The Shards

by Bret Easton Ellis

My parents would be away most of the fall, traveling through Europe on a number of cruises trying to repair their flailing marriage after numerous separations and I had zero interest in the outcome—divorce was preferable to the agonies that the marriage played out, and it became increasingly apparent as I moved through my adolescence that I wasn’t particularly close to either my mother or my father. We were all distant from each other even though the public façade, the Boomer narrative, suggested otherwise: the Christmas card with the posed family photo emblazoned on it, the sleepovers I had where my mother acted like a concerned chaperone checking in on us as we watched the Z Channel, the days at the beach club with Thom and Jeff and Kyle that my father oversaw and where he acted as if he was our best friend—all of it seemed fake, performative, unreal. There was no doubt my parents loved me and if pressed I would admit I loved them back but I was becoming an autonomous adult and realized that I didn’t need them in the ways I once had.