From the vantage point of maturity, our teenage selves can look oddly distorted, like bodies in a fairground mirror. The grandiosity of their moods is in no way justified by their surroundings. They can feel like Napoleon in a suburban bedroom, like Che Guevara at the school disco.
It's a cliche to appeal to adolescent hormones as an explanation. Part of it, however, must be a side effect of simply getting to know the world. A crazily unlikely world with giant question marks behind the familiar edifices of education, family and the daily news. A world you have been dropped into alive, for a short time, to make sense of as best you can. Enough to drive anyone briefly (or even permanently) crazy.
In this light, it seems like a failing of adulthood that everything can come to appear normal. The churn of work, relationships, making enough money to survive; all of these distractions shed layers of dust over the wonder that teenagers, infuriating as they can be, exist a little closer to. Not that they're necessarily the right people to express that wonder, in words or art. Mournful teenage sketchbooks, poems or paintings are usually embarrassing artefacts, at least for the creator, later in life. The worst, of course, are diaries. If you're lucky, they can raise a laugh. But the portentousness can also be deeply embarrassing.
Is it to Barbara Ehrenreich's credit she has exposed her own diaries, over a particularly important period of her personal development, to public scrutiny? Or does placing them in such an exalted context – as the backbone of a philosophical investigation with lofty ambitions – repeat the hubris of the teenager? Living With a Wild God is not a volume of diaries as such. In 2001, asked to collect her papers for a university archive, Ehrenreich found her journal from the years 1956 to 1966, starting when she was 14. It pivots around an incident she has been avoiding, in one way or another, since it happened. This is her attempt, finally, to interpret it.
The fact that she is an "atheist by tradition" is key to the story. This was an unusual denomination in 1950s middle America, its origin a deathbed renunciation of Catholicism by Mamie McLaughlin, the paternal great-grandmother. Not that her parents were especially rational. Ehrenreich's father comes across as a domineering alcoholic (both parents enjoy drink-driving, regularly returning home battered and bruised from a prang). Her mother is just as disturbed. In one display of intellectualised jealousy, she tells her daughter that Freud said girls are sexually attracted to their fathers, which had to be why Barbara prefers him to her.
Her parents' behaviour stunned her, I think, into a deep-seated detachment. She begins a "systematic observation" of them as an alternative to colluding in their emotional ups and downs. It is a protective mechanism, but it burrows into her being to such an extent that she starts to undergo episodes of total dissociation. She experiences these, however, not as mental disturbances, but philosophical ones. Each time they happened, she writes, "something peeled off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels and words". She is able, magically, to see objects and people as they really are, raw forms, bundles of matter – existing, just existing, under the sun.
These moments are useful to her insofar as they help in her quest to understand "the situation" – her labels for the apparently pointless cycle of birth and death she notices going on around her. But her detachment often looks like contempt. She records a summer camp thus: "Ocean Park was no disappointment because I had already prepared for the worst … I am always much more pleased with my family after being away with mental degenerates for a while." Where it's not focused on human beings, her attention settles on objects, like a waste-paper bin in the corner of her classroom. The adult Ehrenreich asks: "What did it feel like … to be a receptacle for every bit of garbage that came your way? Did it choke on each piece of refuse that came flying into it or did it take an austere pride in its silent self-abnegation?"
It is at this point you begin to wonder how much separates the author and her younger self, in tone and thought. Ehrenreich (below) has lived a rich and exciting life in the intervening years. As she puts it later in the book, she eventually "joined the species" as a political activist and journalist, enjoyed love and solidarity and engagement with the world. But there is a sturdy filament linking girl to woman. Ehrenreich says: "A lot happens in 50 years. You learn to spell better … your writing becomes less stilted, so there is no way, for example, that you would compose the sentence, 'I have lately been considering the utter futility of the lives of almost every living thing.' " And yet stilted, or perhaps desiccated, is how I would describe much of this book. On every page there are sentences like the one about the waste-paper basket, or this: "In the absence of Hegelian dialectics, which I had not yet encountered, I experimented briefly with a kind of indeterminacy." The contempt is there too: "I have known people who are duller than trees, as well as individual trees that surpass most people in complexity and character." Ehrenreich may have experienced a great warming up in her real life: evidently this did not filter down to her style.
The great, defining moment of this book is tiptoed around for more than 100 pages, but revealed in just two paragraphs. Returning from a stressful trip to a remote ski resort, sleep deprived and hungry, the teenage Ehrenreich undergoes an overwhelming sensory experience, a kind of natural trip, a "furious encounter with a living substance that was coming at me through all things at once". She makes the reasonable point that words cannot do justice to what she went through and she uses very few. But it's a writer's job to find a way of translating experiences that are hard to express. Ehrenreich's unwillingness to do so means it's difficult to share in, and therefore begin to interpret, an event that is the book's raison d'etre.
I suspect the episode has been so difficult for her to come to terms with because of that inherited atheism – a feeling she had to keep up atheist appearances while having a nature that was at odds with them. This could be why a brief loss of self, experienced by an exhausted teenager on an empty street before dawn, has acquired the trappings of something far grander. It's the vibrating secret a super-logical woman has had to carry with her her whole life.
The book closes with a discussion of who or what she encountered that day. The nature of the other – living being, emergent property of complex systems, parasitic meme? – is tied up in a few pages. The effect is odd, like reading someone else's summary of a metaphysics lecture. It's as though the obviously very clever Ehrenreich's ability to talk about these subjects has been stunted by years of running in the other direction.
I did not enjoy not enjoying this book. I was expecting something vivid, terrifying, curious. But despite the conceit of revisiting a distant self, I was left with the impression that there is a part of Ehrenreich that seems stuck in the mode she adopted as a teenager. She retains that useful ability to see the sheer strangeness of the world, but it is deployed in a way others will struggle to identify with. Her vistas are cold, dry, lunar: landscapes that lack much evidence of human, let alone divine, intervention.
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