Generosity and paranoia

Madeleine Connors on compulsive gift giving. This article was originally published on August 25th, 2023.

I love giving gifts. When I peruse a store to buy a gift, my gaze is so intense, so fevered, that it could be mistaken for lust. I have come to recognize that my gift-giving habit borders on compulsion. I once bought a ceramic mug for a bartender I used to chat with at a kitschy Mexican restaurant I frequented. I attended a Bachelorette Party during a time when the stress from my lack of income was giving me a rash. Many of my days are a cautionary tale in credit card use. I offered to cover friends’ drinks when I knew I was short on rent. Last Christmas, I procured a rare coffee table book I had imported from a small bookstore in England for my friend. It was too much. Too elaborate. He may have reasonably wondered, “Why all the trouble?” I’m not entirely sure. When contemplating my inclination for gift-giving, I think of it in abstraction. I think of it, however misguided and self-punishing, as love itself.

I was 8 years old, living in Las Vegas when my father declared bankruptcy in 2002. It was summertime, and the air was taut. To keep cool, I often pressed my face against the cold bathroom tiles until they left an impression on my cheek. One sweltering night, my mother said: “Your father does not have a penny to spare to keep you fed.” 

To resuscitate his reputation, that summer, I collected pennies from under couches and car seats and presented them in an envelope to my mother. It’s a gift from Dad, I said, hoping to pass it off as a testament to my father’s love. My mother looked back at me blankly, perhaps in awe of how quickly I had taught myself to lie to prove that I was loved. 

As autumn rolled around, I did not make appearances at my classmates’ birthday parties. “We don’t have money for a gift, and you can’t show up empty-handed,” my mother insisted. So, I resigned to staying home. I attended a private school on scholarship, and rumors swirled that girls were gifting each other iPods at sleepovers. Our family could not compete, so we declined invites. On those isolated nights when I lay across my couch, bored, I began to suspect that I had to come bearing gifts to take up space in people’s lives.

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BLANK X URBAN STEMS

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” This first line is among the most famous in literature, echoing across 100 years of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a novel that takes place in the course of a single June day.

In celebration of the book’s centennial, we partnered with Urban Stems on The Mrs. Dalloway—a bouquet for true literary lovers, available through the end of the month. We also asked six of our favorite recent authors to tell us what Mrs. Dalloway means to them! Hear from Cora Lewis, Ling Ling Huang, Ilana Kaplan, Stephanie Wambugu, Rax King and Rebecca Fishbein.

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