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In memory of my parents, Eve and George

We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.

—Mario Vargas Llosa, upon being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2010

Introduction

One summer a couple of years ago, my wife, Linda, and I rented a house for several weeks in a small town on Long Island. Being there would allow us to catch up with people we don’t see often enough. Experts say that close personal ties—family, friends, community—are fundamental to achieving a meaningful life. Given that we happen to live in Chicago, we now and then have to get on a plane to connect with these relationships. Most of our friends are in the East. Our kids, Ned and Katherine, both in their twenties and on their own, live in Brooklyn. The plan was for the kids to come out to Long Island and spend a few weekends.

The house sat on a quiet street, a short stroll to the center of the village, a ten-minute bike ride to the beach. There was, however, an old country graveyard right around the corner, an unexpected bonus. When I walked through the cemetery’s iron gates for the first time, I realized I’d never visited a graveyard when there wasn’t a grim reason to be there.

From day one the graveyard became part of my daily routine. Every morning after breakfast I went over there to jog, concerned at first that tromping through in Nikes and gym shorts was ill-mannered. I made certain to keep to the unpaved lanes separating the plots—a good thing, too, because I later came across this warning in “A Curse Against Elegies,” a poem by Anne Sexton: “Take your foot out of the graveyard, / they are busy being dead.”

It’s been said that to focus on life we must deprive death of its strangeness. Partly because middle age had swiftly come and gone, partly because summer arrives with long shadows, and mostly because I had a book to write, that became my daytime assignment during those weeks on Long Island: deprive death of its strangeness. After my morning run, I would close myself off in a small spare bedroom with a pile of books that have never made it onto anyone’s summer-reading list: The Denial of Death; Death and the Rebirth of Psychology; Life Against Death; How We Die; Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death; Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Sounds grim, but it actually wasn’t too bad. I’ve had worse getaways, such as the time in Scotland when a babysitter hired to look after our son challenged me to a round of golf. Our boy was only two. So was the babysitter’s handicap. She mercilessly wiped the gorse with me.

When my workday was over, I’d restack the books about death and dying and return to the cemetery to unwind. I never once saw another living soul there. Everyone was still busy being dead. I would wander aimlessly until dusk fell. Here was a giant anthology of life stories, every genre imaginable, two hundred years’ worth, each story distinctly different from all the others. And yet, as if by some ingenious narrative sleight of hand—even a director like Robert Altman couldn’t have pulled it off—every last story ended up in exactly the same place, this old country graveyard.

It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve got stories on the brain. I always have, actually. For a big slice of my career, nearly twenty years of it at Esquire, I’ve been up to the eyeballs in stories, fiction and nonfiction, commissioning them, celebrating them when they clicked, mourning them when they fizzled. Later on, I was paid to think about how I could apply storytelling to everything from enriching a school curriculum (at an education start-up) to explaining the wonders of a high-tech down-filled jacket (at a catalog company).

Some of my best friends are stories. Just the other night at a dinner party, I glanced around the table and realized I was in the company of a soap opera, a farce, a chick flick, and an incessantly chatty shaggy dog story with no clue as to where it was going. The farce and the chick flick drank too much, the soap opera sobbed a little, the shaggy dog went on and on. But it turned out to be a surprisingly pleasant evening—though between you and me there were times I thought it would be better to be home in bed with a good book.

You have your life story, I have mine. The people around the table had theirs, and so did everyone in the old country graveyard. Our stories are us. Each is unique. Even if the events, relationships, and characters in your story were exactly the same as those in mine, our stories would be very different. If we spent every day of our lives welded at the hip, they’d still be different because we’d remember things differently.

To be absolutely clear: I’m not talking about the version of a life story either of us might put down on paper. I’m talking about the story you know like the back of your hand, the complete, unabridged account of how you and I came to be here at this very moment, me typing this, you sitting there with a book or e-reader. You know exactly how your story begins and whether it’s gone uphill or downhill. You know whether it’s sad or happy. You know which parts are interesting and which put you to sleep. You know the events and characters you’d delete if you possibly could. The story begins with your earliest memories and unfolds from there: your hopes and fears are included in the story; your victories and disappointments; your love affairs won and lost. Every secret of yours is there. So are your dreams, the ones you remember. It’s quite the saga, isn’t it?

But here’s the kicker: your story remains an enduring mystery story because there’s one thing you don’t know and you may not want to know even if you could—how and where the story ends. And there’s another thing you’d give almost anything to know:

Is there any point to it?

That’s what this book is about.

Now, obviously, the point of existence is a vast ocean of a topic. Clearly, some boundaries are in order. What the book won’t try to do is convert you to (or from) any faith or spiritual quest. Far be it from me. If you choose to see God’s plan in every arachnid, fine. I also won’t try to replace your values with my values. If you insist on believing that shopping for shopping’s sake is what it takes to fill the human soul with sufficient purpose, I may not applaud you, but it’s your life story and I wish you well.

