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A review by artemiscat
A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip by Alexander Masters
Things I found aggravating about this book, in no particular order. Spoilers everywhere.
“The diaries teach us that it is too much to be inside anybody’s head. It is a horrible place. All the repetition; that endless analysis that doesn’t analyze, just mulls a point over and over until it drops dead from banality. What goes on in a person’s brain is the opposite of what makes a story live.”
So the writer warns us, after 198 pages of inviting us into his own head and thoughts concerning these discarded diaries.
I was drawn to this book via a selection of the diaries published in The Paris Review- but this book is largely not the diaries, but his commentary on them.
One gets the impression that the writer who discarded these 148 is rather good, and while he’s reading her scratch book of musings and life records she may be working in something else entirely. He seems challenged by her. He goes out of his way to belittle her work, to slam her drawings, to assume she did nothing with her life. His own writing and drawings offer nothing of real contrast. Unless this is all repetitive humor that rushes past me... in which case it is the humor of a woodpecker working steadily on concrete.
He assumes she is a failure. Why? Because she doesn’t praise herself in these books? To judge a human being on this thin a sample, it’s like someone trying to extrapolate all of the films of Bergman by his gym attendance records or his transit tickets or his luggage tags in combination with a burning desire not to know because only anonymity will allow the author to peruse the ideal.
But back to gender, I half expect him to say, “Can you imagine my shock and bewilderment? I thought I was in a room of human beings and there was A WOMAN!”
He treats the existence of women, and the possibility of reading a woman’s words as a frightening revelation. He goes out of his way to avoid a woman’s sexuality, and when it does confront him attempts to make it heteronormative for far longe than the text supports.
I don’t know how many more punchlines about “the curse” I can bear, any more than I understand how a man got through his entire life without a woman letting him know how cramps hurt.
Still, I’m moved by her work, I’m moved by his framing narrative (though too little gets in past the snark) I’m glad I’m reading it, though frustrated when he deliberately avoids clarity and answers.
Are there some finely put forward insights? Sure. But when the author argues that writing held her back from other dreams because of the time involved, after stating she spent about half an hour a day, when one of those dreams was becoming a musician, a practice which involves something more like 5 Hours + a day, I don’t credit him.
Post script- this problem with this review is everything I dislike so strongly turns out to be admired right by the actual protagonist. Can I hold on to my disagreements when it turns out he is in the right?
“The diaries teach us that it is too much to be inside anybody’s head. It is a horrible place. All the repetition; that endless analysis that doesn’t analyze, just mulls a point over and over until it drops dead from banality. What goes on in a person’s brain is the opposite of what makes a story live.”
So the writer warns us, after 198 pages of inviting us into his own head and thoughts concerning these discarded diaries.
I was drawn to this book via a selection of the diaries published in The Paris Review- but this book is largely not the diaries, but his commentary on them.
One gets the impression that the writer who discarded these 148 is rather good, and while he’s reading her scratch book of musings and life records she may be working in something else entirely. He seems challenged by her. He goes out of his way to belittle her work, to slam her drawings, to assume she did nothing with her life. His own writing and drawings offer nothing of real contrast. Unless this is all repetitive humor that rushes past me... in which case it is the humor of a woodpecker working steadily on concrete.
He assumes she is a failure. Why? Because she doesn’t praise herself in these books? To judge a human being on this thin a sample, it’s like someone trying to extrapolate all of the films of Bergman by his gym attendance records or his transit tickets or his luggage tags in combination with a burning desire not to know because only anonymity will allow the author to peruse the ideal.
But back to gender, I half expect him to say, “Can you imagine my shock and bewilderment? I thought I was in a room of human beings and there was A WOMAN!”
He treats the existence of women, and the possibility of reading a woman’s words as a frightening revelation. He goes out of his way to avoid a woman’s sexuality, and when it does confront him attempts to make it heteronormative for far longe than the text supports.
I don’t know how many more punchlines about “the curse” I can bear, any more than I understand how a man got through his entire life without a woman letting him know how cramps hurt.
Still, I’m moved by her work, I’m moved by his framing narrative (though too little gets in past the snark) I’m glad I’m reading it, though frustrated when he deliberately avoids clarity and answers.
Are there some finely put forward insights? Sure. But when the author argues that writing held her back from other dreams because of the time involved, after stating she spent about half an hour a day, when one of those dreams was becoming a musician, a practice which involves something more like 5 Hours + a day, I don’t credit him.
Post script- this problem with this review is everything I dislike so strongly turns out to be admired right by the actual protagonist. Can I hold on to my disagreements when it turns out he is in the right?