Tracy Flick Can't Win

by Tom Perrotta

I felt a familiar pang of separation, the melancholy awareness that my daughter’s real life—at least her favorite parts—took place in my absence.

Lance walked out on her right after the holidays, no warning at all, unless you count years of unhappiness as a warning.

You failed. You did the best you could. You failed. You did the best you could. Both those statements were true, and I accepted the mixed verdict. I was an adult; I had no choice. But I desperately wanted to go back in time, to find the girl I used to be and tell her how sorry I was for letting her down, that fierce young woman who never had a chance, the one who got crushed.

The past is always looking over your shoulder, whispering things you don’t want to hear.

They just kept coming, these young people, wave after wave of them, beautiful and full of energy, hungry for the world. It gets to be too much after a while.

I’d learned from bitter experience that there was no justice in the world, and that I would never get what I deserved. My mother had been wrong: fame wasn’t a reward for your hard work. It was a lottery, pure dumb luck, and it didn’t matter anyway, not in the long run. That was the whole point of the poem. There’s no such thing as immortality; all our striving is in vain. In the end, we’ll all be forgotten, every single one of us, the winners and the losers alike.