“‘This is Diana—our family dropout,’ my mother said for the fifteenth Thanksgiving in a row, but when my sister’s new husband reached across the table to shake my hand, his grip locked, his face went still, and the room forgot how to laugh before he said the two words nobody there was prepared to hear”

my memory, I can see what I couldn’t see at the time. How much love was in it, and how little it had to do with what I actually needed.

Freshman year at UVA was, by all external measures, fine. I performed well. I made friends. The campus was beautiful in the specific, self-aware way that old Virginia institutions can be, all red brick and white columns continue reading …