My mother and I have a long-running disagreement over books, specifically, the kinds of stories we favour and are willing to invest time in reading.
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These days, I lean almost irresistibly towards fine-tuned domestic drama – Margaret Drabble, John Updike, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Jonathan Franzen. I am, after all, a domesticated beast at the moment, mired in the early years of parenting.
My mother, on the other hand, retired and with all the time in the world to devour books, cannot bear to read about anything or anyone ordinary, much less a book that serves to elevate it. She prefers sweeping stories of remarkable feats – of the extraordinary.
I can only put our diverging opinions down to life stages.
I recently re-read – with great enjoyment – Franzen's The Corrections, a book I hated the first time I read it, back in 2004. I was, then, a fancy-free aspiring writer, eking out a living in half-hearted academia in Melbourne. I couldn't understand how the minutiae of lives – multiple lives, lived out in all their mundane glory – should be celebrated so, or even detailed on the page in the first place. (As a side note, I was given the book as a gift by a dear friend, who was mortally offended when I cheerily told her how much I hated it; a lesson learnt in gift-receiving etiquette 101.)
But then, whenever I stop to consider the whys and wherefores of what helps me through the day when it comes to literature, I always hear the words of an old housemate ringing in my ears.
In the year 2000, when I was 21, I did a student exchange in Montreal, and lived with an Indian-American literary genius who slept most of the day, smoked unfiltered cigarettes instead of eating, and churned out perfect essays in the wee hours. (Another side note: she's now a literary editor at The New York Times).
"Dude, romanticise what you do," she would say to me, whenever I expressed any dreary angst about my direction in life. I've been aiming to do so ever since. And while I am loath to do it as so many others do, via social media – I post, therefore I am – I find an equal sort of validation in seeing other people's small, carefully crafted and ever-so-important lives laid out on the page of a novel.