What this book will try to do is offer a different perspective on how our life stories come to be, one that applies to every man, woman, and child alive or as yet unborn. And it will do its best to explain what it takes for a life story to add up to something meaningful, even endure into the future.

Bold claims, I know, especially these days. Once upon a time, we paid dutiful attention to certain stories we could hitch our personal story to. Ancient myths and fairy tales cued us to life’s unpredictability. They instilled courage and imagination in young minds. And of course there’s the Greatest Story Ever Told. It’s a big and sprawling story, brimming with lessons and warnings. It lays out the difference between right and wrong. It offers chapter and verse on how to overcome obstacles and suffering. It boasts a colorful cast of thousands. At the center of the sweeping plot, there’s an all-knowing leading character, possessed of unparalleled wisdom and power. A story on such scale offers a mere mortal’s story a leg up. It nails down where and how one’s own story begins and what happens after the story’s over. It doesn’t dillydally over what the human purpose is, it comes right out and says what it is: it’s to follow the commands laid down in the story.

And yet when I talk to people, most seem to be saying that they’re flying blind. They’re making up their life stories as they go along. For instance:

A twenty-six-year-old, a grad student in criminal justice, says she thinks about the point of her life story only on Sundays when in church, otherwise gives it little thought. “An overwhelming concept,” she says.

A woman in her mid-thirties, a social worker, says she tries not to think about the point. She deals with mental and critical illness in children from morning till night.

A man in his late fifties—he retired early, moved to a warmer climate, now regrets it—wishes he were busier. “The trick is not to waste days,” he says.

A widower engaged to a woman he met on a dating site says, “At the end of the day, the only thing I’ll think about on my deathbed will be the people I knew and loved. I don’t think it’s more complicated than that, though it might be.”

Is it so bad that the great old universal stories are no longer in play? “It’s not easy to build a life for yourself with no model whatsoever,” said Joseph Campbell, who didn’t mince words when it came to the wisdom to be gained from reading mythological stories. Without a model, he said, we’re lost in a labyrinth, groping our way through our life story as if no one’s ever lived a life story before. The problem with our stories today, Campbell said, is that too few of us have a “deep sense of being present” in them.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

PART I

The Beginning

No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us.

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden

1      Meet the Scribbler

Right now you have company upstairs. There’s a little storywriter nestled in the fissures of your brain, a writer-in-residence, a compulsive scribbler. If it helps you to conjure such a fantastical idea, imagine a diminutive scribe in a teeny-tiny Aeron chair, sitting there with pen, pencil, or proportionately sized laptop. If things aren’t going well for you at the moment—lousy relationship, dead-end job, no job—there may be other items on your storywriter’s desk: a whiskey bottle or a packet of pills.

Your storywriter is at work on an assignment of indefinite duration: take your memories and mold them into chapters, the so-called chapters of your life. Some chapters are necessarily long and irksome—maybe a misguided career choice or an exploratory consultation with a doctor that turned into ten years of twice-a-week treatment sessions. Other chapters are short and adventurous—the summer you drove across the country or that delirious week on Tobago (or was it Trinidad?) with whatsisname. Still other chapters that seemed important at the time may now strike you as utterly forgettable. First marriages are a classic case.

Long or short, riveting or not, the chapters eventually thicken into an overall plot. You may find yourself thinking of this plot in terms of bunches of chapters clumped together. One woman, for instance, said she divides her overall story into three distinct clumps. Part I: “Childhood.” Part II: “Motherhood.” Part III: “My Time.” Throughout the plot, however you bunch the chapters, minor and major characters make entrances and exits. Some characters you remember in great detail; others are hazy. An English teacher would refer to them as “flat” characters (sketchily detailed) or “round” characters (fully developed). Naturally, some flat characters you’ve known have been fat, while some round characters were skinny. Flat or round, fat or skinny, a given character can remain in your life story for a day, a week, a year, many years, through sickness and health, till death do you part. Some characters outlive the story itself, others don’t. Quite a few characters simply fall off the face of the earth, though occasionally you can stalk them successfully on Facebook.

This process of shaping memories into chapters has been going on since you were three or so. I say “three or so” because that’s when we typically start collecting and keeping memories for the long term. Memory and story making go hand in hand. But once settled in, your storywriter scribbles silently in the background, the way certain software programs run. The work is nonstop: 24/7, 365 days a year, for as long as you live or until your memories vanish, at which point the story’s over.

Now, you can think of your personal scribe as a playwright, screenwriter, ghostwriter, it doesn’t matter. He may be a she if you’re a he and vice versa. (I’ll use them interchangeably throughout.) Or he/she can be a transgender, cross-dressing storywriter. Think Jan Morris or Janet Mock, only much, much smaller.

