Disillusionment

Falling Upward

Richard Rohr · 2011

Rohr’s argument is that the first half of a life is spent building a container — a career, a marriage, a set of certainties, a sense of being one of the good ones — and the second half only begins when that container cracks. He is a Franciscan friar and there is God in it, but the structure holds whether or not you share the faith. The useful part is his insistence that the cracking is not a failure or a midlife wobble to be medicated. It is the ordinary way people stop living inside a story somebody handed them.

Middlemarch

George Eliot · 1871

Dorothea Brooke marries a dry scholar because she wants a life of consequence and believes he is the route to one. The chapter where she sits in Rome and realises what she has actually done is, by common consent, one of the great moments in English fiction. Eliot is not cruel about it. Her whole point is that we build our lives on partial views because partial views are all anybody gets, and that what matters is what you do in the years after you see clearly. Long, and worth it.

Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell · 1938

Orwell went to Spain to fight fascism and spent most of his time cold, lousy and short of ammunition, and then watched the side he had joined start arresting its own. This is the classic account of an idealist discovering the machinery behind the cause, and what makes it remarkable is that he does not come home a cynic. He remains convinced the thing was worth doing. If your disillusionment is with a movement, an employer or an institution you gave years to, this is the book that shows you can lose the illusion and keep the commitment.

Yellowface

R.F. Kuang · 2023

June Hayward steals her dead friend’s manuscript and publishes it as her own, and Kuang uses the fallout to take an industry apart from the inside: the publicity machinery, the diversity arithmetic, the way a book’s success has remarkably little to do with the book. Nasty, funny and extremely readable. Included here because disillusionment with an industry you dreamed about getting into is a real and under-discussed kind, and this is the sharpest novel about it.

The Myth of Sisyphus

Albert Camus · 1942

Camus starts from the position that the universe owes us no meaning and is not going to supply one, and then spends the essay refusing the obvious conclusions. The image at the end — a man condemned to push a boulder uphill for ever, and Camus insisting we must imagine him happy — has become a well-worn image precisely because it does something no consolation does. It is philosophy rather than comfort, and it is harder going than anything else here, but for some people it is the only thing that helps.

Revolutionary Road

Richard Yates · 1961

Frank and April Wheeler are certain they are not like the other couples on the street. They plan to move to Paris. Yates writes the gap between how people describe themselves and what they actually do with more precision than is entirely comfortable, and the book is bleak in places. Read it if the illusion that has cracked is one you were maintaining about yourself. It is not kind, but it is honest, and there is a version of relief in that.

Leaving the Witness

Amber Scorah · 2019

Scorah grew up a Jehovah’s Witness and was sent to Shanghai as an undercover missionary, where the conversations she was having in order to convert people slowly converted her instead. She loses her faith, her marriage and every person she has ever known, in that order. It is the most vivid account here of what disillusionment actually costs, and of the strange, weightless period afterwards when nothing has replaced what went.

Consolations

David Whyte · 2015

Fifty-two short pieces, each one taking an ordinary word — disappointment, ambition, honesty, beginning — and turning it over until it means something different. Whyte is a poet and it shows; these are essays that behave like poems. The gentlest book on this list and the right one to end on, because it treats the loss of an illusion as an event with its own dignity rather than something to be got over quickly.