We Are Unprepared

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Meg Little Reilly. We Are Unprepared

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WE ARE UNPREPARED...

This is a novel about the superstorm that threatens to destroy a marriage, a town and the entire Eastern seaboard. But the destruction begins early, when fear infects people’s lives and spreads like the plague.

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Pia’s parents, both academics, lived in a tony Connecticut suburb outside of New York City, which was where they had raised their one beautiful child. They were aloof and opinionated, but they had always been kind enough to me. Pia spoke of them as if they were monsters. And maybe they were. I once assumed that she liked believing that hers had been a cruel childhood because it made her more interesting and tortured. But I was wrong about all that. Something had been missing from her childhood; there was a chaos inside of her that I couldn’t account for.

I didn’t like Pia’s parents, but not for the reasons she provided. They offended a Yankee sensibility in me that valued industriousness and discipline. I couldn’t understand what justified their haughtiness when, as far as I could tell, they hadn’t left much of a mark on the world. It wasn’t that their pretensions were unfamiliar to me—there was no shortage of artsy liberal affect in the corner of New England I grew up in. I just hated playing along with it. Pia’s parents attended the symphony and followed culinary trends and read theater reviews, but they didn’t create anything themselves and this bothered me. They seemed to believe that, by virtue of association with greatness, they, too, were great. They told us stories about so-and-so who just produced a one-act play or wrote a book about his trek across Nepal as we nodded with appropriate awe. Visits with them required pretending that we weren’t having cocktails with appreciators of great art, but with the artists themselves. All of this was made even more maddening by their undiluted disappointment at the lack of formal culture in our lives. That was their term for distinguishing the kind of culture that we enjoyed from the established arts of the aristocracy they believed themselves to be part of.

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