The Orphan Master’s Son
Author: Adam Johnson
Released: January 2012
Published by: Random House
Before we went to Rome for our honeymoon in October of 2019 Steve told me he wanted to see the Vatican. He mentioned it more than once, so I knew it meant a lot to him.
I’d been to Italy once before we got married. In 2017 I attended a writing workshop about sixty miles south of Rome, and that trip was a perfect inaugural Italian experience— I stayed in a gated villa located in a small village and we didn’t travel to any tourist destinations on the numerous day trips our teachers took me and my fellow students on.
I wasn’t dying to hit up super touristy spots on our honeymoon, but, if Steve wanted to go to the Vatican, we’d go. It wasn’t number one on my list, but I certainly didn’t mind going there and checking it out.
The day we visited Vatican City, Rome was a little rainy. We had an early breakfast at our hotel, walked to the Borghese gardens and wandered around for a bit, then took a taxi across the river to the Vatican, specifically, to Saint Peter’s Basilica. We didn’t spend any money to go on a tour of the cathedral, we didn’t want to be those types of travelers, but the price we ended up paying was waiting on a very long line, for hours, in the rain.
I was hungry, I had to pee, and my hair looked like shit, but I didn’t complain, because Steve didn’t complain.
When we finally got inside St. Peters, we slowly took it in, staring up at the ceiling, looking at all the things there were to look at. It felt impossible to see the intricate detail of the architecture and sculptures inside since the structure is vast. I mean, it’s fucking gigantic inside. I don’t know how else to put it.
Steve did his thing. He looked at every statue, read plaques, dipped his fingers into a basin of holy water, did the sign of the cross.
I took pictures of him. My Catholic husband. I was raised Catholic too, but we are not religious. We’d just been married two weeks earlier in the least religious wedding ceremony I’d ever attended.
Then we wandered into a small chapel, sat in a pew, and a holy man gave a short sermon in Latin. Everyone knelt and we knelt and Steve bowed his head and prayed for several minutes. I prayed too, I thanked my higher power for guiding me to make my own decisions, I prayed for the health of my family, and then I started to figure out what kind of sandwich I was going to get afterwards when we went to a panini shop that came highly recommended on the Goop website. Gwyneth hadn’t steered us wrong yet on our honeymoon, and I was absolutely starving.
Steve kept praying. I watched him. I wondered why his eyes were closed so tightly. I wondered what he was praying for, for so long, and I wondered if he was upset. He looked intense. And also a little sad. And we were on our honeymoon, and we were the absolute definition of present— we both agreed we’d never felt so connected in an extended moment for such a long time, no sorrow about a past or fear for any future, we were just there, together, in Italy.
And we were so in love, and in the chapel I was reminded of something I’d known for a long time but hadn’t thought about it a long time— someone can be in love with their wife but still carry a heavy heart. You can sit next to your new husband on your honeymoon and wonder what they’re praying about but have the wherewithal not to ask them ‘Hey what were you praying about?’ over a sandwich Gwyneth Paltrow recommended because it’s none of your business.
People in relationships, people in love, people who are best friends with each other can have an entire universe inside them that belongs to only them, and sharing it isn’t required. And it doesn’t lessen the relationship. It may even strengthen a bond in a relationship when two people are given the dignity to live their own lives.
The Orphan Master’s Son is a bildungsroman, which may be my favorite genre of fiction. It’s a book written in two parts with three points of view: a North Korean orphan named Jun Do who the reader witnesses grow from a boy into a young man throughout the novel, an unnamed interrogator, and the propaganda of North Korea as told via city wide loudspeakers throughout the North Korean cities Jun Do travels to.
This book was given to me as a Christmas gift in 2018 by Steve. We’d been dating a very short period of time, only a few weeks really, and we both exchanged books as presents. I got him The Sarah Book and Preparation for the Next Life (both available at Tyrant Books and you should buy them here) and he got me a delicate topaz necklace and The Orphan Master’s Son. He told me it was his favorite book.
