers.

And hey, hadn’t I finally gotten what I always wanted? Separation? Free agency? Be careful what you wish for.

You want to go forward? Go back.

She told me I should keep reading—that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways.

“Your museum of pain. Your sanctuary of justifiable indignation.” “I, uh . . .” “We all superintend such a place, I suppose,” she said, “although some of us are more painstaking curators than others.

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.”

For you to take responsibility for circumstances beyond your control is both counterproductive and—”

“Well, do me a favor, please. Give me a demonstration of these great powers you have to direct the course of things. Throw open the window, please, and call to the river. Tell it you want it to stop flowing in its present direction and reverse itself. Let me see this power of yours.”

To assume that the river would ignore its inevitable course and bend to your wishes? You are limited, my friend, in what you can and cannot control, as are we all. If you are to become healthy, you must acknowledge the ineluctability of your brother’s course. Acknowledge your limitations in directing it, Dominick. And that will free you. That will help to make you well.”

“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.”

Oppression, man: the “haves” kicking the “have-nots” in the teeth, kicking them while they were down. Might was right, eh,

“Where there is no shadow, there is no light.

The key to peace within my soul, he said, was to cast aside my bitterness and resentment.

Forgiveness is the rich loam from which love can grow. And it is love, not grudge-tending, that will make your home a godly place.”

Because our history was more than just the crash-and-burn ending.

Dessa said it amazed her to think how self-assured she had been at that point in her life—how confident she was that if she just planned a future, that that would be the future she would have. “Look how young we were,” she said. “No wonder.”

“Things get clearer when you’re older,” he said. “Of course, by then it’s too late.”

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

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.