The Way Forward Is With a Broken Heart by Alice Walker

novel, just because Dianne never could. Ernesto thinks perhaps he will be a journalist for television.
    I sat in bed with the diary after it arrived. It is not like my journals, which are sequential, systematic, by years. It is not even finished, and is haphazard. Dianne’s thoughts are jotted down raw, just as they came to her; with no attempt to mold them into anything other than what she actually felt at the time. A diary like this, with so many blank pages, seems to reflect a life permeated with gaps, an existence full of holes. But perhaps that is what happens when one’s experience is so intensely different from anything dreamed of as a child that there seems literally to be no words for it. For living with a white man, and having him be, somehow, in brutal Mississippi, an exemplary father to her black children, must have seemed to Dianne stranger than any childhood fantasy she might have had.
    I used to feel that way, myself. Though what I’ve come to realize about myself is that I honestly like living on the edge, wherever it is; that is where I feel most alive and most free. And so I cherished the strangeness of us; and sometimes as we sat down to eat breakfast together, I looked at you across the table and thought you might as well have been a leopard lying waiting for prey on the limb of a tree. Strange, maybe dangerous, but so exciting and beautiful!
    But back to “the ruin.”
    Your mother did not understand the concept of “brownstoning.” Buying a dilapidated row house in the wilds of Brooklyn and transforming it into a comfortable and spacious home. Why we thought she’d get it, and give us a favorable report on the house we’d chosen by photograph sent to us by a Brooklyn realtor, I know not. The exquisitely remodeled, light-filled triplex, three doors from Prospect Park, in the very best part of Park Slope, she told us was in a slum. What did we know? Essentially, what did I know? Sleepwalking through the heat of our last Jackson, Mississippi, summer, subsisting on bicycle rides and Valium, I knew only what I read in the few books on brownstoning I’d managed to buy on trips to New York. Your mother was born and raised in Brooklyn, as you were. I thought her opinion held water, until, months later, I saw with my own eyes the house she’d encouraged us not to buy. The most perfect house in Brooklyn.
    Instead, with time running out for us in Mississippi, and New York once again calling, we found ourselves with one week in which to house-shop. And chose a beautiful but literal ruin, on a calm, out of the way street in Brooklyn, that it would take a year to get completely clean, and nearly three to renovate.
    Our blood went into that house. And the last shred of the love that had so characterized our life. The plumbing alone cost every cent you received from the sale of your share of your law firm. Every word I wrote was transformed into lighting fixtures, doorknobs and paint. We were not wise enough to know not to try to live in this foolishness. We did not know we should have done something else. At times like this, I felt our isolation most keenly. That we lacked parents or friends who would say: Look how tired you both are. It’s obvious. Sell the law firm, yes, buttake the money and go to Negril for six months. Write from a resort in the Rocky Mountains, if write you must, and save the money to live on the Upper West Side in New York, in a part of town already renovated. Enough, already! You don’t have to keep challenging and “improving” the world by avoiding yourselves! For we did learn to avoid ourselves, avoid each other. Our pitiful attempt to avoid our failure, avoid our pain.
    The night before we decided to buy the ruin we’d stayed at your mother’s house. She had magnanimously given us her bed. But as I sat on the edge of the bed, after putting Our Child to sleep next door, in your old room, she came in, and warned me not to put anything on her dresser because whatever I put