You Don't Have to Live Like This: A Novel by Benjamin Markovits

by Benjamin Markovits

A frighteningly prescient novel of today’s America—one man’s story of a racially-charged real estate experiment in Detroit, Michigan“You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but most of the pressure on you is just momentum. As soon as you stop the momentum goes away. It’s easier than people think to walk out on things, I mean things like cities, leases, relationships and jobs.” —From You Don’t Have to Live Like ThisGreg Marnier, Marny to his friends, leaves a job he doesn’t much like and moves to Detroit, Michigan in 2009, where an old friend has a big idea about real estate and the revitalization of a once great American city. Once there, he gets involved in a fist-fight between two of his friends, a racially charged trial, an act of vigilante justice, a love affair with a local high school teacher, and a game of three-on-three basketball with the President—not to mention the money-soaked real estate project itself, cut out of 600 acres of emaciated Detroit. Marny’s billionaire buddy from Yale, Robert James, calls his project “the Groupon model for gentrification,” others call it “New Jamestown,” and Marny calls it home— until Robert James asks him to leave. This is the story of what went wrong.You Don’t Have to Live Like This is the breakout novel from the “fabulously real” (Guardian) voice of the only American included in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Using the framework of our present reality, Benjamin Markovits blurs the line between the fictional and the fact-based, and captures an invisible current threaded throughout American politics, economics, and society that is waiting to explode.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, Unfinished, Literary Fiction, The United States Of America, Book Club

Hardcover

First published June 30, 2015

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Our first person narrator Greg Marnier is a massive Olympic-gold-medal-standard dweeb and overdescribes his daily life in hair-tearing facepalming detail. So achingly dull is most of this hefty book that many readers have launched it at the wall even before the statutory 100 pages amidst cries of “I can’t stand this no more” or “I’d rather have my face eaten by one of them revolting face eating alien things from that movie we saw last month”. If only these readers would have stuck around till page 172, which is when something actually happens.

I too was one of those readers emitting muffled groans and sotto voce expletives and I was on the tippytoes of writing yet another famously cruel one star denunciation when I had an attack of perverseness.

This was my perverse thought : I have tried a number of GR four ‘n’ five star rated novels recently and I have not liked them. Therefore I will plough on with this almost-universally-derided-by-GR novel and see if I am now actually living in the Bizarro world where up is down and boring is exciting and fish are men and men are fish.

Well, boring did stay boring but gradually, ever so slowly, I got to almost enjoy the terrible tedium. Okay, now you are wanting to know just how tedious this narrator and his life is. So here he is at the top of his game, a true virtuoso of the banal observation.

Around ten o’clock I undressed and pissed and brushed my teeth, and then read in bed for a while without taking much in.

We were driving around in his Oldsmobile, not really going anywhere but just driving around. It was another fine blue May afternoon, with a bit of breeze to make it cool in the shade. But the car got hot in the sunlight, which was clear and direct. Those big leather front-row bench seats get hot pretty quick.

He read history books and liked to explain why he disagreed with them. He also watched a lot of TV and sometimes told me in the morning what he planned to watch later in the day.

His skin was very pink, though he probably had to shave a lot, because the black hairs came through darkly. He wasn’t very tall.

We ordered food, but I wasn’t very hungry. I didn’t eat much. The hamburgers came and she got her fingers dirty with ketchup. Even though she rubbed her hands on paper napkins, I could see the marks they made on her white T-shirt.

I said some things I half-regret

Occasionally Greg comes up with a Pearl of Wisdom. These are either Readers Digestingly obvious or bafflingly recondite. I really liked this one :

It’s amazing how time passes even when you don’t have the mental attention to occupy yourself. It passes anyway.

And you know, that's so true.

ONE OF THOSE AGGRAVATING OBSESSIVELY REPEATED VERBAL TICS

Either our narrator Greg or (surely not) Benjamin Markovits himself has this really most irritating knowing manner of describing people which features the phrase “one of those”.