As for personal appearance or quirky habits, none of that matters, either. Writers have license to be peculiar. Yours may be as eccentric as Goethe, who craved the smell of rotten apples when he sat down to write, and in fact kept a few decomposing under the lid of his writing desk. W. H. Auden guzzled tea nonstop. James Joyce wrote with a crayon on scraps of cardboard. It takes all kinds. Many writers, though, do fit a mold. They “live through oscillating self-doubt and mild paranoia, the rival temptations of vanity and self-pity,” wrote Julian Barnes in an essay titled “Literary Executions.”

I realize that some of you may not like the idea of a self-doubting, too-clever-by-half narcissist living inside. Some of us don’t like houseguests, period. Others aren’t at ease around “creative types.” If it will help you keep an open mind about the scribbler upstairs, feel free to think of your storywriter as one who can hold her own in a corporate environment. She’s your Chief Subjective Well-Being Officer—with a pen. But whether you think of her as a scruffy bohemian or Chief Well-Being Officer, your life story starts and ends with this person. By arranging your memories into chapters, she can make your life seem coherent and meaningful. Or not.

I know, some of you are still incredulous. How could anyone get anything done working in such ridiculously tight quarters? Not a problem. Zadie Smith favors a small room with the blinds drawn to keep the light out, which would make the fissures of the brain quite accommodating, don’t you think?

Some of you remain unconvinced. You may be thinking, yes, I really did spend time in an old country graveyard, but that’s as far as it goes. There’s no storywriter in the attic. No Aeron chair, laptop, cluttered desk with a drawer full of rotting apples. No THERE’S A CHANCE THIS COULD BE VODKA coffee mug. No ashtray with stale butts and a framed photo of you at age three or so wearing a Davy Crockett cap. Or a tutu. Or a Davy Crockett cap and a tutu, if your writer-in-residence is of blended orientation.

You’re probably thinking the storywriter’s a half-baked metaphor for something not nearly so exotic and now that we’re under way I’ll promptly axe her from the book. And you’d be half right about that. The scribbler is a metaphor. But she’s a metaphor who’s not going anywhere. Metaphors serve a purpose, in life as well as in stories. “Metaphors,” says Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, “are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.” If a single metaphor can do that, then a metaphor can account for how our life stories come to be.

I first started thinking about the scribbler one night while leafing through an old paperback collection of Paris Review interviews. Martin Amis, former bad boy of British letters, now a ruminative, middle-aged dad, was asked whether he thought “ego and self-confidence” mattered to a writer. (No eye rolls, please.) “If I die tomorrow,” Amis answered, “at least my children… will have a very good idea of what I was like, of what my mind was like, because they will be able to read my books. So maybe there is an immortalizing principle at work even if it’s just for your children. Even if they’ve forgotten you physically, they could never say that they didn’t know what their father was like.”

I was intrigued by this idea that the stories writers write live on in others, and therefore the writer himself lives on in a way. Okay, I wondered, then what about the rest of us? We’ve been compiling our own internal stories for as long as we can remember. Why exactly do we do that? Why do we unthinkingly turn events and relationships into distinct chapters; come up with reasons for why this or that thing happened; label something a “turning point”; impart motives to characters who come and go throughout our lives? Is it to give ourselves and others, as Amis said, an idea of who we really are? Is it how we bring ourselves to life? And is there some “immortalizing principle at work,” as Amis put it? That’s when it hit me. We all have a little “writer” inside. An even tinier Martin Amis!

The thought got me Googling around to see whether I could push the idea any further. I tried “Life stories.” “Immortality.” “Legacy.” My willy-nilly search eventually landed on a YouTube video of a boyish-looking professor and a lecture he gave about a book he’d recently written—George W. Bush and the Redemptive Dream: A Psychological Portrait. It was part of a series of lectures that addressed a common theme, explained the professor who introduced the speaker. The series had to do with how we “construct self-identity” in the hope we’ll find some meaning in life.

Given that George W. Bush’s psychobiography isn’t central to the story here, I’ll skip over the particulars of the talk. But as a side note, knowing what I know now, it’s interesting to think about what W’s upstairs storyteller makes of his patron. Whenever asked about the disastrous foray into Iraq, Bush likes to say his legacy is out of his hands; it’s a job for future historians. The Decider will let others decide. And yet when Bush is asked why, after leaving the White House, he started painting portraits of himself shaving and taking a bath, he says it’s because he wants “to leave something behind.” There’s an immortalizing principle at work. If the paintings do the trick, then mission accomplished.

The lecturer on the video, Dan P. McAdams, gave an engaging performance, offering keen insights into Bush’s makeup. So I looked him up. It turned out he was the director of something called the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University, just up the road from our Chicago apartment. He’s a highly regarded narrative psychologist, a so-called personologist, a term I’d never heard before.

