Books for Living
It’s not just what Anne Lamott says but how she says it. I love her voice on the page, her honesty: she’s brisk but warm, wry but tender. She’s my senior by only eight years, but she has a kind of hard-won wisdom that I associate with certain much-older elders I’ve encountered at key moments in my life. More than anything, she reminds me of my grandmother’s friend Alice who used four-letter words (out of my grandmother’s earshot) and could swallow a wooden matchstick and bring it back up again. I could always count on Alice to tell me the truth, tell it to me straight, listen to whatever I had to say, and never blow my cover on anything. That’s Anne Lamott.
Actually, Alice was probably the same age then as Anne Lamott is now. Funny, that. To my ten-year-old self, Alice seemed ancient, as I must now to the youngest people in my life.
Anne Lamott can write like nobody’s business or, rather, everybody’s. One minute you are smiling at a vivid image—her description of herself at the start of Bird by Bird as a little girl walking around with “my shoulders up to my ears, like Richard Nixon.” Then she throws in a joke or two—about how she was clearly the child most likely to become a serial killer or have “dozens and dozens of cats.” But right after she moves in for the kill: “Instead I got funny. I got funny because boys, older boys I didn’t even know, would ride by on their bicycles and taunt me about my weird looks. Each time felt like a drive-by shooting. I think this is why I walked like Nixon: I think I was trying to plug my ears with my shoulders, but they wouldn’t quite reach.”
Lamott’s father was a writer, and she wanted to be one, too. She realized that “one of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around.” Lamott’s father believed that writing—like reading—teaches you how to pay attention. You would need to be sensitive in order to become the kind of writer that Anne Lamott is; but you could also say that the kind of writing that she does will make you more sensitive.
Sadly, sensitivity isn’t universally regarded as a good quality. For children, it’s okay—just as long as you aren’t labeled “oversensitive,” as Lamott was. In one of her recent books, Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope and Repair, published in 2013, Lamott writes about this:
If you were raised in the 1950s or 1960s, and grasped how scary the world could be, in Birmingham, Vietnam and the house on the corner where the daddy drank, you were diagnosed as being the overly sensitive child. There were entire books written on the subject of the overly sensitive child. What the term meant was that you noticed how unhappy or crazy your parents were. Also, you worried about global starvation, animals at the pound who didn’t get adopted, and smog. What a nut. You looked into things too deeply, and you noticed things that not many others could see, and this exasperated your parents and teachers. They said, “You need to have thicker skin!” That would have been excellent, but you couldn’t go buy thicker skin at the five-and-dime.
Any healthy half-awake person is occasionally going to be pierced with a sense of the unfairness and the catastrophe of life for ninety-five percent of the people on this earth. However, if you reacted, or cried, or raised the subject at all, you were being a worrywart.
For adults, the label “oversensitive” is rarely used, because, in most quarters, when people speak of an adult as being “sensitive” they almost always mean it pejoratively; the prefix “over” is redundant. “Sensitive” is bad all by itself; “sensitive” is code for oversensitive. Any kind of concern someone might raise in, say, an office setting can be dismissed with the accusation that the “complainer” is just being “sensitive” for raising it. This is especially true if the person who is raising the concern is not in the majority. Problems not experienced by the majority are often not seen as problems at all, and if they are, they are certainly no one’s fault; the fault is in the receiver’s too-sensitive antennae. “You’re just being sensitive” means “You are complaining about something everyone else thinks is trivial.” And that simply means “You are complaining about something that concerns you and not us, because we really don’t care about you.”
Sometimes when I’ve been accused of being sensitive, I’ve crumbled. Sometimes, I’ve doubled down, arguing my point. You can try to explain why something so small to others is so big to you, and you may succeed, or not.
But often encounters aren’t even that clear-cut. Someone will voice a concern, and others may acknowledge it, but has anyone really heard? Has anything changed?
So the questions remain—when to say how we feel and when to keep it to ourselves; when are we being sensitive and when too sensitive?
In Stitches, Lamott writes, “I wish there were shortcuts to wisdom and self-knowledge: cuter abysses or three-day spa wilderness experiences. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. I so resent this.”
I’m glad Anne Lamott told me she resents this. I resent it, too.
Rebecca
Betraying
TELEPHONE. Telegraph. Or Tell Terry.
I have never known anyone who gossiped as much as my friend Terry. I met him in the mid-1980s and learned within hours that any comment I made to Terry would be broadcast to a wide audience of friends and acquaintances and strangers. I can’t quite remember how Terry came into my life: he was the ex-boyfriend of a friend’s ex-boyfriend, I think. What makes it hard to remember is all the gossip: Terry was constantly at war with one person or another in our circle for repeating something he shouldn’t have to someone he shouldn’t have.
I would love to write that there was nothing malicious about Terry’s gossiping, but that wouldn’t be true. There was often something malicious about it; he was the little boy at the party who switches the sugar and salt just to see the expression on people’s faces as they sip their salted tea. But there was also something infectious about it; it allowed us all to partake but not indulge—we could pass on what Terry told us in the guise of another Terry story: Can you believe what Terry did this time around?
