Hillbilly Elegy

guilty and desperately afraid. For so
much of my life, I’d made Mom out to be
a kind of villain. And now I was acting
like her. Nothing compares to the fear
that you’re becoming the monster in your
closet.
During that second year of law
school, Usha and I traveled to D.C. for
follow-up interviews with a few law
firms. I returned to our hotel room,
dejected that I had just performed poorly
with one of the firms I really wanted to
work for. When Usha tried to comfort
me, to tell me that I’d probably done
better than I expected, but that even if I
hadn’t, there were other fish in the sea, I
exploded. “Don’t tell me that I did fine,”