Both jobs taught me a lot about the work that went into good writing, building an argument, backing it up, and making a point. The first not only required me to write well, it also asked that I do so in a British accent; the second involved making bad writing less bad. But neither job, largely conducted from our London flat, did much to alleviate my feelings of isolation. On those occasions when I went into the Economist’s St. James headquarters, the plummy tones of the extremely English people who worked there scared me into near silence. For the first time in my life I was living with a partner, and I’d never felt more alone.
Here we were, having practically just met and now living together in London, separated from friends, family, jobs, and—not unlike Hans Castorp—cast away from our larger social tapestry. In theory and occasional reality, this was a lovely way to be in love. But with few other outlets, we began to turn against each other. We disagreed about books, we disagreed about politics, we had different worldviews, and we disagreed about the way each of us characterized the other. We were still in love; we just found each other disagreeable.
With growing frequency, the world out there became the basis for argument. I started to read with an eye to anticipating the fights; I’d lap up books, magazines, and newspapers with purpose, accumulating statistical backup and rebuttals for future intellectual showdowns. “Aha!” I’d gloat, when I found a particularly useful piece of data in an article or book, scribbling notes that I’d file away for future reference.
I was still no match for him. He could pull out a quote by Kant that he’d barely glanced at during a freshman-year seminar and swashbucklingly apply it to something I’d said, rendering it stupid and inert.
And he knew it. A year later, lying in our bed in Brooklyn, where we’d moved after London, he playfully pinned me down in bed and demanded to know the hero’s name from Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. I’d finished reading the novel only six months before. “His object of desire’s name was Mildred,” I answered miserably. Though I’d spent more than six hundred pages with the character, I couldn’t for the life of me remember his name. (It’s Philip.)
This put me constantly on my guard. My defensiveness had the unintended consequence (a favorite phrase of his) of making me a better reader, a closer reader, cautious and more skeptical. In earlier blithe days, I’d simply allowed the content of books to gather agreeably in my head as I read and then file out when I was done. Now I clung to texts with determination, stowing away facts for future reference. I needed to be prepared.
If my childhood had made me an ambitious and voracious reader and my high school English teacher had turned me into a close reader, my husband made me a deeper reader and a more critical one. I’d gone from escaping into books and searching for answers to locating a considered remove, respecting my perspective on the work, and trusting my own responses. I hadn’t properly engaged with books before I’d met my husband; I’d never wrestled with a text. Before we were married, I’d never written a book review; a few months after we split up, I wrote my first.
And a funny thing happened when I devoted myself to the authors I vehemently disagreed with: I found I enjoyed reading them. There’s a personal and intellectual challenge in being forced to inhabit another point of view, to reexamine your opinions and learn to make a case for them. As all debaters know, sometimes you figure out what you really think only when in opposition. If reading people who think along the same lines as you do is a comfort, reading the people with whom you disagree is discomfiting—in a good way. It’s invigorating. To actively grapple with your assumptions and defend your conclusions gives you a sense of purpose. You come to know where you stand. Even if that means standing apart.
Later, when it was all over, after the wedding and the separation and the divorce, it was hard to prevent the arguments from continuing to swirl around in my head. I couldn’t stop reading defensively, endlessly poised to prove that there was more than one side to any story.
I missed it. But what to do with that yearning for engagement? My husband was gone, living on another continent, and I was still putting up a fight. The positioning, the ready indignation, the fear of not having the facts marshaled by my side continued to wind up my brain as I scoured the newspaper over coffee and as I read any book, fiction or nonfiction, Victorian novel or twentieth-century biography. I’m ready now, I thought to myself. I know who I am. But the person I wanted to appreciate all that was no longer there.
For months and even years after we split, years in which we never actually spoke, I’d pull my ex into conversations about what I was reading, whether it was Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct or Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation or Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which I expected he would think I liked because he’d always seemed to reduce me to simplistic views. It had felt unfair then, and it still stung. Well, I’d show him. I paused midbook and conjured him in my mind.
“You didn’t think I’d agree with you on this one, did you?” I asked, relishing what I knew would be surprise and a glimmer of respect. I’d play and push repeat on endless variations of our ensuing discussion. We would debate back and forth over books we disagreed on and issues that had torn us apart. Only now we no longer quarreled so much; our views had mellowed. The rare times we fought, I won.
CHAPTER 15
Autobiography of a Face
On Self-Help
Is there any genre as potentially embarrassing as self-help? Diet books, parenting guides, sex manuals, relationship fix-its; these are the books that hide beneath the New Yorker or within a bathroom magazine rack. Some people consider themselves above the very idea. They disdain any overt effort at self-improvement or consider how-to’s ludicrous. Others, and they have a point, think all books are a form of self-improvement.
For me, the best self-help has always been reading about other people’s problems. From an early age, I lapped up accounts of mental illness and abuse (The Three Faces of Eve, Sybil, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, One Child), other people’s suffering providing my own guilty salve. Reading about other people feeling bad can make you feel a little bad and eventually come around to making you feel good, or at least better. Whatever they’re dealing with always seems legitimately far worse than what one is going through, or at least much more interesting. And it’s an easy way to avoid one’s own problems.