Terry’s parties were almost always gossip-worthy. He lived in a 1960s high-rise in the unfashionable far-east Upper East Side of Manhattan and would cram up to a hundred people into an apartment that could comfortably fit thirty or forty. Terry had immigrated to New York from Singapore by way of boarding school in Australia, and he worked in fashion. His friends included Singapore expats, East Village gallerists, Australian rugby players, assistants from fashion magazines, and an assortment of other characters. Terry stood barely five foot five and had a round face, so that even when very thin he looked pudgy. The other feature everyone noticed when meeting Terry was his fangs; he had canine teeth so sharp and prominent that they always seemed in danger of piercing his lower lip.
When I first met Terry, he was sometimes drunk. In later years, he was often drunk. And then he was always drunk. He carried everywhere an enormous satchel, filled with books and scarves and who knows what else. I always suspected that there was at least a fifth of vodka buried within, if not a liter bottle. When I first met Terry, he worked for a fashion house. In later years, he started his own company making the most beautiful vests I’ve ever seen and will ever see, fantastic handmade vests of peacock feathers and colorful woven ribbon, vests that became for a while in the mid-nineties the hot item for grooms to wear at weddings around the world. Then he made dresses for private clients. But the financial crisis made customers scarce. And then I can’t remember him working at all, except to make garments for friends.
Terry loved to talk on the phone. And he called at the worst possible moments: just as a friend was arriving; just as you were sitting down to dinner; just as you were leaving late on your way to a movie. My friendship with Terry predated caller ID, and I signed up for the service partly because of Terry. It allowed me to screen his calls. He would rarely leave a message; I would see on my caller ID that he was calling and would only sometimes pick up. I usually told myself I would call right back. And I o
ften did. But I often didn’t.
Terry’s fabulous life became particularly evident on his Facebook posts. He was an early adopter and took to it enthusiastically. He chronicled foods he was cooking and the ingredients he was using (oysters and uni and monkfish livers and fresh baby-goat ribs); a high-school reunion; his wanderings around his neighborhood; friends asking for too many favors (free alterations being extremely irritating to him); a case of champagne showing up unlabeled and his having no idea who had sent it. He also put up posts about migraines, weight loss, and visitors acting like vultures, all relayed in a funny-bitchy-exaggerated tone. We went from seeing each other every month or so, to every few months, and then to two or three times a year.
The last time I saw Terry it was for dim sum; he showed up early. Terry was always early, especially to a party, and always the last to leave, to the point where you finally had to escort him out, having washed the dishes, cleaned up the room, returned the furniture to its preparty position, and even having brushed your teeth—Terry would not leave a party until you left him no alternative.
I wish I had better memories of that dim sum lunch, but all I remember is that Terry was drunk. It was 10:00 a.m., and Terry was clearly smashed, slurring his words. He proudly announced that he’d had a big night last night and had started the day with vodka, to take the edge off.
After that, we communicated on Facebook for a few months—he liked some things I posted and I liked some he posted, and we messaged each other that we had to get together. And then a few months went by, and I didn’t notice we hadn’t been in touch. And then a friend called and told me that Terry was dead—that, essentially, he drank himself to death. Terry had stopped eating and just drank; by the time he checked into a hospital for an infection, he was too far gone to save and didn’t seem to want to be saved anyway.
The same friend called later to tell me about the memorial service she was helping to organize. It would be in the staid Frank E. Campbell funeral parlor on upper Madison Avenue, on a Saturday—and my husband, David, and I already had plans to be out of town. It was obviously going to be thronged; no one would notice whether we were there or not, so we decided to go away for the weekend, as planned. As we were heading out Friday evening to catch a train, though, we changed our minds. After all, Terry had been a very good friend. So we called our hosts and made our apologies.
The next day found us arriving early at Frank E. Campbell—as long as we were going, we wanted to be sure to get a seat. The chapels aren’t huge there, and we didn’t want to have to stand in the back. David wore a vest Terry had designed for him—black and white satin woven into a broad checkerboard.
The first thing that greeted us was a picture of Terry, wearing the very same vest, looking plump and happy and devilish, as always. And then we walked into the chapel to find twenty or so people sitting in pews that could fit more than one hundred. And we twenty or so were the only people who showed up. A dozen of the twenty were Terry’s family, from Singapore and Washington, D.C. Then there were fewer than a dozen friends, including the two of us. And there was Terry, in an open casket at the front, looking nothing like the Terry I knew and remembered.
In Epitaph of a Small Winner, the narrator (who, as you will recall, is telling the story of his life from beyond the grave) relates the story of the funeral of a young girl, who died at age nineteen. The girl’s father is named Damasceno, and the narrator tells us of a conversation he had with him. Cotrim was the girl’s uncle.
