Curated by PS

Every September, I find myself gravitating back to World War II books. There’s something about the shift in the calendar that makes the war feel closer, as if history itself is leaning in, asking me to remember. My reading habits seem almost ritualistic, moving in step with the timeline of the war: the politics, the human stories, the incredible acts of courage and cruelty. Last month, I dove into Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America for the second time and binged Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, both as a novel and as the series. While Roth’s work plays with alternative politics in America, Dick’s book does something more radical—it asks the reader to live in a world where the Axis powers actually won. And it asks: if the story we know is “wrong,” what does that mean for truth, morality, and our own reality?

The premise is immediately gripping. “What if the Axis won?” is not just a historical thought experiment—it’s a lens that turns everything upside down. This isn’t a utopia or a “better world” scenario. It’s a dark mirror, showing the most extreme consequences of ideologies that, in our history, were thankfully defeated. Dick’s alternate America is divided into three zones, each reflecting different forms of control and oppression.

On the West Coast, we have the Japanese Pacific States, where California, Oregon, and Washington fall under Japanese rule. It’s not as brutal as the Nazi regime, but it’s oppressive in quieter, subtler ways. One of the most interesting aspects of this setting is the cultural obsession with pre-war American artifacts. People collect old items—some authentic, some counterfeit—and it highlights how history, memory, and value can be manipulated under foreign occupation. San Francisco becomes a kind of microcosm for this cultural tension, a place where the past is commodified and the present is tightly controlled.

The Greater Nazi Reich covers the eastern and Midwestern parts of the country. It’s terrifying in its scope and ambition, a place where genocide has already succeeded elsewhere and where technology and ideology combine to create an omnipresent threat. Unlike the Japanese Pacific States, the Nazi-controlled East represents a world of constant danger and moral decay.

Then there’s the Neutral Rocky Mountain States, a buffer zone between these two powers. This is lawless territory, a gray area where survival is uncertain but personal freedom, though limited, is possible. It’s also where Hawthorne Abendsen, the mysterious author of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, lives. His book—a story in which the Allies actually won—becomes a focal point for exploring truth and perception, giving the novel its philosophical edge.

The story unfolds through the lives of three main characters. Frank Frink, a Jewish man in hiding, works in a factory producing fake American goods. He hates the falseness of his work and dreams of making something real, beautiful, and authentic. His craftsmanship eventually becomes a form of resistance and a key to one of the novel’s more surreal moments.

Juliana Frink, Frank’s ex-wife, is a judo instructor living in the Neutral Zone. She becomes obsessed with The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the book that imagines a victorious Allied world. Her quest to find the author takes her across a dangerous country and forces her to confront betrayal, loyalty, and moral choice. She must decide whether to protect the author or let him die, a dilemma that speaks to one of the novel’s central questions: what does it mean to act ethically in a world built on lies?

Finally, there’s Mr. Tagomi, a high-ranking Japanese official in San Francisco. Calm, spiritual, and deeply moral, Tagomi relies on the I Ching, an ancient Chinese oracle, to make decisions. When he is forced into violence for the first time to protect a German informant, he experiences a vision of an alternate reality: San Francisco as it would be in our world, unoccupied and familiar. This moment, strange and beautiful, forces him—and the reader—to question the very nature of reality.

What makes the novel so compelling is how these threads interconnect. Frank’s jewelry triggers Tagomi’s vision; Juliana’s pursuit of Abendsen intersects with the I Ching; the book within the book challenges every character’s understanding of their own world. Unlike traditional narratives where events drive the story, Dick’s novel is driven by ideas. It’s about the search for truth—through art, morality, and imagination—in a world where official history has been rewritten.

The ending is famously ambiguous, and that ambiguity is the point. Juliana meets Abendsen and learns that his book isn’t a historical record—it’s a spiritual truth, a glimpse of what could have been. Tagomi’s vision suggests that reality itself is fragile, that our world might not be the only one, and that morality and perception are as important as factual truth. Dick doesn’t give us a neat resolution; he leaves us unsettled, questioning our own assumptions about history, reality, and ethics.

Beyond its plot, the novel is deeply philosophical. It teaches that reality is subjective, that truth can exist outside of historical fact, and that even in oppressive regimes, individuals have the power to act morally. Frank’s jewelry, Juliana’s quest, and Tagomi’s vision all reinforce the idea that meaning is found in the choices we make, the beauty we create, and the courage to seek truth. At the same time, the book is a warning about authoritarianism and prejudice, showing how societal power can magnify human flaws, turning bias into something catastrophic.