One of these tightly put-together anxious hippie moms

One of those mothers who expresses affection for her son by flirting with his friends

One of those fifty-year-old guys with a little boy’s face under the stubble and gray hair

Her father had one of those innocent happy dark-skinned white-teethed black faces that probably cover up a lot of private opinions

She was one of those bony-butted black girls

Brad looked like the kind of guy waitresses and flight attendants start a conversation with

He’s one of those likeable good-looking guys who doesn’t take anything too seriously

Oh had one of those ageless Asian faces

She was one of those women ballplayers date

And he also does this with inanimate objects!

One of those mottled translucent plastic cups

One of those water kegs that glugs from time to time

As you see, this becomes like nails on a blackboard very quickly. But I think the annoyance is deliberate. Quite risky for Mr Markovits to give us such an annoying narrator as we see from the many one and two star reviews.

ANY REDEEMING FEATURES AT ALL?

Yes, absolutely.

First – great title (a quote from Obama, apparently). Second, a beautiful cover. Third, a very intriguing idea on which the whole novel is based. Which is :

A rich white guy gets the notion to buy up properties in some of the worst areas of present-day Detroit, then get a bunch of people who aren’t looking for your usual middle-class jobs & lifestyles to come and live in these places and fix them up and maintain them and create a community, thereby raising up the whole area and boosting everybody’s property values.

This then becomes a complex series of negotiations between the existing mostly black Detroiters and the incoming colonists.

So, redeeming feature number four is a series of very believable very fraught conversations between Greg and his eventual black teacher girlfriend. This was good stuff.

Not so great, but I don’t see how this could be avoided if anything ever was to happen in this long novel, was the Catalysing Event which sets the cat among the pigeons. This was exactly the same kind of Catalysing Event I first encountered in the very famous Tom Wolfe novel The Bonfire of the Vanities : there’s an incident on a road where a black kid is put in hospital by a white driver, and all hell breaks loose. I mean, damn, this is almost identical to Bonfire of the Vanities, it really is. But I agree, this novel had to have something to kick off the subsequent train of events.

Redeeming feature number five was the unexpected appearance of Obama and - even more remarkably - Mickey Dolenz, the ex-Monkee. I thought it was a missed opportunity that Mickey Dolenz did not get to perform "Last train to Clarksville". I mean, you had the guy right there. I'm sure he would have done it if you'd just asked him, Greg.


NOT TWO AND NOT FOUR BUT THREE STARS

With deadly Greg narrating, this could never climb up to the dizzy heights of a 4 star rating; but it was peculiarly engaging and sorta kinda I guess pretty good. Shrugs and walks away singing "Cheer up sleepy Jean" - I know, that was Davy Jones, not Mickey. Still, good song.

[Adam Yates · Rating 1 out of 5]

Got a quarter into it and nothing had happened and I mean nothing. No 'racial tension' no 'frightening portrait of America.' A guy moves into a house. That's what I read a quarter of a book to learn.

[KR · Rating 5 out of 5]

A terrific novel. It's being promoted as about Detroit and race relations, and yes, it's that. But I read it more as a portrait of a very specific type of person. The highly-educated narrator overthinks everything and is searching for something, drifting through life, afraid of the usual options but unable to define or commit to some other way of living. I recognized bits of myself in him, as well as most of my friends--an entire generation, in fact. (How many times have I thought, "well, maybe I'll just chuck it all and move to Detroit"?--which is why I picked this book up in the first place.)

The narrator's "this and then that" way of reporting leads him to under report situations. It takes awhile, for instance, to realize that conversations that sound casual are often quite heated, and that insight has to come from the words or reactions of other characters, because the narrator is always staring at his naval. The effect is often hilarious; at the climax, it's devastating. There his specificity to details exposes the very real, very human nuances of a scene that spirals out of control and becomes a defining event in race relations. And his this-and-that reporting becomes preferable to the way the media, politicians, and the law simplify and sensationalize the event.

This is a story I enjoyed very much while at the same time admiring the skill of the author.

[Kate Vane · Rating 2 out of 5]

The narrator of this novel begins by saying he’s never been much good at telling stories. His brother always chided him for his ‘this and then this and then this’ approach. This has the effect of immediately undercutting any criticism. If you say it’s not a well structured, or paced, or interesting story, the author is free to respond, it’s not meant to be.

