Do What Makes You Happy

In Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, record shop owner Rob, who likes making top 5 lists, writes down his top 5 dream jobs.  All but one of the jobs (architect) are impossible, because he’s chosen things like, ‘Journalist for Rolling Stone magazine, 1976 -1979,’

When I was a child, my dream jobs, in no particular chronological / of importance order were:

·         Mounted police officer

I was obsessed with The Bill and with horses, so this seemed like the perfect combination.

·         Film / music journalist

Because then I would get to meet rock stars and actors. I was too young to know that rock stars and actors hate journalists.

·         Band photographer

Because of the mighty Jill Furmanovsky and her beautiful black and white photographs of rock stars.

·         Criminal psychologist

Because of Robbie Coltrane in Cracker and my enduring love for anything police procedural that had the added bonus of being grim and made you want to check all your doors and windows were locked before you went to bed.

·         A writer

Miss Joan Wilder, on her yacht, with her typewriter in Romancing the Stone. I already loved stories, I loved writing stories, I loved stories about writers, I loved the words WRITING and BOOK. Yesterday, I saw this family walking along the high street. Mum, dad, son. The son was trailing a few feet behind, and he was reading as he walked along. That was me. I LOVE it when I see kids reading in weird places; during meals in cafés, in the supermarket, outside shops. Any opportunity to read, and I’d read. I always had a book with me (and mostly still do, because they have in handy when you’re queuing or stopping for coffee, or on a long boring public transport journey, or can’t sleep, or you’re bored, or it’s too wet to go out….I draw the line at reading at the gym, though.)

For years, writing was my thing. It was my calling. I knew I’d never be happy if I did anything else. I worked in a series of undemanding jobs that meant I could write during quiet periods (night reception cover was brilliant for this, as all you had to do was keep one eye on the door and set the early morning wake-up calls.)

I told myself each job was just a way to make money while I was writing. Then I stopped. What I wrote was shit. I didn’t have any stories. I didn’t have any of my own ideas, I didn’t have any of my own characters. This was in the chick-lit boom of the late 90s / early 00s, when Bridget Jones set a precedent for the genre, and many pale imitations followed.

I was trying that sort of writing; girls going on adventures, bitchy bosses, selfish flatmates, bad boyfriends, white wine, Jimmy Choos, bikinis, beaches, hot sex scenes.  Fiona Walker’s books had all of this stuff, AND horses, a bit like a Gen X Jilly Cooper.

 I loved those books, but I wasn’t any good at copying them. Maybe it was because I liked really weird news stories, like the one about the woman who got her hair caught in a swimming pool vent and drowned, while people merrily and obliviously used the pool for several days before she was discovered.

My taste in books has changed over the last 15 -20 years, and I don't read the white wine and happy ending stories anymore.  My heart lies with the gruesome and the strange; a spooky tale, a psychological thriller the cold prickles on the back of your neck; Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, Ann Rule, Gillian Flynn, a m homes, Zoe Heller, Ruth Rendell, Bram Stoker, Eerie, Indiana, The Missing, The Enfield Haunting. Really, it was always this way, from when I read The Haunting of Cassie Palmer, The Ghost of Thomas Kemp and The Children of Green Knowe when I was at middle school to The Shining and The Rats in my early teens.

I loved being scared shitless, I loved the feeling that when you closed the mirrored bathroom cabinet, there, behind you, might be a face, the boogeyman, Bloody Mary. 

And this brings me to the crux of this post. Authenticity.

A lot of self-help videos and blogs will go on about how in order to be happy in your work, you need to find your true self, what makes your soul happy, and do that. I have several issues with this.

1)      If we all did what truly made us happy, there would be a lot of people dead, no one to keep the country’s basic facilities running and a lot of make-up vloggers.

2)      Sometimes, you can’t do ‘what makes you happy’ because you have to do boring, adult things, like pay the rent and eat.

3)      Sometimes what would make you happy would be standing on your desk and dancing like Claire in this clip from HBO TV series Six Feet Under. (working in an office was NOT her calling.)

4)      How exactly do you know what your calling actually is?

I don’t KNOW what my calling is, or if I even have one. And that’s why I have ended up, almost twenty years after I left school, in the same meaningless jobs, wondering what I am there for, wondering where my stories went, wondering why I can only write when I don’t have time, or when I am totally miserable.

Finding and following your ‘true calling’ only really works for two kinds of people. The first kind, who know from a very early age that they want to be doctors, nurses, police officers, vets, camera men, solicitors, lawyers, landscape gardeners, builders, mechanics, engineers, and chefs etc. and the second kind; people who have the means / money to tell other people how to be authentic and find their calling and call that a career.

