What book are you in (or escaping from), or who is writing your life?
Being a sad person, I was on the step machine at the gym this evening and thinking that there was nothing in the day's events that stimulated me to an lj entry.
And then I remembered a conversation I had with R1 and R2 before the seminar last week, about the kind of books that impress one in youth, and the expectations they raise about what life is going to be about. The corollary to this was that these are often books which seem, then, to be Deep and Philosophical and to offer Profound Truths about Life, the Universe, Human Relationships, etc, but tend to wear badly. Or at least, one goes back to them in later life and is markedly less impressed.
Then R2 commented that he'd once supposed that life in academic London would be like Aldous Huxley, in particular Point Counterpoint. And I remarked that I'd imagined that life as a grown-up would resemble the novels of Iris Murdoch (a thought which now has me running screaming).
Which brought me to the other thought about what book or works of what author people think they are or living in. For quite a long time I felt that there were no books that were really about me. There's a long tradition of what Walter Allen in his books on the English novel refers to as the 'Young Man from the Provinces' plot (in which class may add to or stand in for provincial origins), but there isn't really a female equivalent. The female version of the story, so far, if there is one, seems to me to be about the 'daughters of educated men', in V Woolf's formulation - or at least professional/privileged men. This does not really apply to me. (The Scholarship Boy is a known literary figure, the Scholarship Girl not.)
Do other people have similar thoughts, about what book they belong in? (There's an article by Katharine Whitehorn on this very subject, so I'm not the first person to think it, which is reassuring.) And if so, what is the book? Or is it that your life is the sort of life that X writer writes (speaking as one these days more B Pym than I Murdoch...) but hasn't yet? Or are you a book that hasn't been written yet by an author not yet in existence?