I ordered a couple of McAdams’s books. They lay out what he calls “a life-story model of identity,” which, academic jargon aside, seemed to be just what I was looking for. The model describes how, beginning in adolescence, we think of our life as an ever-evolving narrative. The narrative enables us to link our “reconstructed past”—how we remember things, accurately or not—with our “imagined future.” McAdams observes that redemption, for example, is a dominant theme in many American life stories: we like to think of ourselves as rising from nowhere, recovering from setbacks, fulfilling our inner destiny. Pick up a newspaper or magazine or current autobiography; go to People.com or any other celebrity site; turn on a reality show or a Diane Sawyer special; or simply open your eyes in the morning. You’ll be witness to a bounty of high-profile redemption tales: politicians, athletes, movie stars, desperate housewives who’ve been down long enough that it’s starting to look up. Monica Lewinsky, for instance, is currently on a multiyear, national Redemption Tour. It kicked off with a 2014 first-person confessional in Vanity Fair (“Shame and Survival”); was followed by a TED talk (“The Price of Shame”); and is now playing out in a venue near you as Lewinsky participates in antibullying workshops around the country. It’s where her life story stands now and she’s sticking to it.

Whether the theme is “Look how far I’ve come,” or “I want to leave the world better off than I found it,” or “I need to put my hidden talent to better use,” or “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,” whatever the refrain, the narrative we create about ourselves amounts to a “personal myth,” McAdams says. We draw on our personal myth to make sense of ourselves. It points to where we’ve been and where we’d like to wind up. Coherent or muddled, everyone’s personal myth is distinct from all others, notwithstanding that there may be common themes. McAdams says that as a kid his personal myth dreamed of playing shortstop for the Cubs. Mine dreamed of playing second base for the Phillies. His personal myth apparently had a better arm than mine. Neither of our young personal myths made it to the big leagues, which is why we now have thoroughly revised personal myths.

Believing that I’d stumbled upon credible support for the idea that we each have a little writer upstairs whose job is to construct our personal myth, I e-mailed McAdams and asked whether we could get together. I said that I was working on a book idea that was still a little raggedy (I probably said “formative”) but that it seemed to dovetail with the work he was doing. He graciously agreed to meet at Peet’s Coffee across from the Northwestern campus. There we chatted amiably about the field of narrative psychology. He told me about his early influences and described the kind of research he and his students were doing. There’s extensive fieldwork involved, interviews with people about how their life stories are unfolding. Before we parted, he gave me suggestions for further study. Those books and papers provided more than enough evidence to think the scribbler notion wasn’t nearly as cracked as it sounds.

• One’s life story, or personal myth, is ever changing. The story evolves. You and I are thus at all times works in progress. It’s not easy being a work in progress. Being a work in progress can be unnerving, especially in middle age. “The road to hell is paved with works in progress,” said Philip Roth, declining to write about his then current work in progress for the New York Times.

• Without our life stories, we’d be lost in time and space, and who wants that? Psychologists say that each of us is born, thankfully, with a “narrating mind.” (Narrating mind, a little writer upstairs, call it what you will.) Our life stories are the vehicles that enable us to draw a connection between who we were, who we are, and who we wish to be. The question of “who I am” presupposes “who will I be,” as one academic put it. Real writers have been onto this idea for a long time. “Our being consists not in what it is already, but in what it is not yet,” wrote the Spanish essayist José Ortega y Gasset.

• Making a story of our life enables us to organize scattered events into a single whole that has a beginning, middle, and end, says Donald Polkinghorne, a prominent figure in the field. The sequence is vital. When a story—movie, book, play, life story—lacks a perceptible beginning, middle, and end, we get grouchy and perplexed. The story comes across as incoherent or incomplete.

• Storytelling and storywriting are elemental. Stories are what “make us human,” I read over and over again. By now I’ve lost count of all the things I’ve run across that make us human. Knowing that we’re going to die makes us human. It used to be said that cooking makes us human, though recent studies show that a chimp will hold off eating a raw slice of sweet potato if he thinks a cooked slice may be on the way. But it’s fair to say stories do make us human. “Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined… with the stories… we dream or imagine or would like to tell,” Polkinghorne writes. “All these stories are reworked in the story of our own lives which we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semiconscious, virtually uninterrupted monologue.” Which is a perfect if overly elaborate description of what the scribbler’s up there to accomplish.

Granted, the books and papers I perused offered nothing that hinted at the existence of a bearded inner-sanctum loner in horn-rims and a carpal-tunnel brace on his wrist. Nor did they say there’s no such creature. Those who study life stories admit they don’t have all the answers. Maybe they should spend more time with real writers, who cite chapter and verse on how life is one big, fat, occasionally juicy, often dull, not very predictable, now and then meaningful story.

