Page 552 - A Little Life: A Novel

And perhaps not coincidentally, he also found himself doubting therapy
—its promises, its premises—for the first time. He had never before
questioned that therapy was, at worst, a benign treatment: when he was

younger, he had even considered it a form of luxury, this right to speak
about his life, essentially uninterrupted, for fifty minutes proof that he had
somehow become someone whose life deserved such lengthy consideration,
such an indulgent listener. But now, he was conscious of his own
impatience with what he had begun to see as the sinister pedantry of
therapy, its suggestion that life was somehow reparable, that there existed a
societal norm and that the patient was being guided toward conforming to

it.
“You seem to be holding back, Willem,” said Idriss—his shrink now for
years—and he was quiet. Therapy, therapists, promised a rigorous lack of
judgment (but wasn’t that an impossibility, to talk to a person and not be
judged?), and yet behind every question was a nudge, one that pushed you
gently but inexorably toward a recognition of some flaw, toward solving a

problem you hadn’t known existed. Over the years, he’d had friends who
had been convinced that their childhoods were happy, that their parents
were basically loving, until therapy had awakened them to the fact that they
had not been, that they were not. He didn’t want that to happen to him; he
didn’t want to be told that his contentment wasn’t contentment after all but
delusion.
“And how do you feel about the fact that Jude doesn’t ever want to have

sex?” Idriss had asked.
“I don’t know,” he’d said. But he did know, and he said it: “I wish he
wanted to, for his sake. I feel sad that he’s missing one of life’s greatest
experiences. But I think he’s earned the right not to.” Across from him,
Idriss was silent. The truth was, he didn’t want Idriss to try to diagnose
what was wrong with his relationship. He didn’t want to be told how to

repair it. He didn’t want to try to make Jude, or himself, do something
neither of them wanted to because they were supposed to. Their relationship
was, he felt, singular but workable: he didn’t want to be taught otherwise.
He sometimes wondered if it was simple lack of creativity—his and Jude’s
—that had made them both think that their relationship had to include sex at
all. But it had seemed, then, the only way to express a deeper level of
feeling. The word “friend” was so vague, so undescriptive and unsatisfying

—how could he use the same term to describe what Jude was to him that he