‘Finding your true calling’ is utterly meaningless.  I’m always getting sucked into TED Talks on Youtube. Many of them are very, very good, but the ones about things like, ‘how to find your perfect career’ and ‘what to do with your life’ tend to be someone telling you that if you can’t find perfect career, ‘do what makes you happy’

Oh, OK. So I’ll find a job, then, where someone pays me to get up in the morning, go for a walk in the country, eat cream buns and then write about it. Or, where someone pays me to go to the gym. Or, to hang out at my friends’ houses and play with their babies and drink tea. Or, go to the SoHo Curzon cinema on a Wednesday morning and watch independent films. Or, spend three hours in a stationery shop looking at pens and notebooks. Or, spend half a day in charity shops looking for out of print paperbacks. What’s that, Skip? No-one is going to pay me to do those things? But they make me happy!

They offer no practical advise whatsoever, just a load of guff about how if you want to climb Everest, you should just go ahead and climb Everest. Won’t my wheelchair stop me, though? Only if you let it! You are the barrier, not the wheelchair, pal!

You’re taking it too literally, some might say. What they mean is, find something that you can stand to do for 40 hours a week that you’re vaguely happy doing. Something that doesn’t make you  want to pour boiling water over your arm on Monday morning.

On Tuesday, it will be the start of my third week in a new job. Those of you who know where it is, please keep it quiet. Those who don’t – when I decide whether I’m going to stay or go, and if you’re interested, I’ll tell you. It’s not that it’s a bad place to work – I’m not mining for blood diamonds or treating Ebola victims – it’s just….it’s just it’s the same old officey shit. Everyone’s very nice and friendly, and I am sure there are cliques and politics I don’t know about yet, but I am just not sure I can do it anymore. The 9-5 (or 8.30 til 5.30, in my case, which is actually a really long time to spend sitting in one place wishing you were dead.) that vague feeling of free-floating, nameless dread – is this what I’m here for? The words that strike terror in my heart:

Purchase orders

Productivity

Action plan

Meeting

The ring, ring, ring of reception trying to put someone though to me when I’m on my lunch break (not her fault, she doesn’t know, and it's not her fault that there’s nowhere to really eat lunch apart from your desk) the fact that I have not actually had a full lunch break since I started, and that I actually start at 8 and finish at what’s more like 6. The fact I have had almost no training but I am expected to get on with stuff. The fact I sit there and don’t know what the hell I am doing.

It could be new job blues, I guess.

Or it could be, I’m not being true to my authentic self.

This Whole Thing Was Started With a Dream and a Mouse

I start a new job on Monday. After almost six months off, this is a daunting prospect, especially as I’m not going back to the cosy work family I was part of for ten years.

Last night, I had two nightmares. In the first, I turned up to start my new job. My mentor was a gruff woman who shouted at me when I didn’t understand what she was saying. All these people came into the office kitchen and ate cake, but didn’t do any work. I waited for someone to show me to my desk, tell me what I was doing, start training me. No one did. A few girls made bitchy comments about me and laughed behind my back. Everyone else ignored me. I left without finishing my first day.

I've got a job infiltrating the Triads

In the second dream, I was back in Thailand, except I had my car with me. I was driving down a narrow tunnel /one way street, when my car just stopped and wouldn’t start again. I sat in the car for ages, trying to get it started, before phoning TC and telling him I was stuck and my car wouldn’t start and how was I going to get to my new job on Monday? (never mind the logistics of getting a car back from Thailand by Monday!)

'The Vanishing' 1988 

I love how illogical dreams are while at the same time making perfect sense. If there’s cake in my new work place, I’ll be happy.

Review - 'A Little Life' Hanya Yanagihara - UPDATE

This review comes about a year too late, but here we go anyway. Warning – contains mega spoilers.

Back in March and faced with almost 2 days of non-stop travel, I thought, ‘I need a big book, one of those massive, 700+ page jobs, that will see me through all those tedious hours of waiting for check-ins, waiting to board and the actual flight,’

I chose Hanya Yanagihara’s Man-Booker prize short-listed novel A Little Life, mostly because I had heard so much about it, and how amazing it was.

US edition - the cover photo sums up this review

UK edition cover

The novel follows four twenty-something New York friends, Jude, JB, Malcom and Willem over a period of some 30 odd, curiously timeless years. (there’s mobile phones and computers, but no social media, 9/11 or world politics.)

 At first, I struggled to separate which character was which, and this isn’t helped by Yanagihara (who I will refer to from now on as ‘HY’) playing the pronoun game and starting each chapter with ‘he’ instead of the narrating character’s name.

