the one channel that carries a life across the room · S5
Joelle can tell he's trying to tell the truth and not just posturing and performing the way so many CAs seem like they do.
Context
Against the book's verdict that interior pain "cannot be conveyed," this is the counter-case: a stranger stands at a podium and tells his worst night plainly enough that a veiled woman in the back row, and even the hard-faced men who refuse to sit, are pulled in against their guard. The mechanism has a name here — Identification — and it is the one transmission the novel endorses without irony: not argument, not eloquence, just an attempt at the truth that other damaged people cannot help receiving. [sweep · shared-ground addiction-recovery irony-sincerity]