The premise is great. Greg Marnier (known to his friends as Marny) is an underachieving academic, who feels his life is going nowhere. His old college friend is a successful entrepreneur with political connections who is investing in the gentrification of Detroit. Marny, having nothing much else going on in his life, decides to move there and become a part of his vision.

I wanted to read this because I’d read a little about what was happening in Detroit and was interested in the issues it throws up. Marny is also a character of our time – highly educated but unable to convert that into secure and well paid employment.

However, this book didn’t work for me and it’s mostly down to the narration. ‘This and then this and then this’ may be authentic but it’s not necessarily interesting. Marny takes you stolidly through his life up until he decides to move, then we follow him in Detroit, where he apparently tells you about pretty much everyone he meets but you never really get to know any of them. Your perspective on the city’s landscape is the same. You’re seeing life from his point of view so you’re not getting much insight or overview.

There is a plot, which revolves around the conflict between the existing, mainly Black Detroit population and the mainly white, middle-class incomers. Marny finds himself caught in the middle, obviously belonging to the second group, but having relationships and sympathies with the first. You get some sense of the machinations of the political and business interests in the area but it’s hazy.

Overall, it didn’t grab me as a story and I feel I learnt as much about Detroit in 20 minutes online as I did from ploughing through this novel.
-
I received an ARC from the publisher via Netgalley.

[Karen Garrett · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hated the protagonist. Hard to get past that.

[Becky · Rating 2 out of 5]

I chose this book because it was listed as 'one to watch' for 2015 in the Guardian, and I was given a pre release copy by the publisher. The story follows a group of middle class twenty somethings buy up abandoned property in Detroit in an attempt regenerate the area and live the pioneering American Dream. There were some potentially thought-provoking themes (racial tension, the dissatisfaction of middle America), but I felt it never got to the point that it was trying to make.

Some of the phrasing is clunky and huge sections of the book are excessively detailed descriptions of parties - who spoke to who, what they drank, who left first, what car they drove - "Everybody arrived at more or less the same time, but Tony had paid for caterers."

The narrator of the story was a strange character, and I'm not sure we were ever supposed to like him. He placed great emphasis on everyone's physical appearance and judged even those I assumed were supposed to be his friends - "..maybe because she’s not pretty enough. Her coloring was dark; you could see sweat on the hairs around her lips. But she seemed perfectly nice."

All in all it had moments that held my interest but these were few and far between - half the length, with some realistic relationships and it might have been there.

[Karen · Rating 1 out of 5]

Despite the great opening chapter with an entire young life recapped in under 10 pages to set the stage for where we are when the action starts, the action never happens. Total fizzle.

Expected so much more from a timely, sensitive proposition like some capitalist visionaires reclaiming a dead American city (Detroit) for whatever commercial or compassionate reasons, all while exploring the landscape, physical and social, for hurdles that lay ahead of this Utopian venture.

Never got there. Or if we did (and I confess to mindlessly turning pages through the middle third), it was buried amongst many mundane personal challenges our main character felt took priority. Kept hoping these vagaries would take us down some Candide-ian premise (like 'we must cultivate our gardens') but no. Just touched on the many current USA issues of race relations, haves & have-nots, urban decay, big biz or big gov intervention programs but none covered with any substance to sit up and take notice.

No, i won't recap further, not for a 1-star read. A miss.

[Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

A book about a man who has no redeeming characteristics and who is just coasting by doing nothing very interesting in Detroit.

[Frances Maxwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled with this book. I found the concept of urban regeneration (also legal art) interesting, but the protagonist was dull and unlikeable, and actually very little happens! I folded a couple of pages for some nice quotes, e.g. 'Everyone talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it,' but I can't see myself re-reading it. Perhaps it has hidden depths but I didn't have the patience to discover them. For a novel about racial tensions, I found it rather devoid of colour.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book intrigued me because it was set in present day Detroit. Since I have lived my whole life in the Detroit Metro area, I figured that it was a must-read. The story mirrors what is going on it Detroit. It tells a story of a group of investors who want to buy up the abandoned, burned out, run-down or torn down properties in a section of Detroit. They want to purchase all the homes, even the ones that people are living in. They want to rebuild 5 square miles of Detroit and make a large profit doing it.

