The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (53 page)

I
f you are a hater of the human species, try living on a rock in the middle of a lake for seventeen years, like Gregory in
The Holy Sinner
. He has extremely good reasons for his own mistrust of human nature. He married his mother, killed his father, and is himself the offspring of a brother and sister. Then he decides he must atone for his
(admittedly unintended) sins, and takes off to live on an island in the center of a lake. He shackles himself to a rock using a leg iron, just to make his penance more painful. On his limited diet—he suckles from the stone of Mother Earth—he shrinks to the size of a hedgehog.

Meanwhile, the last pope has died, and two bishops have had a vision of a bleeding lamb, which (somehow) makes them understand that the next pope is to be found on an island in the middle of a lake. With great distaste and confusion, the bishops bring the bristly homunculus back to dry land, where Gregory is miraculously restored to normal human size again and goes on to become one of the greatest popes of all time—admired for his clemency, wisdom, and understanding.

If, like Gregory, you tend to stand apart from humanity, despising what you see, consider whether your hatred isn’t in fact hatred of yourself. Adopt, like Gregory, the expression
Absolvo te
—“I forgive you”—and turn it inward. Once you’ve learned to love yourself, you’ll find it easier to forgive others’ failings as well.

See also:
Antisocial, being
•
Cynicism
•
Dinner parties, fear of
•
Grumpiness
•
Killjoy, being a
•
Selfishness

The Time Traveler’s Wife

AUDREY NIFFENEGGER

M
iscarriage is miserable, bloody, and lonely. No matter the circumstances, it’s hard for any woman to deal with the despair it brings on, especially with your hormones still raging and your womb aching. While you recover, read
The Time Traveler’s Wife
.

Clare has loved the same man all her life. She first met him when she was only six and he thirty-five. Henry is not a pedophile but a time traveler, and he knows that in his future, and hers, they will be married. The strange, haunting tale of their love is both agonizing and wonderful to witness. Clare waits for Henry, rejecting suitors from the start. But she has no control over the romance: Henry cannot choose when he time travels—sometimes he leaves Clare for months or even years on end—even when they are happily married. Clare turns inward, coping with the solitude by channeling it into her art.

The real problems begin when they try to have a baby. Clare goes through five miscarriages before it dawns on them that the fetuses might be inheriting the time-traveling gene and leaving the womb prenatally. Each time it happens, there are blood-soaked sheets, sometimes a “tiny monster” in Clare’s hand, hope and despair hot on each other’s heels. Clare perseveres because she is desperate to have a child, and eventually they find a way around their unique predicament. But she suffers for each loss as you will have suffered, and to bear witness to her grief is deeply comforting. If you, too, are determined, keep trying, and may this life-embracing novel both console and inspire.

See also:
Children, not having
•
Cry, in need of a good
•
Failure, feeling like a
•
Pain, being in
•
Sadness
•
Yearning, general

See:
Breaking up
•
Death of a loved one
•
Family, coping without
•
Homesickness
•
Lovesickness
•
Widowed, being
•
Yearning, general

See:
Empty-nest syndrome

Mrs. Dalloway

VIRGINIA WOOLF

I
f the thought of Monday morning fills you with doom, if you emerge into wakefulness with the weight of a mountain pressing on your chest, pep yourself up with
Mrs. Dalloway
. For with this masterpiece, Virginia Woolf invented a whole new way of writing, of capturing thoughts in constant flux and the vitality coursing through the veins of a woman experiencing, moment by moment, one day in June, in the London she loves after the war has ended. The day is not, in fact, a Monday, but a Wednesday, and Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party that night.

She decides to buy the flowers herself. You, too, might like to take responsibility for a task—something pleasant, something sensual—that you would normally leave to someone else. The thought of this will help you out of bed. As you eat your breakfast, drink up Clarissa’s exuberance, her cut-from-crystal thoughts—“What a lark! What a plunge!”—and run with the longer, meandering thought that follows, bending through time, and gathering up sounds: “For so it had always seemed to her when, with a squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.” What a sentence! What an invitation! Can you not hear that squeak, feel the little shove as the doors give way? Can you not taste that clean, cold air?

Then receive, through your eyes and mind and into your body, Clarissa’s appetite and love of life. Inhabit her neat and birdlike figure, light, springy, upright, as she stands on the curb preparing to cross. Notice the “particular hush,” the “indescribable pause” before the tolling of Big Ben. Become aware, as she is aware, of the presence of death—that all these scurrying people will one day just be bones and dust—and carry this awareness with you into your day. Let it heighten your sense of being alive, this particular Monday. Let it help you make the most of your day. Your
Monday
.

Then step out. And . . . why not? Go and buy the flowers yourself.

See also:
Bed, inability to get out of
•
Career, being in the wrong
•
Dissatisfaction

See:
Broke, being
•
Tax return, fear of doing
•
Unemployment

See:
Book buyer, being a compulsive
•
Extravagance
•
Shopaholism
•
Tax return, fear of doing

See:
Nausea
•
Pregnancy

Our Spoons Came from Woolworths

BARBARA COMYNS

•   •   •

I Don’t Know How She Does It

ALLISON PEARSON

H
ow I dislike the idea of being a Daddy and pushing a pram!’ said George. So I said, ‘I don’t want to be a beastly Mummy either; I shall run away.’ Then I remembered if I ran away the baby would come with me wherever I went. It was a most suffocating feeling and I started to cry.” This excerpt from
Our Spoons
Came from Woolworths
, a soufflé of a novel published in 1950, could be printed on packets of birth control pills as a reminder of the realities of having a baby. Once it’s there, it’s there all the time, and you’re responsible for it, whether you like it or not.

Motherhood can’t be cured, but it can be treated, and Barbara Comyns’s self-deprecating and largely autobiographical novel is an excellent place to start. Sophia is the relentlessly optimistic heroine, who marries far too young, carries a newt called Great Warty around in her pocket, and is utterly ill equipped for the impending onslaught. She and her young painter husband are bohemians at heart, cut off from their families and living hand to mouth, barely employed. Sophia has two babies, and Charles’s reluctance to make any concessions to fatherhood doesn’t bode well for their harmony—he doesn’t see, for example, why you can’t keep a baby in a cupboard. Sophia’s hideous experiences at the birthing hospital are enough to put many a prospective mother off, but her ability to bounce back after the most appalling setbacks—such as her mother-in-law first swearing not to come to the wedding at all, then turning up with swarms of relatives and expecting to be hosted in the new couple’s dingy flat—makes her spirited and positive company. She goes from odd job to odd job, frequently supporting the entire family, while Charles continues to believe he is magnificently talented and should not allow fatherhood to get in his way.