I've been reading A Life Discarded – a biography by Alexander Masters. I haven't finished it yet: 84% through, according to the Kindle.
that Laura, though now an old lady, is still alive.
That's the bones of it – the mystery/adventure story behind Laura's own story; poor, valiant Laura of the squandered life and the lost ambitions, recording a whole lifetime of neurotic fears, artistic ambitions, failure on almost every front; poverty, boredom, loneliness and television watching.
She doesn't read back what she has written – all those hours and hours a day of obsessive scribbling – which is how, when he finds her, she is surprised that the diaries were even missing. She does not read back at all; she writes and writes 'to protect her brain' as her biographer puts it – to knock the words out of it, to eliminate wretched thoughts. Diary-keeping means she fails to practice the piano, her drawing, or to write anything else. It 'gobbles up' her talent. She briefly goes to Art School. She works in a library and gets sacked. Then she gets sacked from a string of other, mostly housekeeping jobs. Because she does not read the diaries back she never does come to understand why. Decade after weary decade she does this one, ritual activity, but can study/focus on nothing else.
I must say although it's an intriguing story I did often wish that Alexander Masters would but out and just let me read the diaries. I got a bit fed up with him and his clever-clever detective work (like working out her height from the slant of her letters, and calling in psychics and detectives to read the vibes) although of course we must be grateful to him for seeing the potential in Laura's diaries at all, and saving her 'life' for posterity. He's a skilled and entertaining writer – if he wasn't, he and Laura would have been consigned to the Cloud well before now – it's just – he isn't a woman, he isn't a failure and he isn't of that generation. I found myself wishing to read the diaries themselves rather than all those teensy-weensy, out of sequence extracts.
I suppose what I'm trying to get around to, and avoiding getting round to, is why I felt I had to read this particular book, out of so many, and what I have learned from it – which is unpleasant, though not unexpected. Unlike Laura, I do read back what I write. I do analyse. And I don't just write to bang the words out of my head, although that's part of it. It is medicine, writing. Not therapy – there we are straying into Self-Obsessed, Dire and Totally Unreadable territory.
So, I could see the parallels – the lack of focus, the constant distraction; the woolly-minded, unemployable dreaminess… a thread of it does rather seem to run in my family. One of my sisters is like it, like me – the other not at all. My mother was an odd mixture of both – steely, unimaginative practicality but cursed with what my father used to call her Butterfly Mind.
With that kind of mind you need a hefty dose of guidance ('support' as they call it nowadays) and she didn't get it. I didn't, either. You can almost hear her un-supported-ness, as she tells you about boiling up the stalks of sprouts, which she got cheap at the supermarket; fretting about Michael Barrymore and his troubles or fantasising about being a concert pianist when she's too old, nowhere near good enough and doesn't practice. She needs looking after. No one looks after her.
But it did make me think about such fruitless, frustrating lives. Are they really wasted? Sometimes we spend our lives trying to create one thing but actually, unwittingly, creating something else. People are often remembered, not for what they thought was important, but for something else entirely, a thing they didn't value.
It did remind me about the returning and recycling of souls, and how they are said to plan, before entering into a new existence, the life they need to lead, in order to learn what they need to learn. When they return to the 'centre' they take with them what they have learned, the ways that they have grown, and they leave behind traces in other human lives, unpredictable consequences. So, it's nothing as crude as saying – though of course, it might be – this must be my lifetime for being a quadriplegic, or spending twenty-five years in an iron lung; this is the lifetime for falling off a cliff and discovering what it feels like to fly through salt-laden air and land in a mangled heap on the rocks below; this is my lifetime for barefoot scavenging on slum waste-heaps and hoping not to get stuck by discarded needles.
But it might well be – this is my life for failure and tedium; for unrealised dreams; for feeling fat, boiling up cauliflower stalks and failing to clean out the fridge; for physically loathing my employer yet staying with him till he dies and I am summarily thrown onto the streets; for actually caring about Jeux Sans Frontières or Michael Barrymore. This is how I progress. This is what I learn. This is the path less travelled; a day's excursion; a small detour in a far, far longer journey. This is what I leave behind, and may other people see what I did not.
This is part of where I'm going.
Delightful! "A magpie in an infinite junkshop" cracked me up. There seem so few butterfly minds anymore, which contemporary (usually American) authors seem to lack in droves. I am distraught whenever I find a read/reviewed/recommended book doesn't get better after all and was a waste of my vision, thought and time itself. Auto/biographies are the ticket for me — their lives may also be a long episode of cartoons, but at least I don't have to fear we're all going so non-discerningly infantile here as readers that a cereal box's side could equally hold our interest.
Such people are habitually not looked after, in my experience. I feel for you.