Broken People: A Novel

Instead, there was a louder thought, a thought Sam had never had before: that is just another person existing in his body. And it was true. That was all he was. It was so simple that it was almost maddening.

For so long all the things that happened to me were just these—these different parts, this jumble of disconnected incidents that didn’t mean anything on their own. And now it feels like all those bones took shape and became a skeleton. Something assembled. It became a whole body.”

It felt like the punchline: to see now, so clearly, the way he had turned the people in his life into characters. He’d picked the narrative, then fit people, in his experience of them, to reinforce it. What if you don’t do that anymore? he thought.

You have to keep making the choice to fix yourself. Every time you choose to be nice to yourself instead of being unkind. Every time you decide to experience life fully in all its shades of joy and sorrow. Every time you participate in the boring drudgery of self-care. The whole thing was the healing—everything that came before and everything that’

This was the thing that he knew now, that he had never quite understood before: the way memory could be both the lock and the key, how easily it kept him in the bondage of old stories he didn’t need anymore, and how easily, too, it could show him everything he needed to know about who he was.

That elemental sense of brokenness, of being wrong, of being bad—it all lived right here in this room, like a filing cabinet, where Sam compiled the experiences that proved there was something wrong with him. All of the memories associated with the reinforcement of this belief were stored in this place. It was an evidence room.

And this is how I always moved through my life—trying to prove this thesis, collecting data to support my most deeply held belief, which was that I was bad.

“You know, you think your pain is so monumental, but it’s actually pretty mundane. This is just normal stuff, not some great human theater. It’s what people go through.

“I think we all do that, don’t we?” Buck said. “We all, you know, tell stories about ourselves and get attached to the version of us that we think we are. You just made yours public.”