Reading The Man in the High Castle in September feels fitting. It’s a book that asks us to reflect not only on history but also on memory, identity, and the fragile nature of reality. It reminds us that the stories we tell ourselves—about the past, about morality, about good and evil—shape the world we live in. And it leaves a lingering question: what if our world, the one we take for granted, is only one version of what could have been?

Philip K. Dick’s novel is a reminder that speculative fiction can be more than entertainment. It can challenge us, unsettle us, and expand our understanding of reality itself. It’s a book I return to not just to revisit a fictional world but to examine the one I live in, to question the truths I accept, and to remember that history is never as simple as it seems.

Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society gives one of the sharpest answers to this question, situating our everyday unease within a wider shift in how power works in modern life.

Han’s book is best understood as a critical engagement with Michel Foucault’s theory of the “disciplinary society.” In Discipline and Punish, Foucault describes how, in the 18th and 19th centuries, social institutions like schools, prisons, factories, and hospitals shaped individuals through discipline, surveillance, and prohibition. This was a system of negative power: rules, commands, and prohibitions structured life. Individuals became “obedience-subjects,” trained to comply under threat of punishment. Within this model, guilt was tied to disobedience, failing to follow a clear, external rule.

Han argues that this model no longer explains our present condition. Instead, we now live in what he calls an achievement society. Power no longer operates mainly through external prohibition but through positivity—the imperative to achieve, to optimize, to realize ourselves. Rather than being forced by others, we pressure ourselves. The subject is no longer disciplined by external authority but is instead an “achievement-subject,” an entrepreneur of the self.

This shift has transformed both how power operates and how suffering manifests. In the disciplinary society, pathologies were criminality and madness. In the achievement society, the characteristic conditions are burnout, depression, and anxiety. These are not failures of willpower but consequences of self-exploitation. Unlike the obedient subject, the achievement subject is both master and slave—driving themselves harder and harder, with no external authority to resist.

This explains why rest is so difficult.

In a culture where productivity defines worth, rest appears as wasted time. The guilt we feel when resting comes not from disobeying a rule, but from failing our own internalized imperative to “do more.” What feels like freedom—working for ourselves, pursuing our own goals—is actually a compulsion.

Han also emphasizes the loss of contemplation. Modern life, dominated by multitasking and constant stimulation, undermines our ability to rest deeply or think reflectively. Instead of achieving stillness, we remain restless even in moments of supposed inactivity. Han compares this to the vigilance of animals who must always remain alert to survive. Far from progress, this “hyperattention” reduces us to a survival state, exhausting us and blocking the contemplative practices that allow genuine rest and creativity.

The depressive is not simply someone who resists demands from outside but someone crushed by the impossibility of meeting their own internal demands. They are, in Han’s words, an “animal laborans”—a working animal—who has turned freedom into self-oppression.

Burnout is a systemic, not just a personal, problem. The most important lesson is that exhaustion, anxiety, and depression are not individual weaknesses or a lack of mental strength. Han makes clear that these are systemic pathologies of a society organized around endless performance and self-optimization. His analysis shifts the conversation from “what’s wrong with me?” to “what’s wrong with our society?” In this sense, guilt, burnout, and depression become less about personal failure and more about a collective condition of late modernity.

He reminds us that we are both the master and the slave in the achievement society, trapped in self-exploitation. What appears as freedom—the ability to “do anything”—is in fact a form of compulsion. True freedom, Han suggests, may lie in the ability to “not-do,” in reclaiming stillness, boredom, and idleness as sites of renewal. Our obsession with hyperactivity and multitasking is not progress but regression, a return to the vigilance of wild animals. Against this backdrop, Han reclaims the value of boredom and deep attention, positioning them as conditions for creativity and genuine life.

Should we move away from a life governed by achievement toward a life that values contemplation, presence, and being over constant doing?

One of my favorite genres is historical fiction, especially the kind that unsettles by twisting familiar history into something disturbingly plausible. On my second reading of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), I was struck less by its premise—which I knew—but by how intimate and ordinary the terror felt. Roth imagines a United States where Charles Lindbergh, the famed aviator and isolationist, defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election. What follows isn’t a totalitarian coup or an Axis victory, but something quieter: a slow drift toward fascism that creeps into neighborhoods, schools, and even family conversations around the dinner table.

