Broken People: A Novel

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.

“I guess I just always thought that people are the way we are,” he said. “Like, we grow and evolve, to a certain extent, and maybe our behavior changes, but so much of what makes us ourselves is innate, or intractable. But what if the bad stuff is like a parasite? What if it’s something you can actually isolate and remove, like—I don’t know, spirit

It’s not about what you remember. It’s about why you remember it that way.

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.

The very act of telling the story was not like photography; he didn’t know how to capture moments as they were. It was more like sculpture, starting from the raw materials of lived experience and chiseling away at it until it had revealed what he wanted to see, or what he thought the world wanted to see.

the best available substitute for love. How did that happen?

We’re not with her in the present as she’s falling in love, we’re with her as she goes back into her memories, with all the grief and longing and distance that comes with the passage of time.

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.”