Resentment & Bitterness

Why Won’t You Apologize?

Harriet Lerner · 2017

Lerner’s subject is the engine of most long resentment: the apology that never came, or came badly. She is very good on the non-apology — the sorry you feel that way, the sorry but, the sorry that arrives with a list attached — and equally good on why the person who owes you one so often cannot manage it. The uncomfortable half of the book is about being the one who needs to apologise. Short, blunt and unusually useful.

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens · 1861

Miss Havisham stopped the clocks at twenty to nine, left the cake on the table and has worn the same dress ever since, and Dickens gave us the definitive image of a life organised around one wound. What makes her more than a grotesque is that she has raised a girl specifically to do the damage back, which is exactly what bitterness does when it is left long enough. Read it for her, and for what it costs everybody standing near her.

The Choice

Edith Eger · 2017

Eger was sixteen when she was taken to Auschwitz and made to dance for Mengele. She became a psychologist and spent decades treating people who were, in her phrase, still living in their own prisons. She has more standing than almost anyone to talk about this and she does not preach. Her argument is that we can be victims of what happened and still choose what we do with the years afterwards, which is a very different claim from being told to move on.

Fates and Furies

Lauren Groff · 2015

The first half is a marriage told by the husband: charmed, golden, straightforward. The second half is the same twenty-four years told by his wife, and it is a very different story indeed. Groff is doing something ruthless here about what accumulates silently on one side of a partnership while the other side notices nothing at all. If you have ever thought I have been keeping score and he has no idea, this is your novel.

Rising Strong

Brené Brown · 2015

The useful bit is her phrase for what resentment actually runs on: the story I am telling myself. Almost every long grudge is built on a version of events assembled in the gap where the facts were missing, and then rehearsed until it hardened. Brown’s method is to write the story down, in full, in its most unflattering form, and then go and check it. Uncomfortable. Effective.

Silas Marner

George Eliot · 1861

A weaver is falsely accused, loses his faith and his friends, moves to a village where he speaks to nobody, and spends fifteen years counting gold in the dark. Then the gold is stolen and a small child walks into his cottage. Eliot is not sentimental about how long the hardening took, and she is clear that what undoes it is not forgiveness or insight but simply being needed by somebody. Under two hundred pages.

The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas · 1844

The greatest revenge story ever written, and worth reading precisely because Dumas does not let his hero off. Edmond Dantès spends fourteen years in a cell planning it and the rest of the book executing it, and by the end he has done real damage to people who did not deserve it and cannot entirely undo it. Enormous, gripping, and a more honest account of what revenge does to the avenger than most books that disapprove of it.