On Not Being Someone Else
Tales of Our Unled Lives
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $29.99
-
- $29.99
Publisher Description
“To be someone—to be anyone—is about…not being someone else. Miller’s amused and inspired book is utterly compelling.”
—Adam Phillips
“A compendium of expressions of wonder over what might have been…Swept up in our real lives, we quickly forget about the unreal ones. Still, there will be moments when, for good or ill, we feel confronted by our unrealized possibilities.”
—New Yorker
We 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?
From Robert Frost to Sharon Olds, Virginia Woolf to Ian McEwan, Jane Hirshfield to Carl Dennis, storytellers of every stripe consider the roads not taken, the lives we haven’t led. What is it that compels us to identify with fictional and poetic voices tantalizing us with 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 of these, revealing the beauty, the allure, and the danger of sustaining or confronting our unled lives.
“Miller is charming company, both humanly and intellectually. He is onto something: the theme of unled lives, and the fascinating idea that fiction intensifies the sense of provisionality that attends all lives. An extremely attractive book.”
—James Wood
“An expertly curated tour of regret and envy in literature…Miller’s insightful and moving book—both in his own discussion and in the tales he recounts—gently nudges us toward consolation.”
—Wall Street Journal
“I wish I had written this book…Examining art’s capacity to transfix, multiply, and compress, this book is itself a work of art.”
—Times Higher Education
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.
