CHAPTER 11

Antihero

[Frankenstein was] made up of bad parts but was trying to do good.

—Johnny Cash

In 1962, Stan Lee, editor and chief artist for Marvel comics, upended the universe of superheroes and revolutionized the comic-book industry when he drew the very first Spider-Man. Unlike any superhero who had come before, Spider-Man was not a full-grown man who gallantly took on the world’s problems with his strapping physique and a heart full of bravery. He was a teenager named Peter Parker who lived with his aunt and uncle and who had troubles of his own. Money was tight and he was picked on at school. He had girl problems. And the powers he did have—such as superstrength, the ability to crawl up walls, and a spider-sense for danger—were not derived from some great calling or cause but were the unwelcome result of a freak occurrence: being bitten by a radioactive spider. Superman had been like a Greek god sent from the heavens and who only pretended to be the mere mortal Clark Kent, but Spider-Man brought superheroes down to earth. Despite the fact that his comic book series was called The Amazing Spider-Man, Spider-Man felt far from amazing. Put most simply, “Clark Kent was a disguise… Peter Parker was a fact,” said Marvel writer Len Wein.

Spider-Man is most often credited with being the first antiheroic superhero, although some would argue it was Batman, with his brooding manner and revenge as his raison d’être. But if an antihero is a protagonist who lacks the noble qualities of the hero, then it was Spider-Man who truly disrupted the image of the caped crusader. More an accidental and reluctant hero than a purposeful or enthusiastic one, not only was Spider-Man human, but he was a human with flaws and contradictions. Beset by insecurities and motivated by guilt rather than bravery, Spider-Man suspected he was secretly bad, or at least secretly not super. He was uneven and unsure, and for the first time the reader heard all about it.

For decades, the inner life of superheroes had been largely left out of the plot lines; suddenly this changed. With Spider-Man, Lee used the thought bubble liberally, showing the reader that Spider-Man’s thoughts did not always match Spider-Man’s deeds. In public, onlookers saw Spider-Man’s bright costume and his amazing feats, but in private—though no one would have guessed it—Spider-Man was troubled by his dual existence and longed to be a normal teenager. In regard to this turn in comics—perhaps as in the study of resilience—“maybe it was time,” said artist Ramona Fradon. “You can’t have those characters running around forever without beginning to wonder what they did in their off-hours.”

Although Spider-Man was created almost on a whim and was intended to be a one-off, by the end of the twentieth century he had eclipsed Superman as the country’s most popular comic-book hero. Superman may have been the prototype for the world’s first superheroes, but Spider-Man became the new template for more realistic and relevant ones. When asked about his favorite superheroes, President Barack Obama said, “I was always into the Spider-Man/Batman model. The guys who have too many powers—like Superman—that always made me think they weren’t really earning their superhero status. It’s a little too easy. Whereas Spider-Man and Batman, they have some inner turmoil. They get knocked around a little bit.” Readers everywhere identified with superheroes who struggled with problems on the inside even as they fought against different ones on the outside. Thus came a flood of characters—the Incredible Hulk, the Avengers, Daredevil, and, arguably, the majority of twenty-first-century incarnations of superheroes—who showed that being a superhero was more complicated than just good versus evil. Maybe these modern, relatable superheroes inhabited a space between good and evil. Like Spider-Man, and like many supernormals, they were too good to be villains but too bad to get to feel like heroes.

One of Vera’s first memories was a sort of thought bubble. She was five years old when her kindergarten teacher complimented her for being happy and sweet, and inside she felt, but did not yet have the words to say, You have no fucking idea. What Vera’s teacher had no fucking idea about was that things were not what they seemed. At school, Vera was a chatty child with ambiguously brown skin and a wide grin, but in the evenings she had little to smile about at the apartment she shared with her brother and her mother, a woman whose problems with drugs kept her from being the parent she might have meant to be.

Approximately two million children live with a parent who abuses drugs, placing them at a significantly increased risk for mistreatment. Having a mother who abuses substances is one of the five leading predictors of child maltreatment, and between one-third and two-thirds of reports to Child Protective Services involve substance use in the home. Because mothers or fathers who are addicts may be more preoccupied with drugs than with their children, neglect is the most common problem in houses where parents are users. Although neglect is at least as harmful to children as physical or sexual abuse, it tends to receive the least amount of attention from professionals.

The relationship between drug abuse and child maltreatment is often a straightforward one, put most simply by this woman, a former addict: “It’s not bad people that become addicts and it’s not bad people that don’t care about their kids. It’s just people that addiction has got the grip of and that is more powerful than anything, even the love that a parent would have for their children. It just overrules even that.” When parents are busy seeking or doing drugs, or when they are incapacitated from their use, their ability to care for their children is impaired. Money may be spent on drugs rather than on food or clothes, and parents may spend time in jail or in treatment centers. In homes where drug use is high, parental supervision tends to be low, and parents show less involvement with and less interest in their children. For these sons and daughters, the most basic needs—such as nutrition, hygiene, supervision, and attention—are often unmet, or they are needs that children must try to meet themselves.

For Vera, feeding herself was easy. Breakfast, she skipped. For lunch, she tucked a fruit roll-up in her backpack. For dinner, Vera usually cooked macaroni and cheese—the kind with the bright-orange powder—on the stove, boiling water on her own long before she probably ought to have been. “I made cereal if I was feeling lazy,” Vera recalls, with no awareness that a child who opts for cereal when left to fend for herself is not being lazy.

Vera grew up in central Florida in a place that was about an hour too far from either coast to be pretty. It was hot and dusty, and her neighborhood consisted of some nondescript streets dotted with apartment buildings and corner stores and pastel-colored stucco bungalows. A nearby orange juice factory left the air smelling like burnt oranges. “That’s what I remember about being at home,” Vera recalls as an adult. “Oranges outside. Cigarettes and drugs inside. There was always the smell of something burning.”

Vera’s aunt worked at a Catholic school, which Vera was allowed to attend nearly for free. She was fortunate to be able to go there—people told her so all the time—but the contrast between school and home was painful, too. When mothers swept in before soccer games and brushed their daughters’ hair into ponytails, Vera watched with envy and puzzlement; she felt proud about being able to do her own hair but also she wondered what it would feel like to have someone do it for her. When a girl told her mother she was hungry and, in a flash, the woman went out and was back with a sandwich from Arby’s, Vera could hardly believe what she saw. Later that night, Vera asked her mother if they could get Arby’s sometime. “We can’t afford fast food,” she barked.

Bounding into school each day, Vera seemed like a heroic child, gamely overcoming whatever her troubles were at home. But Vera did not feel so heroic. At school, her life looked good, but at home things were bad. On the outside, she looked good, but inside she felt bad. Maybe this was why she had always felt like a liar, even when she was not saying anything.

Vera’s school uniform was a navy-blue smock-dress, so no one could tell that it was rarely washed, but what went under her uniform proved more difficult. She wore a cousin’s old underwear, safety-pinning them where the elastic had long since given way, and when she walked to the front of mass, she prayed to God they would not fall down around her ankles. Sometimes, when she picked through clothes left on the floor, there were bugs crawling in her dirty underwear, a sight and a memory that would make her feel unclean for the rest of her life. As an adolescent, Vera only had one bra, and between washings it became so brownish that she changed for gym class in the locker room as quickly as possible, as if she was trying to get away with something. Once Vera’s gym teacher spotted her: “Tell your mother to wash your clothes!” the teacher boomed, her words reverberating off the rows of metal lockers.

Vera felt caught in a lie.

Still, every day, Vera put on her uniform and went to school, and there she amazed people. Despite her disadvantages, she did as well as or better than the other students in her grade and far better than her own brother, who went in and out of suspension at a different school—and then in and out of juvenile detention centers—while Vera sat obediently in class. She never caused trouble. She never seemed troubled. She exceeded expectations in every way, and no one, including Vera, knew quite how.

For reasons that are not entirely understood, on average girls are hardier than boys when subjected to developmental stress. One study—the largest and longest of its kind—looked at the birth certificates, household characteristics, kindergarten readiness, academic performance and attendance, school discipline, graduation rates, and criminal records in a sample of over one million schoolchildren born between 1992 and 2002 in Vera’s home state of Florida, an ethnically and socioeconomically heterogeneous place. Researchers found that, in the face of family disadvantage, not only do girls outperform boys in school, but sisters also fare better than their brothers, despite being raised in the same homes.

