Hillbilly Elegy

anyway—leave. He’d always ask me,
‘What’s wrong with you? Why do you
fight with me like I’m your enemy?’”
The answer is that, in our home, it was
often difficult to tell friend from foe.
Sixteen years later, though, and Lindsay
is still married.
I thought a lot about myself, about the
emotional triggers I’d learned over
eighteen years of living at home. I
realized that I mistrusted apologies, as
they were often used to convince you to
lower your guard. It was an “I’m sorry”
that convinced me to take that fateful car
ride with Mom more than a decade
earlier. And I began to understand why I
used words as weapons: That’s what