Dostoevsky: “How could you live and have no story to tell?”

Julian Barnes, in his novel The Sense of an Ending: “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”

And consider what Joan Didion says in The Year of Magical Thinking, which she wrote—was compelled to write—after the death of her husband of forty years, John Gregory Dunne: “This [book] is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.”

To make sense of the unfathomable, Didion says, she had to write a version of herself as yet unwritten. Years before, she published a collection of pieces titled We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. It comes down to this: your life, my life, Joan Didion’s life, anyone’s life, will feel “meaningful” to us only if our storywriter can take the flotsam and jetsam stashed upstairs and artfully hammer it into narrative submission.

2      Inside the Memory Factory

It didn’t take long for me to grasp how it all comes down to the memories we keep. The life stories we maintain inside are wondrous in their complexity and degree of detail. But whether they’re “true” or not depends on whether the memories are “true.” Are they true? Yes and no. There’s historical truth and narrative truth. It’s not that we lie to ourselves, it’s that memories are slippery. Events and relationships get bigger and smaller, more and less important in a life story over time. We’re sure that certain things happened that in fact never happened. “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it,” wrote Gabriel García Márquez in his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale.

True or not, the memories pile up. We traffic in memories so naturally that it’s easy to forget the sheer number of them that must be uploaded into whatever miraculous filing system your writer-in-residence draws on to build your ever-lengthening life story.

It’s nothing short of astounding when you think about how effortlessly we fling memories around. If, say, you and I meet in a bar and introduce ourselves, we quickly start cherry-picking from our vast memory archive to give each other a sense of who we are or who we’d like the other to think we are. We introduce ourselves, then begin exchanging chunks of our respective life stories—“evolving stories of self,” as narrative psychologists call them.

Let’s say I’m chattier than you are, so I take the lead. Maybe I’d open up with only a small, specific cut of my evolving story of self, a goofball part, such as how years ago I had a regrettable encounter with Susan Sarandon, who got furious with me even though it wasn’t my fault. I wouldn’t share the anecdote just to name-drop—well, maybe to some extent. I’d share it because it’s a fairly embarrassing, self-deprecating sliver of my evolving story of self that people get a kick out of, especially over drinks. A narrative psychologist might say that the reason I occasionally dust off the old chestnut is because it does a good job of reflecting my current personal myth—i.e., I’m kind of a cool guy but also a nebbish. Maybe after another drink I’d share a torrent of excerpts from my evolving story of self, perhaps a good deal more than you wanted to know or could bear listening to. How I grew up in Philadelphia in a redbrick row house with a small front yard and a tiny concrete patio under a green-and-orange-striped awning; how my bedroom walls were covered in wallpaper with cowboys on it and festooned with collegiate pennants; how in high school I was sentenced to ten detentions for taking exactly one step beyond the grounds to buy a soft pretzel from a food truck; how eventually I came to get a really cool job in New York City, though it required me to swallow my pride; how, when, and where, many years later, I met Linda, and this or that about Ned and Katherine; some inside stuff about how the Rotisserie League got started and how it gave way to fantasy sports, and how, like fools, we didn’t make any money from it; how it happened that we now live in Chicago; warmhearted remembrances of my dogs Corky (mutt) and Woody (vizsla). Even if I bent your ear off for a couple of hours you’d still be getting a snippet of the full story of my evolving self.

By our third or fourth drink—by the way, you’d also be telling me about your life, or you’d be trying to—it’s possible that I’d have drilled down to such minor bits of personal lint as why and when I had myself tattooed—small dolphin, left shoulder—long before it was fashionable for nontattoo types to have tattoos, and made further fashionable because the artist who put it there also tattooed Janis Joplin; my ten favorite Philadelphia Eagles of all time; or the two recurrent dreams I had as a child: a priest driving a school bus who kept trying to run me over; and E.S., a girl I knew in the second grade, spotting me in the subway and I wasn’t wearing pants.

Sooner rather than later, having been battered with so many bits and pieces of my evolving story of self, you’d remember you were late for an appointment and reach for the check. You’d have learned an immense amount about me. But it wouldn’t amount to even a minuscular fraction of what the writer upstairs has access to.

