Feb 03, 2017
A Scar Is Not a Story
The sentiment persists that scars construct character. I wish it were that easy.
Tracy O'Neill is the author of The Hopeful. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and was awarded the Center for Fiction's Emerging Writers Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, LitHub, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Literarian, Narrative, and Guernica. O'Neill's nonfiction has been published in The Atlantic, the New Yorker, Bookforum, The Guardian and Rolling Stone online; in VQR, Grantland, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She teaches at the City College of New York. Website: tracyoneill.net
The sentiment persists that scars construct character. I wish it were that easy.
That my brother and I were not white like the rest of my family didn’t seem to matter much. And then it did.
“You’ll feel like a baby,” she said. But I didn’t want to feel like a baby.
