I Read You, I See Me, Part 2

Continued from yesterday....

Much of Powell's book makes me cringe from a certain, palpable recognition, but I won't go so far as to beat up Powell for her issues surrounding her husband. I was especially annoyed with the female reviewers who claimed that Powell treated her husband like crap. Well, perhaps so, in some ways, but the truth is - and I'm speaking from experience here - her husband stayed in the relationship out of his own desires for whatever it is that he gets from the situation.

I seriously doubt that Powell ever pulled a knife on him and told him that he couldn't leave so that she could continue to cuckold him and then write about it. No, there's more to it and I won't pretend, unlike those other reviewers, to know what it is. Powell's husband is a grown man with a mind of his own. If he were so unhappy, he would leave. Why doesn't he or why can't he? Perhaps he could write his own book and explain. Perhaps he doesn't feel the need.

All of this is to say that as I've plucked images, people, moments and bad actions from my own life to write my book, I have fretted over how my characters would be viewed because they, too, are incredibly flawed people. Not one of them is all good or all bad. Like most of us, each has their quirks and demons. Each of them can appear utterly normal while a river of ick runs below the surface. And each of them will just carry on, as people do, stumbling, picking themselves up and trying again. Some will even be kicked while they're down and the person doing the kicking might surprise the reader. But isn't that how life is?

So do I love the Powell book? Probably not.

Honestly? I'm reading it with the same self-absorption that Powell wrote it. I'm making it all about me. I'm skimming the butchery parts because I got dragged out to the slaughterhouse one too many times when I was a kid and reading those parts can give me an olfactory flashback that is most unpleasant. Nope, I'm a perfectly self-absorbed reader, searching for the words and passages that resonate with me, that reflect my own situation or that illustrate perfectly and quite eloquently the relationship MathMan and I have shared lo these twenty-two years. More embarrassingly, I cling to the bits that describe her obsession with her lover because it, too, reflects my own personal mismanagement that sent me skittering toward madness a couple of years ago.

Would I recommend it to you? Not without caveat. As one reviewer said, "If you believe in the sanctity of marriage, this book is not for you...." Oh, agreed. A big heaping helping of agreed. If you're a sanctity of marriage person, consider this my Danger! Danger, Will Robinson! moment. Do not bother yourself with this book.

But if you think that people get married for all kinds of reasons - known and unknown - and that each marriage is the sum of its parts, rather than some spiritual binding, then you might like this book.

The fact is - infidelity is but one way to hurt your spouse. There are sins of commission and sins of omission. No one ever wants to talk abut the damage done by withholding affection or love or intimacy. No one wants to discuss how marriages begun in one's twenties might just outlive their realistic shelf life when the couple reaches their forties, fifties or sixties. Perhaps the whole reason we've seen a cultural shift in the average age at which people marry for the first time is because the younger generations understand that who you are when you're twenty-two isn't the person you want to have picking out the person with whom you'll spend the rest of your life.

For my part, I'm going to finish my story the way I'd originally intended. Yesterday morning, as I was going over it with MathMan, fussing about what the moralists might think (fingers crossed they'll have their chance to moralize about it!), MathMan asked why I should care? I care, I guess, because I know that I will just as protective of my characters as I was of Julie Powell, a character of her own making. It irritates me that often the same people who can get totally insane about marital fidelity are the same people who would insist that people stay in unhappy marriages - kind of the 'you made your bed, now you must lie in it' approach to living. It's punitive and petty and unnecessary.

Of course, Powell puts herself out there for the attacks by the simple act of writing about her life - warts and all. I suspect she must have a relatively thick skin by now, but who knows? And besides, as someone once said, respectability is overrated. I'm sure Powell has heard that before...

I Read You, I See Me

MathMan and I lay in bed this morning doing what we do when the day stretches ahead of us with no work, no plans for anything in particular. Talk, snuggle, fight over the blankets, bemoan a sore back (me), spoon, talk some more. I know, it's almost embarrassing in its wholesomeness, and you thought I was going to tell you something much more risque, didn't you? Admit it. You thought it was Thursday.

Anyway, as we lay there in the new morning light, I told MathMan some more parts of the story that I planned to write today. Sometimes I actually do try to work out the action before I put the words on paper. Thank goodness for MathMan. He's been my sounding board on so much of this story, he's been key to any of it that's actually gotten finished.

I told him how I'd finally decided to keep the story as fiction, partly because I was so brought up short by the reaction to Julie Powell's book Cleaving. I saw some reviews of it via a couple of online resources and I was a naively surprised at the rancor and venom directed at Ms. Powell for what is likely her pretty straight forward telling of an extramarital affair that was more like an addiction.