Here’s my theory on that. At some point early on, we grant our storywriters top-drawer security clearances: VIP, backstage, inner sanctum, eyes only, Category One. The permissions provide a writer-in-residence with unfettered access to what cognitive scientists refer to as our “autobiographical memory.” As a result of this extraordinary access, nobody else comes close to knowing as much about us, not even the NSA, not even Google. Parents, spouses, partners, kids, siblings, former lovers, therapists, priests, friends, neighbors, and folks in the office know varying amounts of your evolving story of self. Some know the truth (more or less), others a whitewashed version. Your writer-in-residence knows everything. Were she ever to turn on you, go off the deep end as writers have been known to do, she’d be highly dangerous. You’d be unimaginably exposed. No online identity hack has ever come close to the emotional rack and ruin the writer-in-residence could leave in her wake. Knowing your memories—yes, even that one—is just the tip of the iceberg. She knows your fears, and in some respects knows them better than you do because she’s not in denial. She’s up-to-date on your latest longings. She knows who’s been important in your life and who hasn’t, even though you pretended otherwise. She knows when you’ve been ecstatic and when you were bereft, even if you concealed your emotions skillfully.

How do we, how does the scribbler, keep it all straight? What’s the process? How do our memories get archived, retrieved, returned to storage, revised over time, deleted, recovered from the trash in a pinch? While science is still working on how we manage to do all that, we’ve come a long way since Descartes, whose seventeenth-century notion of how we manufacture memories was even wackier than my scribbler theory. The pineal gland, Descartes said, serves as the center of human consciousness. “Animal spirits” on the surface of the gland create patterns or impressions that result in images of that which is no longer right before our eyes.

Flash forward to now. Great strides have been made. Forget the pineal gland. Neuropsychiatrist Eric Kandel won a Nobel Prize a few years ago for his “discoveries concerning signal transduction in the nervous system,” a major breakthrough in our understanding of how brain cells operate. He arrived at it in an amazing way—by examining electrical synapses in slimy, oversized sea slugs. Our own neural activity (which can also be sluggish) takes place in distinct areas of the brain, depending on the type of memory. For example, memories of things fast and furious, such as the night you totaled your father’s Buick, flicker around the amygdala. Highly charged, sexy memories, too. Neuroscientists say such memories may return with no apparent warning, in “flashbulb” fashion. The writer-in-residence needs to be careful when drawing on these memories, as they’re often wildly inaccurate.

In any case, major progress has been made on how it all works, with so much more to come over the next decades. Francis Crick, who codiscovered the double helix, predicted that as early as 2030 we’ll have a full understanding of how the brain generates consciousness. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have time to wait until then. Which is why, and for now, I choose to imagine that there may be a little bitty person sitting on an exercise ball in front of a monitor, or some other simple way to picture it. She punches up memories with the touch of a keystroke, then edits individual memories or strips of memories the way a film editor cuts a movie. Using a Photoshop-type program, she can crop and retouch memories at will.

Scientists will push back on this, of course. Memories, they say, aren’t at all like snapshots or video clips. The story of your life, cognitive psychologists insist, is made up of images and perceptions that are “figurative and creative,” not “literal imprints of factual events.” Indeed, the entire storywriter-upstairs hypothesis runs into a brick wall when subjected to scientific scrutiny. It isn’t that brain researchers and molecular biologists deny the importance of life stories. On the contrary. Narrative formation is “the inescapable frame of the human experience,” says a neurologist at UCLA. But scientists will be scientists. They demand evidence that can be tested and verified, and to date nothing resembling a storywriter has been observed hanging out up there. Whenever a scientist surveys the brain with any of the usually reliable neuroimaging devices, whenever a brain surgeon pops open a skull for direct eyeballing, what they see is a three-pound mass of jelly packed with a hundred billion neurons. No Aeron chair. No laptop. No yellow legal pads or index cards. No drafts on whether or not there’s an afterlife. No paperweight in the shape of Maslow’s pyramid. No trace of coffee grounds, spliffs, booze, or little green pills. No evidence that a scruffy writer’s been within body odor of the remarkable three-pound mass of jelly.

But just because nobody’s yet found any tangible evidence, it doesn’t mean a scribbler isn’t up there, ingeniously concealed. (As I’ve said, this is a really small person, even in Doc Martens.) For now, though, let’s call a truce. I won’t suggest that the surgeon have his eyes tested or whine that the fMRI machine’s on the fritz. Only a fool or a religious fundamentalist (sometimes one and the same) would bet against the scientific breakthroughs that lie ahead. The day will come when we’ll have a very good idea of how “a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm is able to imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos,” as neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran eloquently put it.

In the end, we’ll applaud the progress but may not like where it takes us. Personally, I prefer to believe that our most important and cherished memories are literally true and accurate. Those memories are me. Yours are you. So long as we retain them in precise, glorious detail, we’ll remain who we want to be. Push too hard on whether our important memories are or aren’t literal imprints and you start questioning whether we are, in fact, who we think we are. Personally, I’d rather not go there.

If there’s one thing we can all agree on about memories, it’s that they’re frequently far from accurate. Some people speculate that once you retrieve a memory it’s no longer the same memory. It’s a new memory of an old memory. Others will tell you that what we think of as a memory isn’t even a memory. It’s an actual experience we live through again and again. Each time we remember something we construct the experience anew.