The novel’s brilliance lies in how it narrows this vast political shift to the experiences of a single Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey: the Roths. At first, they dismiss Lindbergh’s rise as an aberration. But soon the government establishes the Office of American Absorption and launches the “Just Folks” program, sending Jewish boys to live with Midwestern families under the guise of “Americanization.” Sandy Roth, Philip’s older brother, eagerly joins, creating a deep rift within the family. Their cousin Alvin, meanwhile, joins the Canadian army to fight the Nazis, only to return disabled and disillusioned.

As Lindbergh’s presidency unfolds, anti-Semitism hardens from background noise to official policy. The Roths are denied hotel rooms, their neighbors flee to Canada, and the introduction of “Homestead 42”—a forced resettlement program—threatens to scatter Jewish communities across the Midwest and South. Prominent Jewish radio personality Walter Winchell launches a campaign against Lindbergh, calling him a fascist, only to be assassinated, sparking riots reminiscent of Kristallnacht. Eventually, Lindbergh mysteriously disappears on a flight—rumored to have been in secret communication with the Nazis—and his vice president continues the persecution until Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the First Lady, helps restore democratic order. Roosevelt is reelected, the U.S. enters World War II, and history “resets,” though scarred.

What Roth achieves is not simply alternate history but a meditation on democracy’s fragility. He shows how prejudice, once legitimized by a political figure, can metastasize into policy. The Roth family’s story illustrates how political upheaval fractures communities, severs family bonds, and reshapes personal identities. Importantly, the erosion of democracy does not come all at once—it emerges gradually, through seemingly benign programs and patriotic slogans like “America First.”

Critics in 2004 quickly drew parallels between Roth’s fictional Lindbergh administration and the political climate of post-9/11 America under George W. Bush. While Roth himself denied that the novel was meant as a direct allegory, the resonances were difficult to ignore. Lindbergh’s campaign slogan, “Vote for Lindbergh, or vote for war,” taps into public dread of another world conflict in much the same way that the Bush administration relied on the fear of terrorism to consolidate support for the War on Terror. The novel also dramatizes an exclusionary form of patriotism: anyone who questions Lindbergh’s policies is branded un-American, echoing the “with us or against us” rhetoric of the early 2000s. Meanwhile, the administration’s programs, such as “Just Folks,” suggest the systematic erosion of civil liberties, a theme critics linked to the expanded surveillance powers of the Patriot Act. Finally, Roth highlights the power of celebrity politics—Lindbergh’s appeal rests not on governing experience or coherent policy, but on his heroic image and stage-managed presence. In this way, the novel anticipates the reliance on spectacle and symbolism that has increasingly shaped modern political leadership.

Roth’s insights feel even more prescient today. The novel exposes how quickly fringe ideas can become mainstream once sanctioned by power. It warns that democracy’s undoing may not come through violent coups but through incremental normalization of prejudice. And perhaps most importantly, it shows how ordinary people—motivated by fear, assimilation, or misplaced loyalty—can become complicit in their own oppression.

In rereading, I found it less an alternate history than a mirror, showing us not only what might have been, but what might still be.

I’ve curated some books for us to understand the world better.

American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World

Published in 1992, the book serves as a crucial counter-narrative to centuries of romanticized accounts of European expansion into the Americas. At its core, Stannard’s message is stark and uncompromising: the near-total destruction of the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere, which unfolded over four centuries, was “the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.” This assertion immediately forces readers to re-evaluate their perceptions of genocide. When many people consider the term genocide, their minds often turn to horrific—yet comparatively contained—events like the Nazi Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide. Stannard, however, meticulously details a catastrophe of unparalleled scale and duration, arguing that the decimation of Native American populations was not merely an unfortunate byproduct of disease or inevitable progress, but a deliberate and sustained campaign of annihilation. Stannard supports his thesis by delving into the cultural and religious underpinnings of European expansion. He argues that deeply ingrained European attitudes toward race, religion, and warfare created fertile ground for the systematic dehumanization and destruction of Indigenous peoples. He vividly portrays the vibrant and diverse societies that existed across the Americas prior to 1492, only to then chronicle their systematic dismantling through a brutal combination of introduced pathogens (for which Native populations had no immunity) and explicit, often religiously sanctioned, violence, enslavement, and displacement.

