How Shall I Tell the Dog? by Miles Kington

Author:Miles Kington
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

Love,

Miles

Two Kinds of Books

Dear Gill,

If I am going to write a book about cancer, one thing I am going to have to bear in mind is that books about life fall generally into two camps.

There are the books that make the reader feel that the writer is far better off and far happier than the reader is or will ever be.

And there are books that make you feel that the writer has had a desperately more miserable life than you.

And both kinds of book have the effect, oddly, of cheering you up.

The first kind of book embraces all self-help books, all cookery books, all diet books, all exercise and jogging books, all therapy books – all books by people who seem to know much more about life than you do. Yet it’s not really depressing to be out-cooked by Delia Smith or out-yoga’d by some guru. On the contrary. Even mastering a couple of recipes or doing some exercises will make you feel fulfilled because you have crept a little closer to the ideals of St Delia, or the physical perfection of Jane Fonda. (Did I say Jane Fonda? My God, that dates me. Who is today’s Jane Fonda? Come on, agent!)

The second kind of book embraces not only all the misery memoirs, all the stories of dysfunctionalism which are so popular today, but also all the adventure, exploration, endurance and achievement books by people who have gone up Everest without oxygen or spent a long period of time cooped up with Terry Waite. People’s sufferings may or may not ennoble the sufferer, but they don’t half cheer up the person who didn’t suffer. ‘Thank God I didn’t have to go through that,’ you think. ‘Thank God Frank McCourt or Joe Simpson did it for me.’

Joe Simpson I think is the name of the bloke who wrote Touching the Void or Feeling the Void, the book (and film) about the experience of cutting loose a rope on the other end of which dangled his friend, so that he could save his own life, and then crawling back to base with a broken leg and finding his friend there.

(A bit after that book came out there was another book by a man who was trapped in the Grand Canyon and could only escape by cutting off his own arm …)

Enough pain.

I hate pain.

I hate reading about it.

I hate feeling it.

I think I probably hate writing about it.

As you might have guessed, I haven’t read any of the misery books in the second category, so I guess I am not the ideal candidate for writing a joy-through-suffering book, a harrowing book about facing up to the reality of cancer, and coming to terms with blah blah blah blah …

I would much rather infiltrate the first group of writers, those who cheer up the reader by showing them a promised land beyond, a sunnier country than the one they live in, where every meal is perfect, every pub is an idyll and every experience is enriching and fulfilling.

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