“Why couldn’t I just feel the way I was used to? Except that was exactly what I didn’t want.” Ellinor is a mixed-up person: she is always rushing about in order to hurry through bad feelings; she is concealing a hidden grief from her boyfriend, …

Eula Biss thinks she and her husband, John, are just like everyone else in the neighbourhood, but he disagrees: “No … we’re nothing like them, I’m nothing like them.” Biss identifies as middle class, John as white trash, and throughout Having …