� Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, in "An Accidental Autobiography

Out with the old and in with the new: no more of the kind of shit that Harrison describes, to which in case you did not know I can 100% relate. And things are *good*, and I can do this. If I�m a quarterback, I�m Bret Favre, I�m Dan Marino. 2003 � hike!

That book, it is interesting, parts of it are so good and parts of it are so jaw-droppingly, embarrassingly self-indulgent that I wonder whether I should give up my own personal take on the diary enterprise � maybe get out of the introspection habit, become gushier and Lesley Gorier over Mr. Man, rejigger media references into snarky smackdown commentary, more emph on The Facts Of What I Did � and I see myself again as that car-crash girl, only not at the Croc in my vintage duds but all the time in my whole life. Harrison�s book is (though it is a lot of other things too) like one of those loser internet sites where every morsel of its creator�s life is laid bare upon the buffet having been fetishistically tended to until you can barely recognize a moment for a moment and a narrative for a narrative, like the literary version of nouvelle cuisine, where even if you�re hungry you can�t fully divorce that response from the intellectual one of sick fascination and Has she no sense of privacy at all? Then again, it tastes pretty damn good. It satisfies a person�s appetite for� I don�t know, something. Also on the diary tip, she quotes letters she wrote to friends many years ago and, in a tone that conveys both discipline and disbelief, tells how little of their substance was true. Check this:

"Accuracy takes too many pages," I wrote in a letter to a friend. I meant � even my letters were coded � that my life was a garment I wore, like an enveloping barracan, to hide my soul. My letters had a jolly, manic tone or a treacly sentimental one.

Numbness and hysteria are two sides of the same coin.

"[Mr. H] is a perfect angel," I wrote. "Remember all that beautiful leisure time I was going to be so creative in? Now I have it," I wrote. "All I want to do is eat chocolates." I was all the time bored, and reproachful of myself for being bored, and bewildered.

When I read this, my eye and my heart caught on the "bewildered" � not just because I have a story about that word that is almost as funny as the one about "moist" � and then snapped backwards and the question presented itself to my mind unbidden: if this sentence were about the way I wrote in my diary over (ahem) much of the last year, "bored" would not be the right word, so what instead? Blank, and reproachful of myself for being blank. I seem to know, I seemed instinctively to grasp, that there is an answer, that a word exists that would make the description true of me, and every time I catch myself starting to page through my mind�s dictionary like the good schoolgirl who doesn�t want to leave any blanks, I haul myself back. Because, partly, I�m not sure how stern it�s fair to be with oneself about that sort of thing. Perceiving something with perfect retrospective clarity does not mean that I could have seen it all along if only I�d looked a little harder: that mindset is so bad and wrong, it perverts hard-won self-knowledge into an indictment, and calling myself names as precisely as possible is still calling myself names. I think Harrison, in what I described as the combination of discipline and disbelief, knows this.

And more on numbness, by the way, from David Edelstein�s review on Slate of "The Pianist," which I didn�t want to see until I read it so rock on to you, Dave: "The survival instinct is shown to exist in a weird, numb state that combines defiance and resignation." Defiance and resignation, discipline and disbelief?

It took me a shocking number of years to learn that truth did not necessarily abide. This sounds lofty but what I mean is that I used to torment myself, for example, in the wake of some bust-up or another, wondering How can he have said those things, how can he have said those wonderful things to me if this is how it was going to end? As if it the saying and the busting-up were parts of a whole and thus the nature of the whole was irreconcilable and the inevitable postmortem question of What did that mean? not possible to answer. I don�t remember when I finally did figure this out, but when I did it was honestly as revelatory as religion: It�s true when you say it. What I said ten years ago or ten months ago, say � well, the fact that I don�t say those things any more, don�t believe them (i.e., have become disbelieving), doesn�t mean that I was lying when I said them. I may have been self-deluded, but so what? We do a lot to keep ourselves going, and most of us are not bad people. I�m having that self-forgiveness feeling right now that I did the morning after Ryan Adams, the morning my crack-up started to feel real, while I was watching "Spring Forward." Most of us, at any given moment, are doing what we can. So if over the past year and � god � at dozens of other times in my life I was wearing an emotional barracan like Harrison says she was, I�m not going to flog myself over it or bog down and stall in self-recrimination. If I was wearing something big and thick and drapey like that, it was probably because I was cold.

And also, from Harrison, this very beautiful passage about buying an old cupboard at a Salvation Army store, then in the process of restoring it learning that it dates to the eighteenth century, and, more important, was *used* in the eighteenth century: "I felt overwhelming affection � the kind one feels for an unselfconscious animal � for the cupboard, a shrine to life that could never be lost so long as someone was alive to love it." And also, and oh, wasn�t it funny that I should have used a food simile earlier, the ambitious and (ha) meaty essay, "Food, Flesh, and Fashion," which if it is an embarrassment of non-restraint is also an embarrassment of riches, so much interesting and seemingly disparate history and philosophy and aesthetics all glommed together and made to support each other, imposing yet inviting � Catharine, I will be sending you a copy.

(Insert here: the joke I told to Karen about surf and turf.)

The thing about the Harrison book is that it presents a style of writing essays that formally foregrounds the individual. And in a way, warts and has-she-no-sense-of-privacy and all, she�s almost working towards a new genre, like the genre of not bullshitting yourself. It is interesting to me that the "genre of lies," which I wrote about lo these many months ago and gave such a glib name, is more like what Harrison is doing than different.

I�m worried these meta-entries are getting tedious. I�m sorry. And I wanted this one to be longer, peppier, less navel-gazy � um, and edited; I�m sorry � but I�m trying to be better at gastro and now I�m out of here early, stopping on the Beast side to pick up Steve and then heading towards Leavenworth with a borrowed station wagon full of skiing gear. He thinks he can talk me into going gravity skiing on Sunday (I have not been in over half my life). Any bets?

Yeah, I�ve got some resolutions and shit. Maybe next time? Maybe not.