Mr. Markovits tells this story from the point of view of Greg Marnier. He grew up as a fairly intelligent, but not very motivated child. He did what was expected of him, and kind of just went along with everything. He graduated from Yale and then went to Oxford, because he didn’t really have any desires of his own. He ended up as an untenured, part-time history professor at a small college in Wales.

Marny, what his friends call him, flys back to the States for a reunion of sorts. Some of his buddies from Yale are getting together. They talk about what they are doing with their lives, and Marny decides that his life is crap. He wants a change, so he decides to quit teaching and go home to Baton Rouge. That’s not working either, so when one of the Yalies, Robert James, asks him if he would be willing to be part of his scheme to rebuild Detroit and possibly make a fortune doing it, he says why not.

Since this is really Marny’s story, many of the events surrounding the Detroit plan happen behind the scenes. The story isn’t really a mystery, but Marny does try to figure out some things that are going on, but most of the story is what happens to Marny. It’s about how he grows close to some of his neighbors and especially how he meets and falls in love with a black women, who is a teacher in a Detroit high school. You get to see, though his eyes, what this project is doing to the city and its residents. You also get to ask the question “Is this the right way to rebuild a city?”

I liked this book, but what worked for me might not mean much to someone who doesn’t have a connection with Detroit. All of the references were quite accurate, but those details might get in the way for someone not familiar with the area, or maybe not, I don’t know. Mr. Markovits does a very good job of telling a believable story, using authentic details, and characters that you care about. The story moves a little slowly, but that may not be a bad thing.

I give You Don’t Have to Live Like This 4 Stars out of 5 and a Thumbs Up. If you are ready for a well written first-person novel with an interesting ethical quandary, then give You Don’t Have to Live Like This a read.

I received a Digital Reader’s Copy from the publisher.

[Adam · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had high hopes for this one, especially at the beginning. The only thing that kept me interested was this quote early on: "You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but most of the pressure on you is just momentum. As soon as you stop the momentum goes away. It's easier than people think to walk out on things, I mean things like cities, leases, relationships and jobs."

I kept that in mind throughout the book because I connected with it, and it made me think there was more for me here. But it was never really relevant again, and I can't identify any other idea of the story. After the intro, the book stuck closely to a series of news-type events of the recession era. Without developing a larger point, or stringing together the few things that do happen, it felt slow and flat.

[Stephen Goldenberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

"A frighteningly prescient novel of today's America " says the blurb. And that's why I decided to read it. Sadly, it isn't prescient, it certainly isn't frightening and it has prescious little to say about today's America. Instead, get detailed accounts of the mostly boring lives and encounters of ex-Yale friends as they move into, and try to regenerate, downtown areas of Detroit.
Benjamin Markovits can certainly write (especially dialogue) but, on this evidence, he's no storyteller. I kept reading to the end because I thought something was bound to happen but the final 'incident ' and subsequent court case is a damp squib.

[Simone Subliminalpop · Rating 4 out of 5]

TRE STELLE E MEZZA

L'idea di partenza era ottima, il risultato un po' meno, anche se la bilancia pende comunque verso il segno +.
Tra tanti, troppi personaggi, anche se tutti ben caratterizzati, e una storia della quale a volte si perde un po' il filo (o meglio il senso primario che l'autore vorrebbe farci seguire).
Di sicuro invece c'è la scrittura di Markovits: vivace e misurata al tempo spesso, in grado di sorpassare le pecche sopra descritte senza intoppi evidenti e che dà il suo meglio nei dialoghi.


Cit.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like it cause it’s new and different, feels very actual. I don’t mind the “this, and then this, and then this” narration at all, I enjoy being nestled into someone’s brain <3

[Ares · Rating 2 out of 5]

Painfully dull, the premise seemed interesting, but it was impossible to engage with the character or find his observations even mildly amusing. Unfulfilled potential for a story set in a city with so much history…

[Sean Gill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Greg, the thirtysomething, generation Xish, largely unsympathetic narrator of this novel, describes himself as moving forward in life on inertia rather than ambition. In the end he gets stuck in a hopeless place relaying his story back to us as a sort of fevered-vision. That's the story the author has something to say about - the rest is just window dressing, with ultimately makes for a rather thin novel despite the page length. The narrator relays some encounters and dialogue in great detail, and is sometimes great at relaying insights about himself and others. There are some wonderfully intriguing scenes. One is when he leaves his parents' Baton Rouge home to (re)start his life in a new city once again, each character's anxiety subtly yet forcefully felt. Another is when he encounters President Obama at a party that seems surreal yet you might imagine Yale alumni actually hold. But other scenes and many characters and their motivations are hastily sketched. In particular, Nolan is a tragic Black male resisting displacement by gentrification and marginalization by the "system" in general, but is 100% token and mishmash of stereotypes.