Virginia Woolf’s central argument in A Room of One’s Own is that a woman must have financial independence and a private physical and intellectual space—a “room of her own”—in order to write fiction and achieve her full creative potential. She contrasts the lavish, well-funded male universities with the poorly resourced women’s colleges, asserting that “intellectual freedom depends upon material things.” Woolf argues that poverty, lack of privacy, and domestic responsibilities have historically stifled women’s creativity. To illustrate her point, Woolf invents “Judith Shakespeare,” a fictional sister of William Shakespeare. Judith is born with the same genius but is denied an education and pressured into a restrictive life, ultimately leading to her tragic end. The “room” in Woolf’s title has come to be understood as a metaphor for any form of personal space and autonomy. In today’s world, this can mean having dedicated time for one’s passion, the mental space to think freely without constant domestic or professional distractions, and the emotional independence to create without fear of judgment. The need for “money of her own” remains critical. Woolf’s discussion of the biases faced by women writers is still deeply relevant. Even today, women in creative fields often encounter different expectations or critiques than their male counterparts. Her work calls for a continued awareness of how social and cultural assumptions shape our perceptions of what is considered “good” or “important” art—and encourages the creation of works that transcend those limitations.

Michael Parenti’s Against Empire argues that modern imperialism is not a relic of the past but has evolved into a system of neoimperialism, where powerful nations—led by the United States—use economic, political, and military means to control the resources and labor of weaker countries. Parenti contends that imperialism is primarily an economic system driven by the needs of multinational corporations to secure cheap labor, raw materials, and new markets. This dominance is achieved through foreign investment, loans from institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and the use of military force to protect these investments. Military interventions, Parenti argues, are often disguised as humanitarian missions—framed as efforts to promote democracy or fight terrorism. However, their true purpose is to suppress popular movements that challenge capitalist interests and to install regimes favorable to Western corporations. Modern conflicts, such as those in Sudan, the Sahel region, and the Middle East, often have underlying economic motivations. These include control over valuable natural resources, securing trade routes, or serving the strategic interests of foreign powers. The book’s argument—that war is often a tool for economic gain rather than purely for defense or humanitarian purposes—can be clearly applied to these contemporary situations. Although Against Empire was written in a post–Cold War context, its insights remain highly relevant in 2025. For example, the involvement of various global powers in Sudan’s civil war or the conflict in Myanmar can be analyzed through the lens of competing economic interests and the desire to expand influence in resource-rich regions.

Obsession, Loneliness, and the Unsettling Yearning to Be Seen

Emma van Straaten’s Creep — published in the UK as This Immaculate Body — is a hypnotic and disquieting exploration of desire, delusion, and emotional isolation. Told through the voice of Alice, a lonely cleaner in London, the novel invites readers into a deeply unsettling interior world where love, fantasy, and obsession begin to blur.

Alice becomes fixated on Tom, a man whose flat she cleans every Wednesday. They have never met, yet she convinces herself that he is her soulmate. Through ritualistic acts of cleaning and careful observation of his belongings, Alice constructs an imagined connection with him, believing that she is destined to be part of his life. Every object she touches becomes sacred. Every detail of his home serves as a stepping stone into a fantasy that becomes more elaborate and consuming each week.

What makes Creep so compelling is the careful balance between horror and empathy. Alice’s behavior is undeniably intrusive and unsettling. She crosses boundaries without remorse and indulges in a fantasy life that grows increasingly unhinged. Yet van Straaten writes her with such emotional depth that we understand, even if we cannot condone, her longing. Alice is not a villain. She is painfully human, driven by a deep need for love, validation, and self-worth.

The prose is lyrical and sharp. Van Straaten writes with an intensity that mirrors Alice’s mental state. Sentences like “His fingerprints are universes” and “His eyelashes, discarded wishes” capture Alice’s reverence for Tom in language that is both poetic and disturbing. Her internal world is vividly drawn, a place where fantasy serves as both refuge and prison. The use of capitalization—“He,” “His,” “Him”—underscores the religious devotion she feels, elevating Tom to a divine figure in her mind.

Themes of class and race run throughout the novel. Alice’s status as a cleaner, an invisible worker in someone else’s life, shapes much of her desire. Her fantasy is not only about love but about access and belonging. She wants to be part of Tom’s world, one that represents comfort, stability, and acceptance. Her obsession is not just personal, it is also social and symbolic.

The act of cleaning itself takes on layered meaning. For Alice, it is more than a job. It is a way of physically engaging with Tom’s life, of participating in an imagined intimacy. Her rituals become almost spiritual, transforming dusting and wiping into acts of devotion.

The novel is filled with discomfort, and some readers may struggle with Alice’s narration. Her voice is acidic and unreliable. Her actions are often inappropriate and invasive. Yet this is where the novel’s strength lies. It asks readers to sit with the discomfort, to feel empathy for someone who is deeply flawed but also profoundly lonely. It invites us to look at the emotional cost of being unseen.

Dark humor weaves through the story, offering moments of relief from the intensity of Alice’s obsession. Her observations are often cutting and strange, creating moments of levity that feel both unsettling and strangely endearing. These flashes of humor ground the novel and keep the tone from becoming too oppressive.

Creep is not a traditional thriller, nor is it a love story. It is a psychological portrait of longing and delusion, written with precision and emotional clarity. Van Straaten offers no easy answers, only a mirror held up to the quiet desperation that can live inside any of us.

One significant thing we can learn is the perilous nature of seeking external validation and the profound impact of unaddressed loneliness on the human psyche.

Alice’s story illustrates how a deep-seated fear of inadequacy and a desperate longing for love can lead to extreme behaviors and a distorted perception of reality.

This underscores a vital truth: that without self-acceptance, the search for love and validation from others — especially when rooted in fantasy or obsession — can become not only futile, but dangerously consuming. True healing begins when we confront our own emotional voids, rather than trying to fill them with illusions.

I picked up A Day with a Perfect Stranger not really knowing what to expect. It’s the follow-up to Dinner with a Perfect Stranger, which centers on a man named Nick who claims he had dinner with Jesus. That story was already a bit of a wild premise, so I was curious to see how this second book would build on it—this time through the eyes of Nick’s wife, Mattie.

Mattie is not religious. She’s skeptical, tired, and honestly a little fed up with her husband’s sudden spiritual awakening. To her, Nick has gone off the deep end. His whole personality has shifted since his “encounter,” and it’s left their marriage on shaky ground. In need of some breathing room, she heads out of town on a work trip.

Then comes the plane ride.

Next to her is a man who seems harmless enough at first—friendly, maybe a bit philosophical, and apparently just as unimpressed by religion as she is. But as they talk, it becomes clear that this isn’t just small talk. The stranger somehow knows things about her life that he shouldn’t. He touches on her fears, her past, her sense of disconnection. It’s subtle, but it gets under her skin.

What I liked about this book is that it doesn’t try too hard. It’s not preachy, and it doesn’t feel like a theological lecture disguised as fiction. Instead, it’s a quiet, conversational story. It asks big questions without forcing answers. Mattie’s doubt feels real. Her emotional exhaustion, her frustration with Nick, her internal conflict—they all come through clearly. And the stranger never pressures her. He just listens, reflects things back to her, and lets the conversation unfold.

It’s a short read, but one that manages to pack a lot in. It explores what it means to feel truly seen, to be spiritually restless, and to maybe, just maybe, be open to something bigger than yourself. I appreciated that it didn’t wrap everything up with a neat bow. There’s transformation, yes, but not in a way that feels unrealistic or forced.

If you’re skeptical about Christian fiction (understandably so—there’s a lot out there that feels heavy-handed), this one might surprise you. It’s more about a moment of connection and personal reflection than anything else. And it poses a good question: what if the most important conversation of your life happened with a total stranger, in a place as ordinary as a plane ride?

Would you even notice?

Kate Quinn’s The Alice Network is a richly layered historical fiction novel that masterfully intertwines two timelines—World War I and the aftermath of World War II—into a compelling tale of espionage, trauma, and female solidarity. Drawing inspiration from real-life women’s spy networks, the book not only thrills with its plot but also pays tribute to the often-overlooked contributions of women in wartime.