Books are so deeply personal, and a beloved book is a breathing piece of art that seeps slowly into the bloodstream so it can live inside of you forever.
I learned recently that if someone asks you for a book suggestion you should find out what their favorite books are and then try to suggest things similar. I don’t think Steve really liked the books I got for him too much that Christmas. I’ve since gotten him books more his speed, namely some Alan Watts books that I know he loved.
I’ve almost never enjoyed a book someone bought for me, unsolicited. Some of my favorite books are The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Franny & Zooey by JD Salinger, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, The Guardians by Sarah Manguso, This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz. I can’t explain why they are, they just are. How do you describe why you love a book. Why would you want to.
I heard Steve recently suggest The Orphan Master’s Son to my dad and I felt guilty I’d never read the book he bought me, his favorite. He read everything I bought him.
Two things about The Orphan Master’s Son hit me in a place that reminded me about the type of woman I can be.
Choosing to believe the lie
I started living a fantasy life on the internet when I was in my early twenties. It was right after 9/11— which had nothing to do with it, I just remember vividly writing in my Livejournal about driving into the city a few weeks after 9/11 when I went to a Beastie Boys show at Hammerstein Ballroom. I lied about pretty much everything in my internet journal entries— where I worked, what I looked like. In reality I was a depressed, reclusive nobody who’d torched her life to the ground, and nobody knew me on the internet. I made friends there (some of whom I still keep in touch with to this day, who now know me for real, some who subscribe to this Substack) and I met guys there and had weird connections and relationships with them. It was never physical, we never even met, but some of those people were the closest relationships I ever had in my entire life. It’s really easy to trust and be vulnerable when you’re lying, and when you don’t have to really, truly show up for someone and you don’t have to risk being rejected. I was rejected by some of those people, but, not for real. They didn’t know me. They knew every single thought or feeling I had for years at a time, but they didn’t really know me. I didn’t let them.
Discovering your humanity in a space where society does everything it can to suppress it
The fantasy life online wasn’t sustainable once I got into the rooms of the 12 steps. When I first started going to 12 step meetings in 2010 for my eating disorder, I didn’t really want to work the steps. I wanted to do step 1, because I heard that you couldn’t really get the other 11 steps unless you surrendered to the first step (we admitted we were powerless over food and that our lives had become unmanageable) and I also wanted the promises that followed the 9th step, and I wanted the spiritual experience promised in the 12th step, but I didn’t really want to do the work.
But. I did. That’s one of the things that makes willingness to do the work so strange, doing stuff you don’t really want to do, but taking action and doing it anyway. I did the work and ten years later I have never stopped.
I’ve probably been to at least 2,500 12 step meetings and if I was paying attention and I learned anything over the years, I have heard thousands of confessions from people who all tell basically the same exact story in completely different ways.
Everyone wants to be loved and accepted for their true, authentic selves and everyone at some point in their lives is deeply scared to show up as their true authentic selves out of fear they will lose the people they love. Also, every single person cares what other people think about them. Everyone. The more someone proclaims they don’t give a fuck, the more they’re trying to hide that yes they fucking do. Now, I don’t care what everyone thinks about me, and it’s taken me years to get to this point, but, I care about what some people think about me. I can still hide who I am with the people I love the most. I do it way less than I used to, but I am still capable of it.
The Orphan Master’s Son reminded me how long it took me to learn, and how hard it was, to simply tell the truth about who I am and what I want. And the paradox in that was that taking the action, whether it was emotional, mental, actual, whatever, brought me to a stomach-dropping exhale of freedom, even though my fear was that by being honest the world was going to disappear underneath my feet and I’d lose everything. And yet the only things I lost were people places and things that I had completely outgrown and just didn’t need or want anymore.
Until next month… the playlist I made that was inspired by this novel is below: