A Book That Won't
Hold Your Hand

Judging is one of the things we humans do best.

We do it fast, almost without noticing, often before we've finished understanding what we're looking at. It's an ancient, useful mechanism: dividing the world into safe and dangerous, into good and bad, is what let us survive. It lets us sleep. We need to know which side each person is on.

Fiction, almost always, grants us that permission. It points out the hero and the villain, tells us whom to love, and lets us pass judgment from a comfortable, safe place, at no cost. We leave those stories with a clear conscience and our categories intact.

I wanted to write the opposite.

The thin line

Not out of whim, but because I believe there's an uncomfortable truth that most stories help us dodge: that the line between the victim and the victimizer, between the one who loves and the one who needs, between what we forgive and what we condemn, is far thinner than we like to admit. That sometimes it runs inside a single person. That sometimes it runs inside us.

"This book won't hold your hand."

There's no sign telling you whom to hate. You'll begin to pity someone and feel, all at once, the ground shift beneath you. You'll want to condemn another and discover, with a certain unease, that you understand him more than you'd like. You'll look for the safe place to watch from, and you won't find it, because I chose not to build it for you.

Not for everyone

I know that isn't for everyone. There are readers who want, with every right, a story that gives them back their order. This isn't that book. This is a book that leaves you inside the doubt and closes the door behind you.

The only thing I can promise you is that the discomfort has a purpose. That on the other side of that doubt there's something a gentler story could never give you: the suspicion, which will stay with you for a while, that we never knew as well as we thought who the good one really was.

Not even when the good one is us.

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