Mind you, the complaints were not about Ms. Powell's writing, although one person noted that even though she may have been a "good blogger," that doesn't make her a good writer. Noting that all the reviewers I read yesterday evening were women, I felt a bit protective of Ms. Powell. I was pretty huffy after reading one from a woman who spent lots of words to tell us all what a "despicable" creature she believed Julie Powell to be.

For those of you who've been around since the PoliTits days and who remember the Drama of Golden Manor Part XI aka UnGlued, you're hardly expressing any shock to yourself or your cats right now that I was a wee bit stung by the sanctimonious moralizing of people - okay women - who think that Julie Powell is a piece of trash because she admits to cheating on her husband, being a weak individual and generally using sex and alcohol as her guiding lights when all else failed.

Of course she's flawed, but isn't that the point?

As for those reviewers who noted that Ms. Powell is self-absorbed, I have to wonder how they missed the fact that the book is a memoir? People who aren't a least semi-self-absorbed don't write memoirs. In fact, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that most of us, even the most ardent of those reviewers, don't want to read a book about a life that is entirely without conflict, drama or an occasional bad thought.

Would you go to the library or bookstore and pick out the book that sells itself like this:

Lisa Golden lives a clean life. She never does anything wrong. She is a good mother who never falters, never yells, never lets fast food cross the threshold of her perpetually tidy and sanitary home. She has never been guilty of letting her kids stay up late and she's never bought a single thing to simply make a kid shut up. She loves her husband completely, but with just the proper amount of reserve to retain her respectability. She never questions authority. She consumes a healthy, balanced diet and gets just the right amount of exercise. She's never been hospitalized for anything other than giving birth. She is a solidly adequate daughter, sister, and employee. She wakes up happy or at least mostly so every day and never thinks about the bad things that happen to good people or any of the world's injustices. She knows better because that kind of thinking only leads to unhappiness. And Lisa has no room in her life for unhappiness. Furthermore, Lisa has never knowingly physically harmed anyone, been a party to a international incident, invented anything, solved any mystery nor won any big jackpot or major award. She has never driven in a NASCAR race, ran for office, found Jesus, developed a method for helping herself, interviewed a wildly famous person, slept with anyone of note, or climbed the Eiffel Tower wearing a Spiderman costume. She's usually on time for things and has not starred in any production of anything. She's never jumped out of an airplane, rescued anyone or run any kind of marathon. She hasn't cured, created nor destroyed anything. She is not a spy. Her life has been remarkable in its absolute mediocrity, steadfast adherence to all society's mores and a belief that average and safe is everything it's cracked up to be. She is the epitome of never doing anything that would make the neighbors talk.

What? You're waiting for the "but," aren't you? You're expecting the dust jacket text to finally tell you where the story really starts. Yeah, yeah, Lisa is living this happy life and all is well. But..... but nothing. That's it. That's all there is to the story. There is no "but."

Would you buy or borrow that book? Hell, you wouldn't even steal it. Not even to use to even out the legs on a wobbly table.

See - the story is the but. The story isn't the ho hum drum of a perfectly ordinary life. The story is what happens that makes it different - not good or bad, but different.

Now, does this mean I'm recommending adultery, selfishness and a serious lack of impulse control to anyone? Of course not. Is Powell self-absorbed and self-serving, hell yeah. But, frankly, who isn't on some level? Even the most altruistic people get some sort of satisfaction from giving without any expectation of receiving.

Powell's book, well-written in my estimation (that means easy to read, the prose not too overworked), is a memoir. It's not a bloody how to, although there are some recipes scattered throughout. I understand from some of the reviews that there a sort of travelogue in the last third of the book. I'm not there yet, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts that it will make me seethe with jealousy that Powell had both the financial resources and the familial freedom to just up and travel and I'll probably start hating on her, too. Only I'll hate on her for her success, not her moral "failings."

So far, though, here's what I'm getting from the book: It's the story of a flawed woman who is honest enough to write about it and who can make me both laugh and want to strangle her because I see myself in her. As she describes both her relationship with her husband and her (former) lover, I am struck by how very close to the bone she gets. (No pun intended.)

I keep reading because I want to see how Powell might or might not resolve things with her husband. I want to see if and how she figures out how to banish her lover from her head. Although her situation is far more flexible than mine (she now has some financial freedom due to the sale of her first book Julie and Julia and there are no children involved), I want to see how she uses the crazy in her life to move forward or not.

As I've been reading in fits and starts (kind of like my writing these days), I can tell you that it's clear that Powell is not making this shit up. There are some passages that make me worry that she's used some crazy military-grade tapping system to see inside my psyche and memory banks. Her flaws and predilections are so much like my own, I have to put the book down sometimes to clear my head.

To be continued tomorrow.....