As I have not related the death, I shall also omit the seventh-day Mass. A fortnight later I was talking with Damasceno, who was still deeply sad and inconsolable. He said that the great sorrow with which God had punished him was increased by the sorrow that man had inflicted upon him. He did not explain. Three weeks later he returned to the subject and confided in me that, in the throes of the irreparable tragedy, he had hoped for the consolation that the presence of friends can give. Only twelve people, and three-fourths of them friends of Cotrim, accompanied his daughter’s coffin to the cemetery. And he had sent out eighty invitations. I expressed the opinion that there were so many deaths during the epidemic that one might well excuse the apparent neglect. Damasceno shook his head sadly and incredulously.
“No,” he groaned. “They let me down.”
Cotrim, who was present, said:
“Those came who had a genuine interest in you and in us. The eighty would have come only as a formality, would have talked about the inertia of the government, about patent medicines, about the price of real estate, or about each other…”
Damasceno listened in silence, shook his head again, and sighed:
“But they should at least have come.”
That passage would find me later. But on this day, another graveside speech echoed in my head: Linda Loman’s, from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, with her famous phrase, “Attention must be paid,” which she repeats as she mourns the death of her husband and the world that moved past him.
There were only a few eulogies, but they captured Terry. One of the friends, who had stuck with him through everything, as we later learned, talked of meeting him at Evelyne’s, a very hip place in the eighties that was a watering spot for downtown celebrities: the Warhol set, actors, and newly famous East Village artists. Terry had been a waiter there in his early New York years and was legendarily rude. Thus, he became something of a cult figure, with people vying to be served by him and trading stories of what he had said to them. He even barked at Lauren Bacall for keeping her sunglasses on inside.
I think Terry would have loved that this story was told at his service. Or the Terry I first met would have loved it. I realize now that the Terry of later years was too unhappy to get much pleasure out of anything. In fact, the Terry of later years might have been the loneliest person I’ve ever known.
On his Facebook page, Terry listed his favorite films—in the number one spot was All About Eve, a movie beloved for its acid-tipped quips. Also Midnight Cowboy, an ode to urban alienation, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, made from James Hilton’s moving novel about a beloved boarding-school teacher. For Terry, boarding school was a golden time: he was comrades with everyone, even the most rugged of the jocks. They were a family of friends, and he was the beloved impish young brother.
Terry and I would talk about books from time to time, when we weren’t talking about food. We both agreed that A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry is one of the greatest books of all time. He loved the very eerie novel Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, as do I. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann was among his favorites; he quoted from it frequently. That was exactly the book one would have expected him to like: campy, wicked, packed with pill-popping models. On his Facebook page, Terry listed Susann’s classic alongside books by great gay authors: E. M. Forster and Gore Vidal and Truman Capote and Patrick Dennis, famous for Auntie Mame. I wasn’t surprised that he loved Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, a masterful history of Australia. That was in keeping with his nostalgia for his school years. Evelyn Waugh’s achingly nostalgic Brideshead Revisited was another book he adored; he reread it almost every year.
Nor was I surprised when Terry told me that he loved Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, that sinister romance of resentment and deception. Terry was gothic at heart.
This book was first published in 1938, one year after Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living. But it is a very different response to the uncertainties and anxieties of the time. It’s a book about scheming, duplicity, insecurity, and murder—and it ends in conflagration.
With its famous first line (“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”), its unnamed narrator (we know her only as the second Mrs. de Winter and never learn her name), and with its whopper of a twist at the end, du Maurier’s novel became one of the bestselling books of all time. Alfred Hitchcock directed a film adaptation, but with a very different ending. It starred Sir Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson and won the Academy Award for Best Picture in
1940.
Rebecca is a novel powered by jealousy. The most memorable character is Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, one of the great underminers in literature. Devoted to the memory of the first Mrs. de Winter, the Rebecca of the title, she is hell-bent on destroying the second. Mrs. Danvers is a baleful presence, and she preys upon the insecurities of our narrator. One of the pivotal scenes involves a dress—Mrs. Danvers suggests to the naïve and trusting second Mrs. de Winter that she attend a costume ball in a gown that the housekeeper knows will enrage Maxim de Winter by reminding him of his first wife, who has been dead for only a year. No surprise that Terry loved a book where a gown is at once a garment and a weapon.
But Rebecca is also a book about loneliness. Loneliness reaches into every corner of Manderley, the de Winter seaside estate. Its endless driveway leads through dark woods to a shocking wall of bloodred rhododendrons, and the stone house behind the wall is described as “secretive and silent.”
Our narrator is soon desperately lonely, lonely enough to try to kill herself. Maxim is lonely, too, though not for the reasons we at first think. And as cruel as Mrs. Danvers is, she is also terribly alone. (Although she is called “Mrs.” and not “Miss,” she has never been married—that was just a convention of the time when it came to housekeepers.) She had looked after Rebecca “for years before she married and practically brought her up.” Rebecca was the great and only love of her life.