Tag: empathy

‘he wasn’t all there…’

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Uncle Arch…We drove past the front door pretty much every time we visited Dad’s parents but we only went inside on one occasion. My sole memory is that one wall of the living room was unrendered and that the place had an air of profound sadness, though the latter may have been my own projection. He never came to Christmas lunch at our house with his brother and sister-in-law. I can only assume he wasn’t invited. In our entire lives Fiona and I saw him a handful of times at most, during that single visit and at a couple of family funerals and weddings. He seemed placid and slow and a little scruffy, but otherwise not greatly different from many other guests. He never married, never had children. I don’t think he worked. Later when I asked Mum about him she said, ‘He wasn’t all there,’ and refused to elaborate so that I have no idea whether he had some kind of learning difficulty or whether he was heavily medicated for a psychiatric illness, but he lived independently into his sixties so whatever difficulties he faced were not insuperable ones. I’ve since worked with many people like Uncle Arch, the kind of people we pass all too easily in the street, forgetting that they have stories and experiences and interior lives of as much value as our own but who get pushed to the edge of society, who are excluded from family events because they’re seen as shameful, because their personal hygiene isn’t perfect, because they might behave inappropriately, because we don’t know how to behave in their presence. I can’t think about Uncle Arch without thinking of how completely and how effectively he was written out of our lives, and I’m embarrassed to admit that I never once looked around the table at Christmas lunch and thought about him sitting eating his Christmas lunch alone four miles away.

— Mark Haddon, Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour (Doubleday, February 17, 2026)

Notes:

I burst into tears. Love is hell.

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Tonight I see what looks to be a tick on the dog’s eyelid. I get a pair of tweezers from the bathroom and kneel to remove it. He looks at me askance but lies there in beatific patience. I smooth the fine yellow fur on his head, apply the tweezers to the tick, and clamp down. But it is not a tick—just a little black growth above his eye. A stream of blood trickles down his snout, and he doesn’t flinch. I gasp. He leans forward and licks my hand, to forgive me for hurting him, with blood in his fur. I burst into tears. Love is hell.

— Daniel Poppick, “The Copywriter: A Novel” (Scribner, February 3, 2026)

Notes:

  • Book: I Loved it. Not recommended / Cautiously recommended.
  • NY Times Book Review of “The Copywriter” here. Notable quote from review: “It’s simultaneously a quotidian task — it’s just another copywriting assignment — and also a monumental moral decision. In action, it may seem like a small choice, but in a vast and ugly universe, sometimes small choices are all we have.”

Lightly Child, Lightly.

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I made a brief visit to see my parents…My father was in the backyard feeding the birds. I hesitated to disturb him but felt an urgency to see him and quietly slipped out back. He was standing at the end of the yard with his back toward me with arms outstretched. As I stood in silence the birds flew to him and covered him, as if a fresco from the painter Giotto’s life cycle of St. Francis of Assisi. I could feel the birds’ affection for him, not merely because he fed them, but because they were responding to his innate goodness. At that moment I had no doubt that he was of a hallowed tribe. Not a perfect man, nor had he produced any known miracle, yet he had the simplicity of a saint, and I the saint’s errant daughter. Somehow sensing my presence, he turned as the birds flew above him and looked at me. Hello doll, he said. Hello, Daddy, I answered.

— Patti Smith, Bread of Angels: A Memoir (Random House, November 4, 2025)

Notes:

…because you make me dream…

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Into the car with the passionate taxi driver. “You stay young forever,” the man told me, whipping around moodily, “because you look good.” And drew a meditative face with his hand over his face… “Kind,” he said to himself, “you seem kind. I speak English to you,” he said, “because you make me dream.”

— Patricia Lockwood, Will There Ever Be Another You: A Novel (Riverhead Books, September 23, 2025)

Notes:

  • Some real nuggets in this book but regrettably cannot (NOT, absolutely NOT, unless you are a masochist) recommend this book.
  • NY Times Book Review by Dwight Garner: “A Novel That Captures the Agony and Absurdity of Covid Brain Fog. In “Will There Ever Be Another You,” Patricia Lockwood recounts the pandemic’s devastating effects on her life.”
  • Image: Boston Globe by Greg Hoax

Don’t be so afraid of losing life that you forget to live it.

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Poet Andrea Gibson died on July 14, 2025 at the age of 49 from Ovarian cancer. Here’s some excerpts from an essay written by her friend and fellow poet Amber Tamblyn from a NY Times article titled: “A Poet Who Advocated Radical Tenderness“.

“Andrea had a unique ability to offer their readers and listeners a way of living, to show us how much we need tenderness, and how to be tender as a radical act. One of the last poems they wrote, “Love Letter From the Afterlife,” was written…for a fractured world. It asks us to do what might feel impossible right now: Soften toward, not away from, one another, even at such a heightened time of vitriol and hate. It was written by a poet who lived their brief life with a consciousness of something bigger than themselves — a collective belief, whether we are aware of it or not, that all of us long to feel less alone. […]

In a poem titled, “How The Worst Day of My Life Became the Best,” Andrea wrote:

When I realized the storm
was inevitable, I made it
my medicine.

Took two snowflakes
on the tongue in the morning,
two snowflakes on the tongue
by noon.

There were no side effects.
Only sound effects. Reverb
added to my lifespan,
an echo that asked—

What part of your life’s record is skipping?
What wound is on repeat?
Have you done everything you can
to break out of that groove?

[…} In 2023, a video Andrea made on lessons they learned after learning their cancer was now incurable, went viral. On a drive, they said, they had done the bravest thing they had ever done. “I picked my head up and I loved the world that I knew wouldn’t always be mine.” They went on, “I think many of us are doing it almost all the time; we are not allowing ourselves joy or love or peace because we are afraid to lose it. Don’t be so afraid of losing life that you forget to live it.” […]

Photo: AP Photo/Chris Pizzello