Tag: on not reading books but passing on opinions

Late night trumpet calls

My husband has been away these past few days and I have been sleeping like a top, sleeping so soundly the hours pass in an instant. And it’s not because I do not miss him.

How can I write this without seemingly taking the mickey out of the man I love? I have been thinking on this issue for some time now. Ever since I read Lynn Freed’s wonderful book on Reading Writing and Leaving Home.

My husband has left home, albeit briefly, and I am left lonelier, but free from his incessant snoring. Lynn Freed writes about snoring stories as the great stories of revenge, the way in which at dinner partes, women, and it is usually women, tell stories about the nature of their husband’s snoring. They can keep their fellow dinner guests in stitches as they regale them of the horrors of those late night trumpet calls, while the husband, the poor perpetrator of said snores is left humiliated and in shame.

Two generations – asleep and snoring?

It’s true. I do not write about such things as a rule because I do not want to humiliate or belittle the ones I love, or do I?

My thesis topics pops back into my mind. It has been absent for several months now. I’m still waiting to hear whether or not I have passed. Life writing and the desire for revenge. The way in which a desire for revenge can inspire writing, not that I want to take revenge on my husband or do I?

I cannot talk easily about his snoring. He finds it insulting. He tries to stop. He rolls over when I nudge him, but even then within minutes his throat constricts and he is back at it again.

Is it his helplessness against snoring that causes him to want to throw it back at me? ‘You snore, too.’ The gut impulse. The talion principle, an eye for an eye. You insult me and I’ll insult you back. Or is it something else?

Please, don’t talk about sleep apnoea or other common ailments. I do not believe it to be the case here. I put it down to age and occasionally too much red wine, but even when he drinks lightly or not at all the snoring persists. I play musical beds until it subsides.

The past few days I have not needed to move about. I can stay put, hence my sleep is more sound.

I have a friend whose wife snores. She is the culprit, and the same principles apply. They came to our house one day overjoyed to have found a new treatment, a sliver of something or other than you put on the back of your tongue, a wafer like substance that dissolves in your mouth and apparently stops the snoring.

My friend is a beautiful and dignified women in her sixties. How can it be that her snoring is enough to wake the dead? She smokes, her husband says by way of explanation. She smokes. Maybe that is the cause.

Smoking’s to blame. It seems we need to find some point from which we can blame the perpetrator of snores, hence the additional shame.

Snoring is treated as a crime, and yet it is one from which we all suffer. It cannot be a crime. It is only a problem when the person who shares your bed finds it too much. Or when it suggests some malady in need of attention.

As I said earlier, I put it down to aging. I am like my mother here. She ascribes every bodily ailment that slows her down to her aging. I, too, imagine that my husband’s snoring comes of his aging and he like me is ashamed of both.

Why be ashamed of our aging?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Didion puts it well in her recent book, Blue Nights:
‘Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored: I have watched tears flood the eyes of grown women, loved women, women of talent and accomplishment, for no reason other than that a small child in the room, more often than not an adored niece or nephew, has just described them as ‘wrinkly’, or asked how old they are.

‘When we are asked this question we are always undone by its innocence, somehow shamed by the clear bell-like tones in which it is asked. What shames us is this: the answer we give is never innocent. The answer we give is unclear, evasive, even guilty … there must be a mistake: only yesterday I was in my fifties, my forties, only yesterday I was thirty-one…’

Didion’s thoughts about her daughter’s adoption, life, and early death lead Didion into thoughts on her own aging and frailty.

It’s a thing that dogs us all, this aging business. I talked about it recently among a small group of friends and most resonated, though the youngest of our group, a woman in her early forties with a small child at home, brushed it off. It’s too far away from her.

I used to be like that, too. I used to think that I would not worry about getting old until it hit me and then I’d die. But these days it hits me daily with a ferocity I had never imagined possible.

It is like wading through mud. The fact that I used to have a school aged child and that my mother is still alive convinced me that I was still a long way away from needing to reflect on this, but my daughter has just now finished school and my mother who lives on and now plans to reach one hundred, reminds me of my age.

‘You have to recognise you are old,’ my mother says, ‘when you have a seventy year old son, a forty year old granddaughter and a six year old great grand son.’

Where did the time go?

I haven’t read the book, but in my opinion, it’s not worth reading.

It’s within a week of a year since I broke my leg. At the time recovering from this break seemed interminable. Eight weeks of my life weighed down with a cast from ankle to knee and now I can scarcely even remember that it happened. I no longer even notice the twinges that beset me earlier this year when I was still recovering.

