Come Tell Me How You Live

 

If you had to describe yourself in a couple of sentences, how would you do it? A fun-loving book-addict? An analytical romantic? A hard-working administrator with a wild side? It’s really not that easy to do, and harder still if those few sentences are supposed to get you a date. I’m loving the publicity that’s doing the rounds at the moment for a Christmas-market publication that’s an outrageous collection of lonely hearts adverts from the London Review of Books. I read this section occasionally in the Green Room in college where all the papers are, because these hardy souls have created the most extraordinary art form out of parody and self-denigration. Here are a few examples:

 

Sinister-looking man with a face that only a mother would love: think of an ageing Portillo with a beard and you have my better-looking twin. Sweetie at heart, though. Nice conversation, great for dimly-lit romantic meals. Better in those Welsh villages where the electricity supply can’t be guaranteed. Charitable women to 50 appreciated. Box no. 0364.

 

Eager-to-please woman, 36, seeks domineering man to take advantage of her flagging confidence. Tell me I’m pretty, then watch me cling.

 

Save it. Anything you’ve got to say can be said to my lawyer. But if you’re not my ex-wife, why not write to box no. 5377? I enjoy vodka, canasta, evenings in, and cold, cold revenge.

 

To some, I am a world of temptation. To others, I’m just another cross-dressing pharmacist. Male, 41.

 

A girlfriend isn’t a girlfriend unless she makes my mother cry with grief every time she visits. For two years now she’s sat, contented in front of the TV with not a care in the world. That’s where you come in. Professional M, 38, seeks heartless common slut with no small knowledge of sheltered-housing application procedures. Basingstoke.

 

Now I’m not sure whether this is a form of humour that’s going to travel well outside the British Isles, where we do tend to think that putting ourselves down with a hint of the ludicrous or surreal is a sub-genre of entertainment, not a reason to contact a therapist. It may not cross too many generational boundaries, either, but I’m sorry, I think they’re funny. After all, you could argue that these people are not exactly describing themselves (well, sometimes you have to really hope not), rather they’re describing the humorous way they view their single status. I may be on my own and no threat to Adonis, they’re saying, but my God I’m good with irony. It’s a way of taking everything pathetic, humiliating, embarrassing, vengeful, clichéd and alarming about searching for a mate, and subjecting it to a deadpan form of celebration.

 

That question of self-presentation is also apparent, but on the other end of the spectrum in another book that’s also a Christmas publication, Don’t Tell Mum, a collection of emails rounded up from gap year students who have finally found themselves with half an hour on their hands in an internet café in Shanghai. Unfortunately I don’t have any direct quotes as the review my husband heard was on the radio. But he did remember the email that described how the writer and his friends were rounded up and held in the jungle at gunpoint, only to manage to escape later on. ‘Other than that, nothing much has happened’ was the cheery exit line. Whereas the lonely hearters are carefully sculpting their prose to form a Venetian mask of self-parody over their true features, these emails are hasty, ill-considered, exercises of both too much and too little information, blurted out with the good intention of communicating, but in a state of radical divorce from their ultimate audience. If the former are prose poems written in the spirit of Philip Larkin, the latter are condensed airport blockbusters sieved through the imagination of Kafka. And funny only to people who are not blood relatives.

 

All of which brings me onto my last category of Christmas-related soul-barings, and that’s the (now dying) tradition of the Christmas letter. Do you either write or receive round-robin letters in your Christmas cards? My family have always tended to think of them as an abomination, nerve-jangling exercises in self-glorification that can have no real interest for anyone beyond their author. My husband’s family tends to write them as a matter of course. This could be accounted for by the disparity in family size. If you come from a family that consists in its furthest reaches of no more than a dozen members, you really ought to make the effort to write to people individually. If, as is my husband’s case, you have eight sets of aunts and uncles and almost thirty cousins, they’re probably more necessary. Anyhow, the upshot is that I, the round-robin letter loather, now write a letter every year. Unlike the lonely hearts ads, and the gap year emails, I’m not restricted by space and time, but I wish I had the specificity of their audience. Every year it’s a formidable puzzle to me to select information that might make a reasonably smooth transition between family, friends and (former) work colleagues, without transgressing into my taboo areas (holidays, anecdotes that take too long to explain or will involve third parties, my son’s interests, personal judgements, politics, or anything that falls into the dislikeable category of ‘achievements’). Inevitably it’s one of the hardest things I have to write all year, and I’m horribly conscious of revealing myself with everything I say, as well as with everything I omit.

 

The way that we explain ourselves in language is my special arena in research, and so I am far too aware of it, at the same time as finding it fascinating when part and parcel of the written archives of others. Every entry we make into language when we say ‘I’ (even implicitly) is an act of both concealment and disclosure, and there’s nothing we can do about that; we always say more than we intend to, even whilst carefully skirting around the shadowy things we don’t want to express. And that self-expression exists always on a knife-edge between collapsing into entertainment on one side, and into invoking horror and repulsion on the other. So this Christmas, you might like to make a special effort with your thank-you letters; it won’t be long before some bright spark decides to publish a collection of the most extreme examples of that particular genre….