I finished The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury last week and it broke my heart a little bit to say goodbye to it. There were so many good bits, but one towards the end of the book stuck out to me especially because it seemed to fit with the theme of the last few of these posts.
I sent this passage to a friend of mine. “Hahahahaha. Required reading for millennial men!” She replied. And it’s true, it does seem to speak to their caginess and strange, wistful tendencies. I’m writing more and more about young(ish) men and collecting more anecdotes from them for this purpose, and this caginess continually comes up in various guises.
More broadly though, the book is full of these observations about the distances that can open up between people and the regret that ferments afterwards, when you can’t go back and put right whatever misunderstanding there was, or go back to the version of yourself that you were when you were better aligned.
Here is another example:
Obviously these are exaggerated for comedic effect. (This is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read, if not the funniest.) But I don’t think the truth of these observations is diminished by the exaggeration or the humour. And I think it’s actually a pretty extraordinary accomplishment to be able to write this way, turning up the pitch of things to the point of making them almost ridiculous, but at the same time keeping an earnest core, so everything still feels honest and true. It’s a really fine line to walk. It’s not satirical (thank god) in tone but achieves something much weirder and more real than that.
To me this book captures something essential and honest about how strange life can feel, a quality that’s also sort of encapsulated by the phrase “you have to laugh”.
Because even in their ridiculousness, I can really imagine both the observations in these passages happening. I mean imagine you are driving around with your boyfriend and he says “put on some of that Don Morrison”, it would really be the end of something. Perhaps this felt particularly true to me as a huge Van Morrison fan, but even if you weren’t I feel you’d still see the truth of it. And Ned, still thinking of Maureen! You can just see it.
Weirdly, these passages reminded me of this essay by Gwyneth Paltrow, a celebrity who I really like because she seems to understand that the purpose of celebrities is to cultivate a fantastical persona which seems fundamentally totally separate to the rest of us. Or almost totally separate.
The essay is about her “conscious uncoupling” (“/separation/divorce, whatever you want to call it”, as she writes) and the moment when she realised her marriage was over. In one passage she writes:
I don’t recall when it happened, exactly. I don’t remember which day of the weekend it was or the time of day. But I knew – despite long walks and longer lie-ins, big glasses of Barolo and hands held – my marriage was over.
What I do remember is that it felt almost involuntary, like the ring of a bell that has sounded and cannot be undone. The inadvertent release of a helium balloon into the sky. I tried to quell that knowing, to push it far down. I tried to convince myself it had been a fleeting thought, that marriage is complicated and ebbed and flowed. But I knew it. It was in my bones.
It’s a very moving piece of writing I think. Not in spite of her fame, but because of it. Because, while she is almost totally separate from the rest of us, she is still human at the end of the day. And so, still governed by the same feelings as pain as the rest of us. The sense of distance and regret here felt like the same thing defined in these other passages to me.
I don’t know if it’s comforting or depressing that even someone like Gwyneth Paltrow can’t get away from feelings like this, but there it is!
Till next time xxxx
Some Things I Liked Recently
This long read on a feud over the correct maintenance of a botanical garden which has erupted on the Isle of Wight, by Mark O’Connell (I promise it is not at all whimsical, it’s full of people letting out brittle laughs and being called things like “AJ Careless”).
John Curtis’s enemies – and for a man who runs a mid-sized botanical garden on the Isle of Wight, he has surprisingly many – have a tendency to refer to him as “the American Businessman”, a phrase that, for many islanders, carries overtones of rapaciousness and cultural barbarism. He would rather not have quite so many adversaries, but neither does it seem especially to disturb him to be the object of simmering ill will on the island. He is not in the business of deliberately goading his detractors, but he tends, in his discussion of the increasingly public argument unfolding around his stewardship of the garden, toward a certain easygoing, sprightly provocation. “I’m a lightning rod,” as he put it to me in our first conversation, and on several occasions thereafter.
This by Sarah Manavis on the impropriety of therapists vlogging about their patients on TikTok….