Broken People: A Novel

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.

grinning at the pleasure of having found one another, at the stupid and endlessly affirming joy of being in love.

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’

“Really? I think of self-loathing as being so universal. We all have so many symptoms.”

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.

How many nights had Sam spent in high school waiting for drugs to kick in, waiting for some promised effect to take him out of his reality into another one?

“Most of the time it all feels like it’s happening really far away from me. Like the world is something that’s happening to other people, but not to me. Maybe it’s just that there’s so much clutter already in my brain that I can’t take in anything else. As if all of my anxieties are a barrier between me and all the things I should be worried about.

He had never loved things that much until they were

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.