Goodbye, Memoirs

I like memoirs. You could say I've been writing mine since I was ten years of age.

B. likes biographies. He's been reading the New Yorker article about Eliot Spitzer for over a week now, in little bits. He sits me down to watch our nightly half-hour dose of the Ken Burns documentary on Frank Lloyd Wright. This seems to be a harmless hobby on his part; he reads an article here or there, or watches a DVD. He finds it interesting to see how the accomplishments of great men (or would-be great men) are inseperable from other personality traits, such as great narcissism. Apparently the conviction that one is absolutely brilliant can be quite empowering.

Memoirs, to me, are dangerous. I cannot digest them in small doses, as B. does his biographies. I fall into another world. All books are dangerous to me in this way, but memoirs are the worst. I am just recovering from one, and my mind is perilously split between this reality and another. The songs and smells of that other life assail me. My mind will not be still.

And yet this life--the one immediately real--is so precious, the kind of clear bright time one might very well include in a memoir. Soon my most fondly-held rituals will be destroyed.

There will be no more reading in bed, early, with the lights on. No more conversations that end when we get tired. No more Frank Lloyd Wright DVDs; no wondering what do this evening; no getting sucked into a book. All of this--the quiet time as a couple, the quiet time alone, the complete freedom of the day, the unbroken sanctity of the night--will be annihilated.

This is that time before children, when two rooms provide plenty of living space, when leftovers are plenty for dinner, when a bit of vulgar language makes the jokes a little funnier. When there is some hope, still, of organizing the basement storage room.

I have five weeks to enjoy this. I do not need to be mired in a memoir of someone else's life. Soon enough I will be immersed in another world: precious, changing day-by-day, defined by diapers and feedings and powerful feelings. Soon enough, just writing about my own life will be a tremendous challenge, never mind reading about someone else's. Never mind reading at all--unless it's to the baby.