Reprieve, or A Hiatus from All Things Orange-y and Thuggish and Shameful

 

This series on Hulu: Nada.

And this at your library: What Comes Next and How to Like It by Abigail Thomas.

Anytime I’m reading an especially delicious book I have to keep flipping to the end to study the flyleaf photo. Who is this person who’s writing? I stare and stare. Thomas’s book, the additional photo on the back cover has her more dolled up, but I promise you, she’s the real deal.

She tells of an old pain—what felt like an egregious betrayal, by two people she loved. “Time has passed,” she writes. “I have metabolized this stuff, I think, but every once in a while it returns in its original form and towers over everything. Like grief.” She loves the two, they love her, and as she puts it, “Forgiveness was never an issue.” She adds, “What is forgiveness anyway? It seems to me the only person you can forgive is yourself.”

She asks Chuck—you’ll enjoy her friend Chuck, or maybe you won’t—“Why does forgiveness irritate me so much?”

Chuck replies, “Because it’s the ultimate act of passive aggression.”

Her sister’s answer, too, knocks me over. She says, “Because it keeps sin alive.”