The Distance Between Us
The Distance Between Us
Essays on family, adulthood and becoming.
A collection of essays written across four years, tracing the particular distances that open up inside families — not through conflict, usually, but through the slower work of growing into separate people who still love each other across the gap.
WHY I WROTE THIS
I wrote most of this book without knowing I was writing a book. It began as private notes after my grandmother's funeral and grew, slowly, into an attempt to understand every distance in my family that had never been named out loud.
“The strange thing about family distance is that it rarely announces itself. Nobody declares the gap open. You simply notice, one Christmas, that you're translating yourself for people who used to understand you without effort.”
TABLE OF CONTENTS
On inheritance — not the material kind, but the quieter kind, passed down in gestures and unexamined beliefs.
What actually happens, psychologically, in the years after you move out — and why it takes longer than the move itself.
On the particular grief of realising you've become a person your family didn't raise you to be — and the relief that eventually follows it.
The title essay. On the gap that opens between parents and children who still love each other, and what, if anything, closes it.
A closing essay on the parts of a family that survive every other distance.