The narrator's destination is Detroit, and it becomes a rather hopeless place for him, rather than fertile ground for personal growth. The rebuilding project/commune/colony that lures the narrator, half-heartedly, as a place to reinvent himself is surprising half-baked. It seems superficially based on real experiences, and is perhaps as fantastical as a moon colony. I don't think the author really succeeds in convincing me that Detroit (or Michigan or America) in the early 21st Century is hopeless. It is almost as if the author conceived of the character and then decided to send him to Detroit and wasn't quite sure what to do with him when he got there. In this sense, I think the novel is a disservice to other authors who should be telling Detroit's story instead.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm 53 and have lived in and around Detroit my entire life. I also have a history degree like the author -- though mine did not come from Yale. The older I get, the more thankful I am that I did not get to attend an Ivy League school. Anyway, I saw this book about Detroit for a dollar. OK, I have quite the Detroit collection, and most of the books I've bought for a dollar have turned out to be well worth it. Not this one. These obnoxious Yallies come to Detroit to make money by picking the carcas of the city. As I said above, I live here, I pay taxes here -- the last thing we need is rich outsiders trying to make a profit by selling back to us what is ours already. The author seemed like a sexist jerk, the person running the project seemed like a greedy one percenter jerk. I was rather offended that the authors first act on deciding to move to Detroit, before he even left the South, was to buy a shot gun. Which he kept under the seat in his car. Yep, precisely the kind of person I want moving to my city. Also, the author describes someone as having "a faggy accent." What? I did not finish this book, I'm greatly relieved to remind myself this was fiction and not real. Though there were many projects like this that were.

[Øyvind Berekvam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jeg hadde aldri hørt om Benjamin Markovits før jeg kom over årsbestelisten til The Guardian sent i fjor. "You don't have to live like this" viste seg å være en råsmart, smådeprimerende og særdeles morsom bok om noe så alvorlig som nedgangstider, industrikrise og rasemotsetninger.

Utgangspunkt: En steinrik finansakrobat forsøker å skape nytt liv i et Detroit som er kjørt fullstendig på felgen. En broket forsamling mennesker flytter dermed inn i gamle nabolag i industribyen, pusser opp og skaper nytt liv. "The idea of America is a small-town idea," hevdes det, og drømmen om å vende tilbake til det trygge småborgerlige 50-tallet lever i beste velgående. Etter en lovende start der til og med president Obama er interessert rakner idyllen. Dette utdraget oppsummerer det ganske godt:

"And youre kidding yourself, Greg, if you think that Americans want to help each other out. That's not what I pay my taxes for. I pay my taxes so that other people are not my problem."

[Geoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don't have much to say about this novel. It made me angry. The narrator is a kind of a jerk. But he stands in for a kind of white everyman trying to make his way through a life that is caught in a racial conflict. He has moved to Detroit as part of an attempt to gentrify neighborhoods, but also a scheme to raise real estate values in Detroit. The conflict is between old black Detroit and new White Yalies in Detroit. The narrator is caught in between and doesn't know how to function.

[Andrew Mcq · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this as it had been included in the Sunday Times ‘100 best novels so far this century’ - a list that included many wonderful books I had enjoyed or wanted to read. Frankly, it’s inclusion in that company is truly baffling. This book has mundane characters, no energy and little imagination. A slow drone of a book, I laboured through stubbornly but for no tangible reward.

[Sara Molinaro · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book had so much potential and fell completely flat. None of the characters developed at all and the protagonist was a numbskull. I finished it just to spite myself, which seems like something dumb Marny would have done.