This gender difference appears early in kindergarten, continues through elementary and middle school, and crystallizes into a sharp divide by high school. Some have suggested that perhaps girls are less negatively impacted by single-parent homes because absent parents tend to be fathers and the available parents tend to be mothers. Others point to the fact that girls tend to have less rowdy temperaments, and they are likely to act “in” rather than act “out”—to internalize their problems—and these are qualities that are rewarded by schools. In the media, more superheroes may be male than female, but in real life, for whatever reason, more girls than boys just seem bulletproof, somehow less affected by the quality of their neighborhoods and by the kind of parenting they receive. Or maybe, Vera thought, she was just better than her brother at hiding who she really was.

After school, Vera sometimes found her mother in the alley behind the neighborhood bar, where workers on breaks and the regulars on benders sat in discarded, half-broken chairs and smoked and drank. When Vera tried to lure her mother back to their apartment, she was swatted away like a mosquito.

“Why don’t you just let ’er go live with her aunt?” asked a woman with a lazy eye and a gruff smoker’s voice that made it unclear whether she was trying to get rid of Vera or save her from her situation.

“ ’Cause I don’t like that bitch, that’s why,” Vera’s mother slurred sharply, referring imprecisely, but most likely, to the aunt.

The adults chuckled as Vera shuffled back down the alley, making her way toward home.

Once Vera became so angry when her mother would not come, she told her she was running away, and she crouched for a long time behind some palmetto bushes just down the road. When she saw her mother coming her way, she stepped out elated—“Here I am!”—only to discover that her mother was not looking for her at all. She was on her way to get more cigarettes.

By the time she was in high school, once her homework was done, Vera would meet up with an older boy who lived down the way, and at night the two teenagers would smoke her mother’s cigarettes, drink her beer, and have sex on her couch. Vera could not have explained why she did any of this, nor could she have explained why she scratched on her wrists with a serrated knife once and wore big Band-Aids to school, but she did remember wishing that someone—no, not someone, a teacher—might say something.

No one did.

It may not seem all that heroic of Vera to have been drinking and smoking and sneaking around, but it is not altogether surprising. Supernormals may seem superhuman, but they are not, and it is not uncommon for there to be a streak of rule-breaking or “delinquency” along the way. Although many resilient teens and adults must learn to be duplicitous, they are far from being malicious, and they tend to hurt or endanger themselves more than anyone else. Maybe they begin running with a troubled crowd, abusing substances that get in the way of their own success, walking away from good opportunities, or sleeping around indiscriminately. Supporters who had high hopes may shake their heads and sigh their sighs as they talk of squandered potential and unfulfilled promise. At least for a time, the resilient child appears to have opted for self-destruction, but as is so often the case with supernormals, things may not be what they seem.

In 1967, just a few years after Spider-Man landed on the pages of comic books, psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott presented a paper titled “Delinquency as a Sign of Hope.” The thrust of this talk, given to professionals who worked in group homes for adjudicated youth, was that sometimes bad behavior—even unlawful behavior—is a healthy sign of life. It is a distress call, an “SOS” said Winnicott, and one that contains the wish that if one makes enough noise and waves her arms wildly enough, then a bystander might see her struggling and come to the rescue. Someone somewhere might save her from her bad situation and from her relentless adaptation to it. At least some of the time, delinquency indicates that there is hope that life could be different.

As far back as kindergarten and her memory of the thought bubble, Vera had kept quiet about what her life was really like. As she aged and came into contact with new people—new friends and teachers and coaches—there were also new possibilities that someone might intervene. Maybe this was why, for a brief time in high school, Vera let her troubles show. Maybe she was hoping that someone would notice when she let her grades slip or when she put her head down on her desk day after day. Once the police brought her home well after midnight, and when they rang the doorbell, no one was home. Sometimes this sort of SOS is effective and the supernormal child or teen recruits real, all-in help, this time not by being charming or easygoing but by being alarming and difficult. Often, though, as with Vera, these less-than-endearing cries for help are unanswered, and the supernormal child learns to give up on other people. She realizes help is not coming so she goes back to saving herself.

In college, Vera was a poster child for diversity, and for overcoming adversity, too. A scholarship student, she appeared in a recruiting photo for her school and was in a special seminar for first-generation college students. When she made the dean’s list, she was invited to the president’s house for a reception. Each time she heard, “You’re amazing!”—which was often—she felt like that kindergartner again whose thought bubble still read, You have no fucking idea.

