Life advice from a great 2021 novel

Plus: the poetry of hero worship

When I dreamed up my Worm School course last spring, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to include a remarkable passage from a novel I’d just finished reading, featuring the narrator’s off-the-cuff life advice to herself, to her students, to her new granddaughter, to the universe. It seemed to me that there was more wisdom in this one paragraph than in anything I’d read in ages—but then I never found an appropriate place to squeeze it in! So I thought I’d share it now.

The book is Loved and Missed by the British novelist Susie Boyt, published in the UK in 2021 and Stateside two years later. (Thanks, once again, to my brilliant book club for getting this to the top of my pile.) It’s the story of a London schoolteacher in her early fifties—the narrator, Ruth—who is semi-estranged from her daughter, Eleanor, who has a longstanding, pretty severe drug problem. When Eleanor gives birth to her first child, Ruth brazenly maneuvers herself—I won’t spoil the details—to become the baby’s primary caretaker. And the novel unfolds from there.

If the premise sounds a bit bleak, the book is actually so buoyant: You are carried along on Ruth’s hopeful gamble that this could work, maybe—that if she can just approach things in the right spirit, the universe might allow her to get away with something, just this once.

You get a taste of that spirit in this passage. Here, Ruth has been admiring her new charge, the infant Lily, when she thinks, momentarily, of the fact that Eleanor was almost certainly using drugs during the pregnancy, and she has a spike of anxious rage that she tries to tamp down with this magnificent self-pep-talk slash sermon slash philosophy of life:

I felt arrows of rage rising in me, fraught images spreading like bloodstains. There’s no point, I told myself. I reached for the ordinary decoys. It won’t get you anywhere. Think of the outcome you want and make sure you are moving towards it. Got to be practical. That’s what I always told the girls at school. There is so much in life that doesn’t matter, so many things that hold you back, hem you in and throw you off the scent of what’s important. Don’t get too bogged down in things that don’t count or things you cannot influence, and specifically don’t worry too much about making sure others know you’re in the right, because it so easily gets in the way of what you want and need. Become an expert at shrugging most of life off and free yourself for what really interests you. Hone your focus. Don’t bother with cleaning or tidiness beyond basic hygiene. Don’t make your appearance your primary concern. It will zap all your creativity. Be as self-sufficient as you dare. Sometimes you hold more strength when people don’t know what you think or feel, so be very careful whom you confide in. People can run with your difficulties when you least expect it, distort them, relish them even, and before you know it they’re not yours any more. Respect your privacy. And earn you own money or you’ll lack power. Take good care of your friendships, nurture them and they’ll strengthen you. Don’t turn frowning at the defects of other people into a hobby, delicious though it may be; it poisons you. Read every day—it is a practice that dignifies humans. Become a great reader of books and it will help you with reality, you’ll more easily grasp the truth of things and that will set you up for life. And don’t expose your brain to low-quality art forms because there will be a certain measure of pollution.

What I love about this passage is not just the advice itself—though I do love that—but how it captures the allure and power of advice, for some of us. Like the narrator, I also cling to notions as a bulwark against stress and anxiety. Ruth calls them her “ordinary decoys,” and they are that—something to distract you from a distressing moment. But isn’t it also true that if we can just orient ourselves toward things in the right way, we can suddenly do things we couldn’t otherwise? (Am I making any sense here?)

Thinking about this over the weekend, I picked up Boyt’s 2008 memoir, My Judy Garland Life. Also excellent! Since earliest childhood, Boyt has felt a special love for and kinship with Judy Garland, and when Boyt went through a very difficult time in her early twenties, it was Judy who saved her. She writes:

During the worst period of my life, autumn 1989 to summer 1990, I watched an eighty-five minute PBS television special called Judy Garland: The Concert Years every day, receiving from it something that just wasn’t available to me elsewhere.

Boyt’s memoir is, in part, an attempt to explain what exactly it is that she received from Judy, why hero worship can be an ennobling practice, and what devotion is all about, especially devotion to someone you’ve never met. As a bit of a serial hero worshipper myself, I found the book utterly invigorating. Thinking well of other people, being interested in them, being a little obsessed even—it’s a good energy to put out into the world, don’t you think? Boyt thinks so. She writes:

Hero worship, when properly entered into, has a great deal of poetry in it. It inspires and motivates, renews and revives. It encourages introspection, investigation of desire, personal moral inventory and all manner of fruitful examinations. The cargo of goodwill that spells of extreme admiration create, can provide personal ballast against discouragement and grief. To be in the habit of fixing another with your highest personal regard over time increases your capacity to love. . . . Hero worship can be an emotional Olympics, a way of testing one’s lowest and highest drives. My Judy-love strengthens and inspires what is already good in me and what is bad. It helps me become more completely and entirely myself. And if the poetry of hero worship imparts some measure of heroism on the practitioner, then that is all to the good.

I’ll leave it there. Thanks, as always, for reading; see you for a fresh dose of artist hero worship in two weeks.

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The poetry of hero habit worship…?