Dual Narratives Across Time

The story unfolds through the alternating perspectives of Eve Gardiner, a young British woman recruited into the real-life Alice Network of female spies in 1915, and Charlie St. Clair, a wealthy but disgraced American socialite searching for her missing cousin in 1947. Their worlds collide when Charlie seeks out the now reclusive and embittered Eve, believing that Eve holds clues to her cousin Rose’s disappearance. What begins as a mystery evolves into a powerful journey of reckoning, redemption, and friendship.

Quinn excels at crafting two distinct but thematically unified storylines. Eve’s WWI narrative is a tense, emotionally charged exploration of espionage behind enemy lines. Her transformation from a timid girl with a stutter into a formidable operative is both heartbreaking and inspiring. In contrast, Charlie’s post-WWII journey is quieter but no less moving, as she confronts her privilege, unplanned pregnancy, and the shadows of a war that has forever changed Europe and its people.

A Tribute to Real-Life Female Spies

The Alice Network is more than a work of fiction—it’s a powerful homage to the real women who risked everything during war. During World War I, networks like the Alice Network and Belgium’s La Dame Blanche relied on women’s perceived invisibility to gather intelligence, operate safe houses, and transmit messages—sometimes even through knitting patterns. In World War II, women’s roles expanded further, with the SOE, OSS, and Bletchley Park employing women as agents, code-breakers, and resistance fighters.

Through meticulous research, Quinn breathes life into this hidden history. Her prose is vivid and immersive, capturing everything from the elegance of French drawing rooms to the gritty realities of war-torn Europe. She doesn’t shy away from the horrors of war—the torture, the betrayals, the aftermath—but also highlights the resilience and agency of her characters.

A wake-up call to the West’s complicity in violence and silence.

A wake-up call to the West’s complicity in violence and silence, Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This is a searing indictment of Western hypocrisy, imperialism, and moral complacency — anchored in the brutal realities of Israel’s 2023–24 attack on Gaza.

Blending memoir, manifesto, and rigorous moral critique, El Akkad dismantles the cherished myth of Western liberalism as a beacon of justice, revealing instead a system riddled with selective outrage, institutional cowardice, and systemic violence. At its core, the book confronts the West’s “moral convenience” — the tendency to perform empathy only when politically safe or expedient. Gaza, with its relentless toll of child casualties, famine, and displacement, serves as the story’s catalytic backdrop.

The book’s moral clarity is unflinching. El Akkad excoriates the media, governments, and cultural institutions for sanitizing violence, prioritizing “neutrality” over justice, and often remaining complicit through silence. His own reflections on the value of art amid genocide offer a sobering meditation on complicity and resistance.

One Day reads as a breakup letter to the West — a demand to confront systemic complicity in genocide before history’s judgment becomes unavoidable. The chilling reality El Akkad exposes — that those protesting the ongoing massacre face repression and violence — renders this work both a vital historical document and an urgent moral call for our time.

“The system does not work for you, was never intended to work for you, but as an act of magnanimity on our part, you may choose the degree to which it works against you.”

With this powerful statement, El Akkad lays bare the fundamental design and function of Western political, economic, and media institutions: systems created not to serve marginalized peoples but to uphold elite power — often at the expense of Palestinians, people of color, the global poor, and other oppressed groups.

Beautifully written and devastatingly clear-eyed, this book will stand as essential reading for 2025 and beyond. It challenges readers to confront the brutal truths of empire and genocide and to reject the comfortable silence that allows them to persist. El Akkad’s work is a testament to the power of moral clarity in a world too often clouded by hypocrisy.

How do you begin to trust a father who betrayed his family in the most horrific way imaginable?

Caroline Darian’s I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again is a searing memoir that unravels the devastating truth behind a father’s monstrous crimes and reveals the enduring strength of mother and daughter amid unimaginable trauma.

In Darian’s narrative, the boundary between childhood and adulthood dissolves. The innocence once nurtured within the safety of family life is violently shattered. Caroline is forced to confront the unspoken, unsettling questions that haunt so many survivors: What truly happened behind closed doors? How does one move forward when the very foundation of their existence has been irreparably broken?

Her story begins with a phone call on November 2, 2020, that changed everything. Caroline recounts the shock of learning the full extent of her father’s abuse, the harrowing police investigation, her own anxiety, and the months leading up to the trial. She also confronts the haunting reality of disturbing photos taken of her—lying unconscious, stripped of dignity—evidence of the violation and invasion she endured.