No one knew, or perhaps no one wanted to know, what went on for Vera when she was not smiling from a photograph or from the front row of class. Scholarships and financial aid made it possible for her to attend college, but they did little to help her live alongside her peers. When classmates went out to dinner and to bars, Vera begged off to study where there were free snacks. Once in a while she tagged along, stopping by the ATM, where she punched in a hundred-dollar deposit, slid an empty envelope into the machine, and withdrew twenty dollars right away; she was only stealing from herself, because the “error” would have to be repaid, but as she rejoined her friends, she felt like a criminal all the same. When Vera needed toilet paper for her bathroom, she stole it from the stalls in the academic buildings, tucking any spare roll she saw into her backpack. Vera thought about stripping in a bar, or selling her eggs, to earn extra income but she never went through with either one.

Vera’s life had always felt like a lie, but now the more she had, the more her existence felt like thievery, too. If “to come by something honestly” means to inherit it from your parents, then Vera felt she had come by her life dishonestly, like she had stolen an existence not meant to be her own. It was not that her successes weren’t real—she knew she had done the hard work herself—but she also knew that none of it had happened in the way people wanted to believe.

Like the campus that surrounded them, Vera’s fellow students seemed so spiffy and manicured, they looked like characters on a movie set, like people whose clothes had never been dirty, people who had never stolen toilet paper or thought about selling themselves in some way or another. Vera wavered between thinking that they must live empty and frivolous lives, and suspecting that she was living a dark and ugly one. She was outperforming almost everyone she knew, but she could not shake the feeling that she would never be as good as those around her.

Vera bummed a cigarette from a young construction worker who was putting a new roof on her dorm. She liked the way his eyes narrowed a bit, like he enjoyed being in on something. Soon they were taking regular smoke breaks, and then they were having regular sex in a motel near the highway. Vera studied with her classmates in the evening, and then she left her dorm to meet a waiting car. The time they spent together was nothing special but it felt real: real time spent with a real person who had lived a real life with real problems. Just before the sun came up, she walked back in through the front door of her dorm, flashing her school ID card at the security guard who sat at the front desk. He was the only person who knew her secret, whatever it was.

After an hour or two of sleep, Vera plunked herself down in the front row of her large lecture class, notebook out and pen poised to write. Sore from having sex not long before, Vera felt the wood of the auditorium seat pressing up against her flesh, like the dull pain of digging one fingernail into the bed of another fingernail. It was a grounding, bodily reminder that the students who sat beside her and the professor who smiled at her did not really know who she was. Her double dealing made her feel superior, untouchable, and wretched.

One parents’ weekend, knowing that Vera did not have a mother or father who would attend, the president of her college asked Vera to babysit her young son. “I can’t believe the president actually knows who you are,” her roommates said admiringly, although Vera felt quite sure that no one, especially the president, actually knew who she was. At the end of the weekend, the president thanked her for her help but forgot to pay her. Vera killed the woman off in her mind right there and then, and by that I mean she wrote her off as someone who only pretended to care. No one would suspect it, Vera thought, but I’m a thief and a whore and a murderer, too.

Vera wondered if, on top of all of the other bad things she imagined herself to be, she was an addict as well. After graduation, she found a job in New York City where during the day she worked hard and, at night, she got high. After years of fighting against the way her life could have gone, she was so, so tired. Every minute of every day, she exceeded expectations, and she looked forward to the time each night when she could come home and close the door on the world. She took long pulls on cigarettes, marijuana joints, and bottles of cough syrup, and sinking into substance-induced sleep she wondered if, after years of defying the gravity that was her family, her genes would pull her down into addiction after all.

Substance use and abuse are moderately heritable, so because her mother was a drug abuser, Vera was at risk for similar troubles of her own. To be sure, the relationship between early adversity and substance abuse in adulthood is well documented, but the connection is more complicated than genes. The more adversities one faces in childhood, the greater the likelihood that by the teen years, one will engage in risky behaviors involving drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes—regardless of whether or not one’s parents were themselves problem users. Living through even a single chronic stressor makes a person two to four times more likely to use and abuse substances as an adult, and those who live through multiple adversities are as much as ten times more likely than their peers to do so. This linear relationship between early stress and later substance use holds across four generations dating back to 1900, and it can be seen in other primates too. Rhesus monkeys who are exposed during rearing to stress such as maternal separation and social isolation opt to drink more alcohol when given access—even to the point of intoxication—compared with monkeys who were not exposed to early distress. Taken together, researchers estimate that childhood adversity of any kind ultimately accounts for one-half to two-thirds of serious problems with substance use.