[anotherfungurl · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very uninteresting. It had a good start, but it didn't continue well. I stopped at 100 something. I don't recommend it to anyone who is interested in fiction. This book is more like a non-fiction.

[Lester Cockram · Rating 3 out of 5]

Must admit I chose this book at a discount house because of its pretty cover and title.
Takes you on a journey on what a young lad from Louisiana does with his expensive Yale education investment.
I came to a conclusion but do not want to introduce any spoilers.

[Fiona · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a really interesting premise: rich guy buys up abandoned land in Detroit and aims to found a new community on the ruins of the old, kind of a modern colonialism or present day American pioneer settlement. But racial tensions are ignited and things get ugly.
I'm quite conflicted about the book as a whole. It made me think, but it didn't make me feel anything. It didn't get under my skin, not even a little. The writing style is deliberately bland and uninflected which gives you a great sense of the main character and also catches everyday life: as things happen we often don't have a sense of the big picture, and the momentous events often land out of a clear blue sky. But it made for pretty monotonous reading and I did find myself skimming parts.
This book asks the big question: what is life really for? It invites us to have a look at modern society in the West, obsessed with money ahead of community, no time left for what matters. Important stuff, but I wish the author has been able to make me care.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was dull because it was a fictional account of something written like nonfiction. It's hard to understand why we're reading a real-life account of something that didn't happen: the failed gentrification of a small neighbourhood in Detroit fueled by industrial-political agreements that are morally questionable.

I appreciate that Markovits seems to write characters that feel very real dealing with subjects, like mixed-race relationship inequality. However, they feel very real because they're so anticlimactic and underwhelming. I don't know. It's a memoir about a man who doesn't yet have enough story for a memoir, checking his privilege and trying to find his footing in his post-uni life like the rest of us.

[Mathieu Ravier · Rating 3 out of 5]

A cold hard look at class and race relations in the US today. The story of creative white liberals on a mission to breathe life back into bankrupt Detroit, it unpacks the complexity of this likely-sounding scenario in clinical, unsparing prose. Its strategy of identification - the reader sympathises with the passive but familiar, well-meaning narrator until they realise the person who smiles back at them in the mirror is a monster - is bold and chillingly effective.

[Sg Perry · Rating 3 out of 5]

A largely enjoyable book set in post GFC Detroit about a social housing project. Strong racism, mixed with poverty and relationships made it quite a topical book to read! Gave it 3 mainly because it seemed a bit long.

[Sarah Mellington-Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's thought provoking... but the writing and 'story-telling' is a little blah....the idea(s) and issues are worth exploring...just didn't quite get there!

[Lily · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you’re looking for a book about a grown man with teenager syndrome doing nothing interesting described in unnecessary detail, this is the book for you.

[Lindsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF

Favorite quotes:

"A lot of reasonable decisions had brought me here, and not just decisions but a fair amount of effort and even some good luck. My college friends, with a few exceptions, seemed to be in the same boat. Working harder than they wanted to, making less money, living somewhere they didn’t want to live"

"You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but most of the pressure on you is just momentum. As soon as you stop the momentum goes away. It’s easier than people think to walk out on things, I mean things like cities, leases, relationships and jobs"

"Staring out the window hour after hour kind of concentrates and expands the mind at the same time; but it’s also somehow liberating, it eases the heart, to realize that you don’t need anything but a few hundred dollars and a backpack to move home."

"Navigating by freeway is like reducing the country to binary code. Every exit you pass is a yes or a no and by the end of the process you hope to end up at the right answer, the right place"

"They were living at home with her mother, in a two-bedroom apartment, the baby was walking, there was plastic everywhere, Ziggy spent his whole life kicking things over and picking them up again"

"I spent a large part of the morning going from room to room and enjoying the loneliness"

'There was a list of things in my head I wanted to tell him, things I wanted him to ask me about because I couldn’t tell him otherwise, and of course he never asked me what I wanted him to. But probably he had the same feeling about me."

"At first, she was just very anxious, because it seemed to her that her bruises were the only evidence she had, apart from the photographs, that something terrible had been done to her; and she knew that the bruises would go away. But later, as she did in fact begin to heal, and her skin turned yellow and then paler again, she started taking pictures as a way of recording the process, which seemed to her almost beautiful and even moving"