As for the first 50 or so pages, the four boys were so indistinguishable to me, I found myself flipping back over what I had just read, making notes so I could keep track.

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Jude is the character HY has decided to focus on. Poor Jude; not even an Eastender’s character is put through the mill as much as he is. Abandoned by his mother as a baby, he’s taken into a monastery where the monks sexually and physically abuse him for years.

All except for kindly Brother Luke, who love-bombs Jude with encouragement and affection, providing him with a safe place to escape and just be a little boy. Because HY is from the ‘tell’ not ‘show’ school of writing, Brother Luke’s grooming is clear to the reader from the start of their ‘friendship’, and when Brother Luke suggests to a blindly willing Jude that they run away together to build a house in the woods, my heart sank.

Following his time with Brother Luke, which is so unrelentingly grimy I had to stop reading to gather myself and make a comforting cup of tea, Jude’s story gets progressively darker and more twisted, from the home he’s in during his early adolescence, to the truckers he meets on the road, to the sinister doctor he encounters in a service station bathroom, to the bullying, violent, lover he thinks he deserves, Jude's life is a non-stop parade of misery. 

Even after he’s adopted as an adult by Harold and his wife Julia, and meets doctor, Andy, there’s no happiness for Jude.  He is damaged, as you would be if you’d been through what he has been through. He cuts himself, he can’t stand sex or to be touched. Yet he’s also brilliant at absolutely everything he does; cooking, singing, playing the piano, gardening, in his stellar career as a lawyer.

And this is one of the issues among the many that I have with this novel. All of the four friends are wildly successful in their chosen fields; Willem becomes a Hollywood actor, winning Oscars and working with acclaimed directors; JB becomes a famous artist despite only painting portraits of his friends, and Malcolm becomes a famous architect. None of them end up quitting their dreams to get a job in Carpet Right or working in a call centre selling home insurance; none of them simply settle down and have a couple of kids and wash the car on a Sunday (I guess because that would be boring.)

JB and Malcolm’s stories eventually fade so much into the background, you wonder why HY included them in the first place, and then you realise; it’s so they can stand around saying, ‘I’m sorry’ (this book clocks up more ‘I’m sorries’ than 50 Shades does ‘Holy Craps!’) and telling Jude how amazing he is and how much they love him.

The amount of shit the three friends, Andy and Harold tolerate from Jude exasperated me. They seemed to give him so much time, such unquestioning, unconditional understanding and loyalty, and he never once gives it back. He lies to them, he tells them nothing about himself, he gives nothing away, he’s stubborn, and he treats them like shit.

In part, you can tell yourself that this is because this is who Jude is, a person who does not believe that they are worthy of being loved, but I found it amazing that his friends, who he treats so poorly for so long, would stick by him, for a massive 30 plus years.  They don’t know anything about the abuse he went though as a child, so they don’t even have the information to decide, ‘this is why Jude is why he is.’ The only knowledge they have of Jude's past is that he had a life-altering accident that disabled him, but even the details of this are hidden from them, and the reader, until towards the end of the book. 

Andy is perpetually, literally, putting Jude back together again, over and over again, stitching wounds and setting bones, asking the slimmest of questions and accepting the scantiest of answers. It drove me mad that Andy’s character was a doctor, and it felt like he was only there to provide Jude with 24/7 healthcare without asking any awkward questions. In short, being the total opposite of what every decent doctor would do, staying quiet when he should be talking, doing nothing when he has a duty to his patient to take action.

There’s actually little evidence of Jude’s amazingness, beyond his ability to survive the most awful of abuses, bake excellent cakes and be brilliant at everything he turns his hand to.

Jude is destined to spend the entire novel hating himself, feeling dirty, cutting himself so badly he almost dies, and surviving two suicide attempts.

I really, really, wanted to Jude to finally decide he was worthy of getting help and realise that he was loved and nothing that happened to him was his fault. I really wanted him to be more than his abuse, but HY was never going to let that happen.

Not much of Jude’s story really rang true for me. He didn’t need to have so much abuse thrown at him to be damaged, and his damage did not need to make up the totality of his character.

I would question how a child who grew up in ‘care’ and without the nurture and solid foundations of a healthy mother/child relationship could slide so easily into a successful career and into close friendships. The truth is, Jude doesn’t. His friendships are as shallow and one-sided as you’d expect from a child who never really learned how to interact with other children, yet this isn’t an area the author chooses to explore at all.  

Jude also displays zero curiosity about who his parents might have been / are, and in fact I am not sure it’s ever even mentioned with the exception of it not being clear what his racial heritage is (we know it’s mixed, and that’s the extent of it.)