Rather than simple heredity, then, a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between early distress and later substance use must include self-medication. Throughout history, the principal use of drugs has been to relieve suffering, and this includes self-administered substances that lessen emotional pain. Emotions are signals to ourselves about our environments, and certainly the depression and anxiety and sleep problems and post-traumatic stress that often follow on the heels of childhood adversity are signals that something has gone wrong, that relief is needed.

If exposure to early adversity results in chronic stress, then the chronic use of substances can be one way to cope—a “special adaptation,” it is said—albeit a rudimentary and counterproductive one. Substances from food to cigarettes to alcohol to cough syrup to marijuana to heroin have been shown to be neuroregulators, capable of changing our brains and our moods. “Fucking smoking,” wrote James Rhodes in his memoir. “These magical cylinders with the most extraordinary medicinal qualities offered me everything I felt I was missing.” Some drugs calm us by quieting the amygdala while others soothe us by releasing neurotransmitters, such as dopamine or serotonin, that lessen our despair. But one hardly needs to be a scientist to be aware of the notion that drugs and alcohol can function as pain relievers. It is one that country music singers have been crooning about for decades: “If this bottle would just hold out ’til tomorrow,” sang Dwight Yoakam in “It Won’t Hurt,” “I know that I’d have sorrow on the run.”

Often, then, substance users like Vera are not seeking an emotional state they enjoy as much as they are looking to escape from feelings they do not enjoy. So it was for Robert Peace, a young man not unlike Vera whose story of moving from the streets of Newark to the Ivy League is told in The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace. Like Vera, Peace felt alienated from his fellow college students—“I just hate all these entitled motherfuckers!” he said in a rare complaint—and he often retreated from his rarefied surroundings and his job in the dining hall to his dorm room to get high: “It’s like nothing matters, not even time, and for a couple hours I can just be.”

Supernormals like Vera—and like Robert Peace—are often isolated and left alone with their problems, so they try to be self-sufficient. Masters of self-correcting, they may try to right their emotions through the use of substances. They suspect they cannot lean on others, so some may use substances as a crutch instead. When they feel there is no one to depend on, they may depend on food, cigarettes, alcohol, or other drugs. In an attempt to self-soothe, self-manage, and self-regulate, they self-medicate. “Every problem was once a solution,” it is said.

Vera got a new job at a company where she would be drug-tested, so she quit using drugs the same way she had once picked her head up off her desk in high school and gotten back to work. She just did it. Without substances, she felt trapped, with no way out of the relentless adaptation that was her life. It was then that she began to be visited by thoughts of suicide, and it is estimated that two-thirds of suicide attempts can be attributed to adversity in childhood. But again, her tendency toward self-preservation was too reflexive; besides, she felt guilty about unpleasantly surprising those around her with the person she feared she really was, the person she feared she had always been: a girl who appeared good but was actually bad, the girl that people had no fucking idea about.

Vera also felt, perhaps incorrectly, that ending her life would not make much of an impact on the world, so it seemed like a strange thing to bother doing. Killing herself felt like going a step too far when, instead, she could just kill off the person she was pretending to be. Vera could stop being amazing. She could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. She could move far, far away and become a heroin addict. It helped to know there was always that.

Vera had come a long way, both literally and figuratively, from her early life in landlocked, low-slung central Florida. Outside the window of the high-rise where she worked, there were buildings and bridges and water in every direction, not a palmetto bush in sight. She had a college degree and a white-collar job, and the only substance she leaned on now was the occasional glass of wine. Vera was a success, and she was often called upon to share some (usually heavily self-edited) version of her story with the Boys and Girls Club her company sponsored. Yet still, each time she entered a public restroom and saw a roll of toilet paper there for the taking, she was reminded of all the bad things she felt she had done. She had stolen. She had met men in hotel rooms. She had numbed herself with drugs. She had worn dirty clothes. She had felt anger, and even rage, toward people who had helped her.

Two weeks after 9/11, Vera needed to fly on a plane. On the way to the airport, she asked the taxi driver to stop so she could step into a store, where she bought a framed picture she did not even want. Vera carried the picture onto the aircraft so that, if the plane were hijacked, she could break the glass and have some kind of weapon. As she sat in her seat, her hands folded and her feet touching the picture stowed under the seat in front of her, she reflected on the fact that she was probably the only passenger there to have smuggled a weapon onto the aircraft. Vera wanted to be like other people who sat there and closed their eyes and sipped on their little plastic cups of soda, but although her intentions were good and even heroic, she felt locked into her role, always ready to do what it took to survive. “No way was I going to be trapped and defenseless,” she recalled. “No way was I getting on that plane with nothing.”