Whatever our memories are or aren’t, wherever and however they’re stored, they’re shifty. In a book about autobiographical memory, John Kotre describes how over time memories have a way of rewriting what passes for reality. Good people in our past grow into better people; bad people regress into worse people; a baby bass balloons into a lunker. Kotre tells of how we commonly say we “always did this” and “never did that” when in fact we never did this and always did that. But we’re not really lying, are we? For instance, I’ve told people that when I was a kid I was always the youngest to make a sports team. Yet because I was young and a shrimp I never got to play much, always rode the bench. I honestly believe that’s true. But if you ran an intensive background check on my athletic career at Camp Arthur in the Poconos, and then you delved into my participation in pickup teams at school or around the neighborhood, you’d find precisely one instance of my being the youngest to make a team (at Camp Arthur, for the record). Then why do I say that I was always the youngest to make the team but never played? Because it helps define me in the present. I’d like you to understand that I was athletic but not that athletic.

Another example: I’ll swear up and down that I never once cheated in school. And I really, truly believe I never did. But I’m also reasonably sure there were times in elementary school when I must have glanced over at Jeannie Malamud’s paper. (Jeannie was a genius, never got anything wrong.) Why have I erased any memory of glancing over? John Kotre quotes a developmental psychologist who reminds us that “once a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it doesn’t remember being a caterpillar; it remembers being a little butterfly.” In my own mind, I’m a fully grown ethical person and honestly don’t remember ever being a little thief.

The storywriter upstairs isn’t out to spread falsehoods by doctoring our memories. She’s merely doing what she can to create a story that’s coherent and consistent. She jiggles memories, playing up some, downplaying others, such that they don’t contradict each other or muddy the overall theme. If you’re currently stuck in a lousy job because you flunked out of school, the memory of all the dope you smoked may by now have given way to the memory of your mother saying you were one of those students who doesn’t do well in a traditional classroom setting. Or you may clearly remember how your now ex-wife said she needed her space and have no recollection of all the times she asked you to please stop chewing with your mouth open. The scribbler’s only trying to help when she allows certain memories to take precedence over others.

“Every act of perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination,” suggests Gerald M. Edelman, a Nobel Prize–winning biologist. Writers know that, without having to take a science course. “When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction,” says a character in Stephen King’s Joyland. Perhaps that’s too strong. If you ask me, life stories are more like nonfiction novels.

There’s a lot of talk these days about how our memories are under siege, which if true presents a grave challenge to keeping our life stories straight. Technology’s making us stupid, some fret. The concern is that now that we’re all packing search engines in our pockets, we don’t need to remember as much as we used to. Why remember something if we can simply Google it? Not to use it is to lose it. Our memories are thus atrophying, some worry.

That’s one reason to be nervous. Another is that some believe that our “transactive memory systems” are becoming extinct. A transactive memory system is when two or more people draw on a shared memory archive. If one person doesn’t know or can’t recall something, there’s someone else around to fill the void. Once upon a time, that’s how we remembered a lot of things. The first line of inquiry was to query another human being. The late Jean Stafford, who in her waning years reviewed books for Esquire, told me how great it was to have someone in the house—her husband, journalist A. J. Liebling, also a terrific writer—who knew everything about everything. Whenever Stafford needed a piece of information for a story she was working on, she’d walk over to the foot of the stairs and holler up: “Hey, Joe! What’s such-and-such or who was so-and-so?” The answer came thundering down.

Back in the day, the interface was person to person, not person to Siri. What one person couldn’t remember, someone else in the transactive memory system could. Your mother and father holding memories of you comprised a small-scale transactive memory system. Multiple generations of a family living in close proximity and maintaining daily contact, pooling their memories, preserving those memories through the telling of stories, added up to a more extensive transactive memory system. You don’t know? Ask Pawpaw. (But ask loudly.)

Trouble is, we no longer live within shouting distance of multiple generations. We also no longer live in tribes, a tribe being an even larger transactive memory system than a family. We do live in brand tribes, but I doubt that my fellow Mac users can tell me where exactly in Belorussia my mother’s side of the family hails from. Other than “somewhere in Russia” in the case of my mother’s side, “somewhere in Austria” in the case of my father’s, I have no idea where I come from. I wish I did. It would make my life story far more meaningful if I could place it in a longer-term historical context. If, say, I knew that someone in my bloodline had fought valiantly against the invading Mongol hordes, it would make me feel more—more what? Connected to time’s infinite arc, or something like that. Arthur Schopenhauer said, “To our amazement we suddenly exist, after having for countless millennia not existed; in a short while we will again not exist, also for countless millennia. That cannot be right, says the heart.” If I knew I dated back to the ancient steppes, I might feel less like I’m just breezing through. But there’s no one left to ask. The only recourse is to go online, which I’ve done. Genealogy sites don’t reveal much, so I’m reduced to gathering crumbs of information I run across in history books and biographies of those who were decidedly not relatives of mine. Hitler and Stalin, for example. Thanks to books about their life stories, I assume that my father’s family wound up in Austria at the end of the nineteenth century as part of the mass migrations of Jews who fled there from Russia, Hungary, and the Balkans. It’s a start. As for my mother’s side, I still don’t know whether her people came from Minsk or Pinsk, though I at least know where Minsk and Pinsk are, thanks to Google Maps.

