life during wartime

A couple of years ago I read A. Alvarez's Life After Marriage. There was a reason for this then, as there is for me to be thinking about it now (and I'm disappointed in myself on both counts). The book uses cases from "real" life, which, left me cold, tired, and more furious than before I'd picked it up. There's something so stale about reading through someone else's "real" hurt and anger when you are going through it yourself. And particularly as someone who has never subscribed to the "self-help" book club (g*d forbid), it is terrifying to find that there are times when one is at such a loss in their own head as to grasp at anything to bring them back. I am lucky in that there is a limit to my flailing before my brain simply shuts down in self-defense of such desperation. But the further result is that I also find myself unable to look at any words on a page without their blurring into memory. This is not entirely without merit. I start to use my other senses ... start taking pictures, listening to music more (though that is ripe with memory, too, and only comes into play, as it were, upon the healing end). Every book I own is a memory, and every author I seek (new and old) is born out of one as well. And so, I find myself thinking about this tonight because it has been more than three months since I have been able to read a new novel ... and am just now finding myself slowly returning to the page. Tentatively reaching out; thinking about stories again, talking about them (ala therapy) and finding myself able to re-read those books that are the equivalent of "comfort food" ... small bites, whenever possible.

Prior to my shut down, I found my reading list increasingly headed toward the inevitable, even before I was conscious of what that was (or willing to acknowledge it, in any event); The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford, Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates, It's All Right Now, by Charles Chadwick (the book that made up my mind), Couples, by John Updike--anything, frankly, by Updike, because I despise him so much for his misogyny; his thrill at adultery, and because his sentences please him so much. It is part of the healing to focus such personally powerful anger at something so outside of yourself and yet so close. Because it is in the novel and the novelist's expression that I find a more generous voice of what it truly feels to be hurt, angry, and bewildered. Divorce is common, as human experience is common. What I find in novels is the complexity and tragedy, and even the poetry and comedy, of the thing. And that's something only a novel can accomplish, because it is within the "bounds" of fiction that an author is free to put a truth to the page that is impossible when you are in the midst of the storm.