If a hero is someone who is admired for bravery or great achievements or good qualities, then Vera felt she did not qualify. Though she was often called courageous for all she had overcome, she did not feel particularly brave: “Is it brave to jump off a sinking ship and thrash your way through rough, shark-infested waters, or is it just the only thing to do?” she wondered out loud.

In 1997, Daniel Challener authored a book titled Stories of Resilience in Childhood: The Narratives of Maya Angelou, Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodrigues, John Edgar Wideman, and Tobias Wolff. What is interesting is that, originally, the working title of the book was The Autobiographies of Desperate Children. Ultimately, Challener decided that resilience was a better descriptor for these men and women than desperate, and maybe it is. Maybe it is also true, however, that feeling desperate and being resilient are not such different constructs but are, in fact, often related. To Vera, though, being brave and being desperate must be two separate things, and this led to her most devastating misgiving about her own goodness: that whatever she had, she had obtained by any means necessary.

Maybe desperate was how Johnny Cash—the country music icon—felt for much of his life, too, or at least after his fourteen-year-old brother, Jack, was killed in an accident in a woodshop. Jack, “the golden child” of the family who, even from a young age, had plans to go into the ministry, had been out earning money for the family, while the younger Cash, who was then just twelve, was off fishing. All his life, Cash would feel guilty and despairing about being the son who lived, both because he adored his beloved brother and because he suspected he was not as good a person. Cash was not the only one who thought so: “Too bad it wasn’t you instead of Jack,” his father allegedly said after a night of drinking.

Not long after Jack’s death, Cash saw the movie Frankenstein, a story that would become a lifelong favorite because he identified with the monster who was bad but who tried to be good. He saw the rest of his years as a battle between lightness and dark, between his brother’s good influence and his own bad ways. “The Man in Black,” as he was widely known to audiences, grieved all his life, which may have had something to do with his penchant for dark clothing—and for gospel music and pills. Sometimes Cash took pills to drive all night or stay up for shows, and other times he took them to change from feeling bad to feeling good. Whatever the case, it got to a point where, Cash said, “it felt barely human.” Desperate to die, he crawled deep into a labyrinth of caves in Tennessee, a place he had been before and where, when the light gave out on his flashlight, he could perish in the dark. Instead, God saved him from killing himself, Cash felt, and now desperate to live, he found his way out. When he emerged from the cave, there was June Carter, a woman whose love saved him, too, standing there with food and drink and Cash’s mother. Although the accuracy of this story has been disputed, if nothing else it was a personal parable for Cash, one he chose to tell in his autobiography.

Iraq War veteran Jessica Lynch was right when she said, “The truth is always more heroic than the hype.” And the truth about resilient children and adults is that they are not perfect. They are not saints or angels. We expect too much from our heroes, wanting their stories always to inspire and never to confound or disappoint. Supernormals may have some remarkable abilities, but they are human beings all the same, and rather than being immune to having problems of their own—such as with alcohol or drugs—they are at heightened risk for them, at least for a while. Maybe what is most extraordinary about supernormals is not that they never have their own difficulties but that they battle back against these as well.

Like Spider-Man—and like Johnny Cash—Vera never really felt amazing. She was as perplexed as anyone about how exactly she had managed to be the sole, sober success from her family. She occupied the strange position of being the highest-functioning member of her dysfunctional family yet also, to her knowledge, the one among her friends and colleagues with the most troubled background. Vera had once dreamed of having clean clothes and good food, and now that she did, she listened to her favorite song—any version of “Amazing Grace”—and dreamed of some sort of redemption, of finally getting to feel clean and good on the inside, too. Vera’s challenge now was to forgive herself for the things she had done and for the person, at times, she had had to be. She felt ambivalent about her survival instincts—which, despite being deeply human and adaptive, can be at odds with the heroic ideal. Vera did not know that guilt, not only for being the one who survives but also for how one manages to do it, is often part of being a survivor.

This was something that Viktor Frankl understood, and was willing to say, in one of the most humble passages he wrote about the Holocaust: “On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of tracking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles—whatever one may choose to call them—we know: the best of us did not return.”