On Not Being Someone Else
Tales of Our Unled Lives
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- £16.99
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- £16.99
Publisher Description
A captivating book about the emotional and literary power of the lives we might have lived had our chances or choices been different.
We each live one life, formed by paths taken and untaken. Choosing a job, getting married, deciding on a place to live or whether to have children—every decision precludes another. But what if you’d gone the other way? It can be a seductive thought, even a haunting one.
Andrew H. Miller illuminates this theme of modern culture: the allure of the alternate self. From Robert Frost to Sharon Olds, Virginia Woolf to Ian McEwan, Jane Hirshfield to Carl Dennis, storytellers of every stripe write of the lives we didn’t have. What forces encourage us to think this way about ourselves, and to identify with fictional and poetic voices speaking from the shadows of what might have been? Not only poets and novelists, but psychologists and philosophers have much to say on this question. Miller finds wisdom in all these sources, revealing the beauty, the power, and the struggle of our unled lives.
In an elegant and provocative rumination, he lingers with other selves, listening to what they say. Peering down the path not taken can be frightening, but it has its rewards. On Not Being Someone Else offers the balm that when we confront our imaginary selves, we discover who we are.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This thoughtful and meditative study from Victorian literature professor Miller (The Burdens of Perfection) is wonderfully lucid about murky questions of what might have been. Reflecting on the question of how one's life might have been different with different choices or under different circumstances, he asserts that storytellers are naturally drawn to exploring "unled lives." Miller moves fluidly between examples that include novels (Mrs. Dalloway), films (It's a Wonderful Life), and poems ("The Road Not Taken") to show that "unled lives lead to story." The feeling that one can determine the direction of one's own life "is a luxury given to those born to choice and chance," Miller writes, and demonstrates this in an analysis of Jessie Redmom Fauset's Harlem Renaissance novel, Plum Bun, about the lives of two African-American sisters, one of whom passes for white. Meanwhile, Miller's analysis of romantic relationships in Sharon Olds's poetry collection Stag's Leap, and Annie Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain," suggests that everyone has an opportunity to be someone else when combining their life with someone else's. Both literature specialists, who will appreciate Miller's breadth of examples, and general readers, who can enjoy the universal topics he explores, will find much food for thought in this pleasant work.