Jude’s relationship with an abusive older partner, in particular, was handled badly, and I felt that little to no research had been done by the author about the creeping, insidious nature of domestic violence and of domestic abusers.

None of the characters rang true for me; there’s not one that feels like a fully formed person you would know,  and have encountered in your own life. They just seem to be there purely to propel Jude’s narrative. The most honest moment in the book comes courtesy of JB. Lost and drug-addicted, he does a cruel impression of Jude and boy, he is never let off the hook for that one, because you’re not allowed to mock someone as fragile and broken as Jude.

I am actually infuriated thinking about just how shallow each character is. They are all so good, with the exception of JB’s brief time as a drug addict. They have no faults, no pettiness, no moments of dickheadishness that make up the human experience. They are constantly there for Jude, at any time, at any hour, despite having lives (and in Andy’s case, kids,) of their own.

I just wanted one of them, ONE, who when summoned to the hospital for the fiftieth time after Jude had done something disgusting to himself yet again to go, ‘Actually, it’s 3am and I have finally got to sleep, after being woken up 5 times already, so I am not going to come to the hospital to see Jude, I’ve got baby sick on my shoulder and I’ve not slept for six months, I HAVE A LIFE TOO, YOU KNOW!!!’

It takes 97% of the way through the book (I read the Kindle edition, so don’t know what page number this was) before HY finally gives Jude a break and lets him die.

Soon after that, all his close friends also die, all youngish in their late 50s and early 60s because NO-ONE IS ALLOWED TO BE HAPPY AND NORMAL AND WASH THEIR CAR ON A SUNDAY AND TAKE THEIR GRANDCHILDREN TO THE SEASIDE OR WATCH A FILM WITH A CUP OF TEA AND BISCUIT FOR DUNKING OR ANYTHING NICE LIKE THAT.

Spindly plot and poor characterisation aside, the writing isn’t that great. I felt that HY was trying to emulate the style of Donna Tartt (The Secret History, The Goldfinch) Most novice writers do this - it’s a means of flexing your writing muscles and finding your own style - but this is HY second novel. Each over-descriptive, meandering paragraph reads like HY was wondering to herself how Tartt would have written the same book (better, is probably the answer, child abandonment and neglect being covered in The Goldfinch.)

There was far too much needless detail about dinners and the lives of the bit-player characters, and this was detail that could have been given to fully exploring Jude’s psychology further, beyond ‘sexual abuse fucks you up’. What about how being abandoned as a baby would fuck you up? About how not knowing who you are, where you come from, not having any normal relationships until you are in your 20s?

HY isn’t interested in this, she’s interested in the unrelenting, grim torture that abusers meter out to Jude and the cruelty he later inflicts on himself as a result.

Are there good things about the book? Yes. We are not given graphic, detailed descriptions of Jude’s abuse, and what is revealed is dealt with sparingly and very matter of factly.  The portions of the book about Jude’s early childhood are very good, his typical childish trust in adults and their motivations, his misunderstanding of the mysterious adult world is heart-breaking, and despite the awfulness of what happens to him at the monastery, I found those sections of the book the most interesting and vividly drawn.

I liked the fact that there’s no clear time setting (other than it’s obviously ‘modern’ times) to the novel - I imagined that the four friends met at college in the late 1980s / early 90s – but another reader could place them as first meeting in the 1970s. There’s little mention of technology or politics to provide a timescale. It’s not really clear why the author chooses to do this – I believe possibly so the book won’t ‘age’ and the story can speak for itself, instead of being a comment on  late 20^th / early 21^st century life.

I started this book on 14^th March and finished it today (2 May) It never normally takes me so long to read a book, even one as long as this. It felt like what it is; a slow, tedious, trudge through the thick sludge of an awful life, while someone hits you over the head with MEANINGS made of breeze blocks. 

I stayed with it because I had already invested time and money in it, but there are probably authors out there who have tackled this subject more competently and meaningfully. 

1/5.....'sorry'. (not sorry). 

Now for the updated bit...

I love reading bad reviews of books. Love it. In my search for reviews on this book, I discovered that the cover photo is called 'Orgasmic Man'. I have to say that a thought had occurred to me when I kept seeing the cover...is he in pain...or is he...? He looks like he might be....? Or at the very least it's a cry wank, maybe? 

So yeah, that cover photo more sums up what I think of the book (load of wank) than my review of the book. 

I probably shouldn't rush to review things when I'm pissed off with the author for mucking me around and wasting my time, because later I think, oh it wasn't  THAT bad.  

It actually wasn't that bad, I take back that the writing wasn't that good. I would have just liked to have read what this book could have been with some more ruthless editing and with less focus on Jude.

I might read Hanya Yanagihara's first book, so watch this space....