What happened to all this free time I was supposed to have once both children were in full time education? Even before my youngest had got her uniform and book bag, I'd transferred to the full time degree course, filling up the next two years before I could say Geoffrey Chaucer. I'm the same with money; I've spent it before I have it. Never in credit. I would have filled (wasted) the time anyway; I like being busy. So much for having weekends to spend with the family. I've just spent most of it reading Sir Gawain and The Green Knight and trying to understand the Middle English. And then I spent Sunday afternoon trying to free my father from his bathroom. But that's another story involving unidentified spare keys, jumping over fences, shouting through windows of empty bathrooms (he was stuck in the ensuite) and a pair of tweezers.
So now I have to get my head around Sylvia Plath and Bret Easton Ellis, with some difficulty as my mind is still full of knights in shining armour, headless horsemen and married noblewomen offering themselves to young knights while their husbands are out hunting.
I really enjoyed The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. It wasn't anywhere near as depressing as I thought it would be. It's a witty, unsentimental account of a young girl's spiralling depression. And no traumatic reason for the depression; proving that you don't have to have a reason.
Although it is fiction and was originally published in the UK under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, it was undoubtedly based on Plath's life. But what struck me as disturbing was that she killed herself shortly after it was published. And she was only 30. I couldn't get that out of my mind while I was reading it. The mother in me thinks about her young children being left without their mum.
I could relate to this book; I have had anxiety and depression on and off since my late teens and spent most of my late twenties and early thirties 'in therapy'. There have been times where I've thought a stay in a mental institution would equate to a bit of holiday; being devoid of responsibility and getting a good meal (my appetite never dwindled in my depression). But it wasn't a feeling that lasted long enough to be put into fruition. I remember the anxiety I always felt towards the end of a course of psychotherapy or cognitive behavioural therapy; being scared of 'going it alone'.
I'd never read much of Plath, but The Bell Jar made me want to plough through my poetry anthologies looking for her work; looking for answers in her writing: 'why did you want to die so young?'
***
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis was uncomfortable and compelling. I'm old enough to remember the materialistic glitz of the 80's. Big perms, shoulder pads and power-dressing. As a teenager in the 80's, I can remember being impressed by the Hollywood image of being young, rich, good looking and driving down Sunset Boulevard in a Ferrari 308 GTS. I wanted to be American. I wanted to be in Beverly Hills.
Now I'm older, I see things very differently. I got annoyed at Clay and his friends. These privileged kids have everything, but are deprived of emotion. What's the point of all that opportunity if you're going to snort it up your nose? (I would have written a very different response fifteen years ago when I thought gonzo journalism was an ideal career option. However, it apparently wasn't appropriate for the Dudley News.)
As for some of the more controversial descriptions in Brett Easton Ellis's account of 80's Los Angeles, I've already been desensitised by reading A.M Home's The End of Alice last year. Where do you go from there?
***
The writing exercise for Reading and Writing the Self's seminar this week is to pick out a memory we'd written about and fictionalise it. I thought distancing myself from my own reality would be easier, but for some reason it's not. I'm limited in my choice of memories and I've only written about the day mum died in specific detail, and now I've written it as a true account, I don't see the point of turning it into fiction. If it had been the other way around and I wrote a fictionalised version first, it may have been easier then to go on re-writing it as myself, as if it were a rehearsal for the real thing.
I do want to work with this particular memory, but I'm not sure how different it would be as a fictional story. However, what if I was a child in the same situation, struggling to understand what was happening?
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