Dear Diary: Amour propre
Golly, isn’t it still somebody else’s birthday?
I was awfully down in the dumps this afternoon, but two things happened. First, I bought Lauren Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family. On the basis of Joanna Smith Rakoff’s review in the Book Review (last week’s), I expected the novel to re-ignite my flagging interest in fiction. And that is exactly what it has done. I’m writing this in the wee smalls because I haven’t been able to put the book down.
The other thing that happened was the realization that, when I’m tired, I feel sorry not so much for myself as for my wounded vanity. It’s as though my vanity were a pet in distress — and I can’t think how I’ll keep the poor beast alive. A lifetime’s flirtations with suicide (and I do mean flirtations) suddenly made sense. I snapped out of my sulk.
I snapped out my sulk despite the following chronicle-of-a-death-foretold bit from the novel that is re-igniting my interest in fiction even as it persuades me that “re-ignition” is a short-term concept. (The narrator of A Friend of the Family is an internist practicing medicine in a fictionalized Tenafly, across the river.)
You are who you are at fifty-three, and even if the person you are is lucky and happy, the crush of it — the kneecapping crush of it — is that anyway it’s too late. My fifty-three-year-old overweight diabetics would die of stroke in fifteen years; my fifty-three-year-old hypersensitive, sedentary middle managers would die of kidney failure. They would not lose weight, they would not start to exercise, they might not even remember to take their meds. They were fifty-three; they were who they were. And as so many doctors before me have noted, it’s often easier to die than to change.
And if the effing doctors would only bestir themselves to make emergency rooms less ghastly, it might be pleasant as well as easy.Â
Happy birthday from Who I Am.
