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Dreadful Nonsense

"I've read your blog. it's really funny. you should write a column." - Jon Ronson

My Brilliant Life

When Jon Ronson was invited to submit a raffle prize to auction at his school reunion, he put together a package that he called "My Brilliant Life".  It included copies of all of his best selling books, and a note left for him by Nick Hornby (I think), which said something along the lines of 'sorry I missed you'.  It was to prove to the school bullies that his life was so great, so much better than theirs.  I love that package.

I realise that is also how I treat my blog, for the majority of posts.  When I can bear to look through the archives, I am struck by what I have left out.  How lonely I often was in Edinburgh, for example, or how much pain I was the year I was ill in Dublin.  I wonder now, if I had been blogging regularly at the end of last year, would I have gone into much detail about my operation and slow recovery?  I imagine that I would, but would probably have tried to put a positive spin on it, end on a joke and a picture of a jack russell.

I know that the Misery Lit genre of writing was very popular at one time.  Stories of people's miserable childhoods, from Angela's Ashes to the countless child sexual abuse memoirs, to anything written by Katie Price, people seem to find entertainment in reading about terrible deprivation, misery and suffering.  I don't understand why.  I have never, and will never, read those books.  I had started a project to read all of the Booker prize winning novels, but had to stop after reading about 10 in a row.  Holy Xenu, they are all miserable.  If your main character doesn't miscarry, divorce, lose all their limbs and/or drown their own child within the first 20 pages of your book, you are not going to win the Booker prize.  I couldn't take it.

Don't get me wrong, I love a bit of misery.  My favourite book in the whole wild world is Dave Egger's And You Shall Know Our Velocity, which begins and ends with the death of the main character, but it also screams JOY and LIFE.  I don't understand why people would choose to read accounts of other people's misery, save only for the realisation that their own lives, in comparison, aren't so bad.

But I don't want to make this a miserable blog.  I want to make it about My Brilliant Life: my perfect, entertaining, silly dog; my wonderful, understanding, occasionally idiotic husband; my challenging, rewarding, interesting career; my prize-winning (I can dream) cherry tomatoes.

So it's suddenly very hard to keep updating this blog, when so soon after I had decided to start it all up again, I go and lose a second much wanted pregnancy.  I don't know how much I want to write about it here.  It's not just my pain, it's my husband's pain.  And I'm still so early in my recovery and it's all still so raw and painful and emotional and devastating and downright unfair.  And that's not how I want people looking in to see my brilliant life.

So I may take a moment to step back and assess what I'm doing here.  I'm going home to Ireland for cuddles soon, so will post when I get back.  Probably with many photos of My Brilliant Holiday and My Brilliant Family.

In the meantime: My Brilliant Dog.

This entry was posted on 30 August 2011 at 4:37 pm. 0 comments

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