Some Light Reading

I need to branch out in my reading material this winter. For some reason, I’ve been reading memoir after memoir, and I need a break from all that fuckedupitude. I remember once asking my father in law about his choice in movies, as he always went for the inane and eschewed all things deep and dramatic. “I go to the movies to be entertained,” he told me. “If I want to know about all the horrible things in the world, I could watch the news or read the paper. Why would I want to waste my leisure time depressing myself?” People read papers back when I asked him that. He had a good point though. The news is depressing as hell. Times are tough the world over, my friend.

So why spend my rare free time reading depressing memoirs one after another like so many burned potato chips? I love fiction, don’t get me wrong. Fiction is great stuff and offers us a wonderful escape or soporific, depending on what you want it to do. But lately, it isn’t doing either for me, so I find myself turning to memoir more and more in an effort to find something to hold my attention long enough to get sleepy. In fact, four of the last five books I’ve read were memoirs or creative nonfiction, and I’m worried my trend is a reflection of my watching too much reality television.

I just finished reading a memoir called The Burn Journals, which is about a fourteen year old boy who has a little thing about arson. He fucks up pretty good at school by intentionally lighting a pack of matches on fire, but then in a panic with the burning matchbook accidentally lighting a t-shirt and the locker it was in on fire as well. Fearing the very real possibility of expulsion, he goes home and attempts suicide by, you guessed it, setting himself on fire. This was not like a Tibetan monk self-immolating for his beliefs and religious freedom; this was an impulsive teenage boy in over his head. The book is mostly about the year of recovery after his suicide attempt, and much like burn scars, it ain’t pretty.

Before that book, I read a memoir by Alice Sebold. You might recall her name, as she is the author of The Lovely Bones, one of the most disturbing pieces of modern fiction ever written, about a girl who is raped and murdered, and the effect of her death on her family, all told from the victim’s point of view.  I remember reading it and thinking that she must have had some serious trauma in her life to create that kind of creepiness. Her memoir is entitled Lucky, and it is about her own rape and the aftermath on her family and her life, including the difficult court trial.  It seems I was right about her.

Prior to that one, I read a translated documentary novel called The Druggist of Auschwitz. I’m pretty sure you can guess what that was about. That’s right, three feel good stories in a row. No wonder I have trouble sleeping.

So I decided to try something different. Now I’m reading a book by Celia Rivenbark, a  columnist who is sort of a Southern Erma Bombeck. She writes humorous essays about nothing, only with more success and acclaim than, say, I do.

Anyway, here’s what I can’t get past. She writes a lot about her family, as do I, only she refers to her child as “The Princess” and her husband as “Duh-hubby.” Sometimes, she just calls him “Duh” but we get the point. She thinks he’s a bit of an idiot, and he is either too stupid to object or very secure and doesn’t mind.

I don’t write much about my husband, which he prefers. Once, back when I first started sharing my essays, I wrote one about him being startled by a snake in our backyard, and he was mad at me for days afterwards. So the understanding we have reached in an effort to remain friends (and also married) is that I don’t write about him without his permission or prior review (with the exception of right now).

Sometimes he is a main character in a story I need to tell, so I can’t leave him out entirely, although I am pretty sure he would prefer I do. He is not looking for his fifteen minutes of fame; he just wants to be left alone. This is an individual who is convinced Facebook is really Big Brother data farming us all, waiting to turn all of our pictures and thoughts and connections over for some sinister use.

The thing is, he’s probably right. The NSA has probably stored every email I’ve ever sent, every Facebook status I’ve updated, every meme I’ve texted. Yours too, by the way. All of ours. Somewhere in an underground bunker in Colorado is a team of extremely overworked government employees who can’t believe how dumb the rest of us have become.

But back to my point, before I went off on that conspiracy rant. I can’t imagine making a living out of smack-talking my spouse and still having one. Maybe my spouse is correct. Maybe we have become a culture of oversharing idiots who can’t take a crap or make a sandwich without wanting the whole world to know about it. If our moms didn’t cut the crusts off our sandwiches or our dads laughed at our sophomoric efforts in card making, we don’t need hours of therapy that result in a book deal. We need to maybe move on and get over ourselves.

It might be time to look at the New York Times Book Review and make a more appropriate reading selection, or maybe stop by the classics section of the library and expand my range. Hell, I could step into the other room and finish the copy of Jude the Obscure I never made it past the first fifty pages of in college. I’ll get right on that, after this TLC “Four Weddings” marathon is over.