My broken leg has healed and now all I have is the memory and the cast which I could not bring myself to chuck out. For one thing it cost over $900.00 – would you believe? – and for another, it seems sacrilegious to chuck it out. But it’s of no use and when I dragged it out the other day to show my brother-in-law who lives interstate and missed out on the drama of my broken leg, I realised that it could not serve as the basis of any work of art – an earlier fantasy of mine.

The cast was custom made to fit my leg. It has no place in my life anymore, not unless I were to break my leg again in the same place, and that is unlikely. In the next clean up, which I plan to go through over the Christmas holidays I may bite the bullet and consign it to the tip.

I have a chapter in my thesis in which I discuss the furore that erupted over Ann Patchett’s book, Truth and Beauty. The book is her memorial, you might say, to her friend Lucy Grealy, author of the renowned Autobiography of a Face. Grealy died in her early forties of a suspected heroin overdose.

To me both books are beautifully written and well worth reading, but the reason I focus on them in my thesis has more to do with the audience response to these books, particularly as I see them played out within the blogosphere.

There is a post dedicated to discussions of a letter that Suellen Grealy, Lucy’s older sister, wrote to The Guardian about Patchett’s book.

Suellen believes that Ann Patchett has ‘hijacked’ her family’s grief by writing about her younger sister and to some extent about the Grealy family as she has. Mind you, there is not much about Lucy Grealy’s family in Patchett’s book as far as I can see. The book is more about Lucy herself and her relationship with Ann Patchett.

The thing that intrigues me is the degree to which this book has inspired a line of hate mail directed against Patchett for daring to violate the Grealy family’s right to its private grief, or at least for daring to present a different image of Lucy Grealy to the one she presented in her autobiography.

I’m interested in notions of grief, particularly in so far as they relate to issues of privacy and the public sphere. I understand Ann Patchett’s book to be in part her attempt to come to terms with the loss of her beloved friend and a commemoration of their friendship, but also as an expression of, or a space in which to explore, some of Patchett’s anger with her friend for perhaps not making a better fist of things.

Having said that, I don’t sense that Ann Patchett lacks in empathy for her friend, Lucy, whose life sounds as though it was horrendous. There’s something though in the way we live our lives, the uses to which we put our lives, especially when those lives are described in public as in the writing of these two books that then invite others to come along and judge those lives, for good or for ill.

To me there’s a confusion between the content of the writing, the writing itself and the real lives of the people, either those who write or those written about.

In one of the comments on this blog discussing Suellen’s letter of protest, Jack Grealy, a nephew, writes a comment in which he complains about what he considers to be one blog commenter’s attack on his aunt, Suellen. ‘She’s my aunt,’ he seems to say. ‘You can’t talk about her like that.’

But in the public sphere, in the blog world, Suellen Grealy is not simply Jack Grealy’s aunt, she has become a commodity of sorts, a character in a novel.

She has written about her perceptions in her letter to The Guardian and has thereby thrown herself into the mix, her sister Lucy’s book about her own life, and Ann Patchett’s response to that life and in so doing, she has become a source of interest and curiosity for readers throughout the blogosphere. Therefore another commenter, tells Jack Grealy that he’s out of line.

Although Patchett’s book came out in 2004, and Grealy’s ten years earlier, comments still arrive at the blogsite that posted Suellen’s letter from The Guardian.

Lucy is dead, Ann Patchett has gone on to write several more successful novels, and heaven knows what Suellen is up to these days, but the saga continues.

I find extraordinary the extent to which people feel free to comment on this fracas, including those who admit to not having read either book.

They wade in on the fight as if a mob is gathering on the street and people are baying for someone’s blood – any one’s blood it seems, though not Lucy Grealy’s. She’s seen as the true victim, but her friend, Ann Patchett, is fair game for daring to write about Lucy as she has done, or likewise Lucy’s sister, Suellen, for daring to take Patchett to task.

I suppose literary skirmishes are not uncommon. They bring out the worst and the best in us. It is for this reason, too, I think there is some merit to the notion that even the best of writing can disturb and evoke a hostile reader response.

What is it that happens to us when we read? Is there some sense that when we take in the words off the page they become our own and therefore we have the right to judge, not only the standard of the writing, but also the content. It is as if we become both judge and jury, not only of the writer but also of those who are written about.

It is a powerful phenomenon and it’s one reason why I remind myself constantly that writing is a dangerous business. There is a world of potential critics out there ready to berate you for writing things they may not have read, or they may not want to read, or see, or hear, or remember, or for writing in such a way as to stir up emotions in readers for which they have no other outlet than rage directed at the writer, who is only the messenger after all.

Somehow unlike the cast from my broken leg, certain published writings can never be consigned to the tip. They go on being worn, even after the leg has healed.