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The Thing About Life

blog date 12/10/2007

I recently turned 51—which is hardly old—but I’m newly aware of my mortality in a way I wasn’t when I was, say, 43. And being the father of an annoyingly vital 14-year-old girl only deepens these feelings. I think of The Thing About Life as being both utterly personal and utterly universal: an expression of astonishment at being mortal, of the enormous effect that one’s physiology has upon one’s psychology at a given time. The Thing About Life is about seeing one’s own body as mortal clay, seeing the power and beauty and pathos in my own body and my father’s body: the animal joy of childhood, adolescence’s sexual frenzy, the physical breakdown of middle age, old age’s confrontation with oblivion.

It’s, of course, a commonplace of contemporary discourse that the body is the “site” of all personality, all politics. Wittgenstein said, “Our only certainty is to act with the body.” Martha Graham: “The body never lies.” How, then, is this book significantly different from so many other recent books that explore the body? The Thing About Life is much more personal, emotionally risky and nervous-making than theoretical work that declaims airily without any sweat emerging from its pores. On the other hand, The Thing About Life avoids, I think, the solipsism that marks many memoirs; the excitement of the book for me lies in its juxtaposition between the radically subjective and clinically objective.

We are all thrillingly different animals, and we are all, in a sense, only the same animal. The seventeenth-century French moralist Jean de la Bruyère said, “There are but three events in a man’s life: birth, life, and death. He is not conscious of being born, he dies in pain, and he forgets to live.” Through eight books of fiction and nonfiction, my work has tended to explore the nature of consciousness and identity via the vehicle of self. Here, now, in this book, self is by no means dissolved but has been recontextualized in a richer, larger, more “universal” realm. It feels simultaneously like capstone and liberation.