More than a personal story, this memoir sheds light on the insidious use of chemical submission—drugs used to incapacitate victims—and the societal and legal blind spots that allow such abuses to go undetected. Darian’s candid account of her mother’s ordeal and her own mental health struggles opens a vital conversation about intimate partner violence and the urgent need for stronger protections.

I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again is a painful yet powerful read, unflinching in its confrontation with the darkest corners of family betrayal. Ultimately, it stands as a testament to resilience, justice, and the critical fight to shift shame from victims onto perpetrators. Caroline Darian’s courage transforms private suffering into a public call to action that demands to be heard.

Above all, it is a plea for justice and change: for shame to move from victims to perpetrators, for better protection of girls and women, and for society to recognize and respond to the horrors of chemical submission. Darian has turned her trauma into powerful activism, launching the #MendorsPas (#Don’tPutMeUnder) campaign to raise awareness and push for legal reforms and victim support.

I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again is a profoundly courageous work that compels readers to confront the uncomfortable reality of abuse. Caroline Darian amplifies the voices of survivors and challenges us to face painful truths we might prefer to ignore.

Her story is a call to action—a plea for truth, visibility, and healing for those whose suffering has too long been kept in the shadows.

Kindness without clarity can be as destructive as cruelty

Set in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity (Ungeduld des Herzens, 1939) is a deeply reflective and psychologically nuanced novel that probes the moral ambiguities of compassion, the limits of emotional honesty, and the tragic fallout of social performance.

Narrated retrospectively by Lieutenant Anton Hofmiller, the story immerses readers in a world bound by rigid codes of military honor, aristocratic pride, and unspoken emotional restraint. Hofmiller’s fateful decision—to invite Edith von Kekesfalva, a young woman disabled by illness, to dance at a social event—sparks a chain of events that evolve into a profound meditation on guilt, pity, and the thin line between kindness and cruelty.

What begins as an awkward social gesture soon spirals into an all-consuming ethical quandary. Overcome by shame and a chivalrous sense of duty, Hofmiller returns to the Kekesfalva estate, drawn into a suffocating emotional atmosphere shaped by Edith’s fragility and her father’s desperate hope for her recovery.

Zweig masterfully captures Hofmiller’s psychological entrapment—his visits shifting from genuine affection to a sense of imposed obligation, as he confuses moral duty with emotional commitment. His failure to confront the truth—both to himself and others—creates a void filled by illusion. In this context, pity becomes an insidious force: cloaked as virtue, it ultimately reveals itself as a form of emotional deception that infantilizes and diminishes the object of its concern.

The novel’s psychological tension peaks in Hofmiller’s internal monologue, reflecting Zweig’s familiarity with Freudian analysis. Hofmiller is no traditional villain; he is an ordinary man, immobilized by the fear of causing harm, yet blind to the suffering his passivity perpetuates. Under pressure from Edith’s father, he tells a well-intentioned lie about the possibility of a cure—a false hope that fuels Edith’s romantic and existential dreams.

The consequences of this deceit are devastating. Edith, mistaking Hofmiller’s pity for hidden love, invests in a future he neither desires nor can fulfill. His eventual rejection—expressed not with honesty but through desperate withdrawal—leads to Edith’s tragic suicide.

This catastrophe is not merely the result of individual failings but emerges from broader cultural and historical forces. The Austro-Hungarian military elite’s rigid hierarchies and emotional repression, the romantic idealism of the fin-de-siècle aristocracy, and the pathologization of female vulnerability all shape the novel’s psychological and moral terrain. Zweig’s work is thus both an intimate character study and a critique of a fading empire’s values—where honor is performative, duty misdirected, and emotional truth sacrificed for appearances.

At its core, Beware of Pity is a profound exploration of how well-meaning but dishonest compassion can cause deeper harm than outright cruelty.

Zweig challenges us to rethink the ethics of empathy: When does pity turn patronizing? When does kindness become self-serving? Hofmiller’s story—recounted with the harsh clarity of hindsight—offers no simple answers but reveals the heavy cost of emotional cowardice. The novel’s lasting power lies in its dissection of the moral grey zones we navigate in our relationships and the fragile, perilous boundary between empathy and deception.

The destruction wrought by misplaced virtue defies detached analysis. Zweig reminds us that the gravest harm often stems not from malice but from evasion—when courage and truth give way to illusion and self-preservation. emotions are not hatred or anger, but love’s counterfeit: pity.