It’s only fair, however, to say that technology giveth and taketh. Cuts both ways. It may induce atrophy but it also jars memories loose. The other day I decided to listen to the score from Richard Rodgers’s Victory at Sea, a TV series that ran in the early fifties on NBC. My father and I never missed an episode; in retrospect, a highly meaningful bonding experience. Thanks to technology, I found it on Spotify in just a couple of clicks. The instant the overture—“The Song of the High Seas”—came on, I was conveyed (convoyed?) immediately back to Whitaker Avenue in Philly. I saw the tuning knobs of the Philco TV in the living room. I saw the pull-down ceiling light in the little breakfast room, with the egg-shaped thing that adjusted the cord, the same fixture my father installed the day of his first heart attack. I saw our canary, Tweetie, pecking at the cuttlebone in the cage that stood in a corner of the room. All it took were the opening bars of Victory at Sea, which were right there at my fingertips.

3      Authorized and Unabridged

E. M. Forster, whose Howards End has been called one of the best-structured novels in English, wrote that we start life with an experience we forget and end with an experience we anticipate but don’t understand. He also defined a written story as “a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence.” The same generally applies to your life story. Your life story is a narrative made up of memories arranged in a time sequence.

Compiling an internal life story arranged in a time sequence is no mean task. Unlike a real writer, your writer-in-residence can’t just make shit up. She can’t pluck interesting characters out of thin air. She can’t move the story back and forth across centuries. She can’t throw in a talking pig the way a magical realist can. Or set loose a homicidal Martian the way a science fiction author can. The writer upstairs must make do with what memories are available. And while the scribbler can and will take reasonable liberties with your memories, she must color within the lines of what seems to have actually happened. Unlike a real writer, the writer upstairs can’t snap her fingers and pull off some corny stunt at the end, a cheap trick such as the leading character waking from a bad dream and living happily ever after. But your life story does have to add up fundamentally, pay off in some way. Otherwise, what’s the point?

To get a sense of how your story came to be, let’s imagine it in book form. I’m not the first to come up with that idea, nor will I be the last. Thinking of our life story in terms of a book lulls us into thinking that it won’t fall apart at the seams. Thus reassured, let’s further imagine that your book starts out with entirely blank pages. Why blank? Because you haven’t yet “stepped into the light,” to borrow a phrase from neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, who likens the switching on of the knowing mind to the moment an actor steps from the semidarkness of the wings and suddenly encounters stage lights and the audience.

Philosophers and scientists have differing perspectives on how blank you really were when you started out. Some theories are more simpatico than not with the scribbler hypothesis, so of course I’m partial to those. Philosopher John Locke famously said that we start out with utterly blank pages, with no preconceived notions. The newborn’s mind is like blank paper, “void of all characters.” “How comes it to be furnished?” Locke asked. In a word, through experience. We live and we learn.

Other great minds offer alternative theories on whether we’re born entirely blank or come with certain standard or optional mental equipment. Linguist Noam Chomsky theorized that we come factory equipped with a sort of motherboard, a preinstalled “Language Acquisition Device.” Think of it as located in a microscopic IT closet adjacent to where the scribbler works. The metaphorical motherboard allows us to decode grammatical structure, which in turn enables us to understand and create stories. Since then, Chomsky’s advanced the idea that there’s something akin to a universal grammar (no matter that English doesn’t sound remotely like Liki, which about five people on a small Indonesian island speak). The scribbler theory remains neutral on the matter of how we come to have a capacity for language. We just do and we must if we’re to have any idea of who we are.

But back to your imaginary book: On the front cover there’s a photo of a beautiful baby, sweet and chubby, with a newborn’s beanie (pink or blue, you choose) on its cherubic little head. The baby’s you, of course. Well, you but not really you, not as far as your current “self” is concerned. The baby will evolve into that you, the “you” you think you are today. But even though you’re something well short of you, you’ve already weathered an “existential crisis,” the first of many, said psychologist Rollo May. What crisis was that? You could have just as easily not been born. But you were, so crisis averted. Having weathered the ordeal, said May, you’ve taken the first step toward creating your own personal myth. It has all the earmarks of a classic myth. You’re destined to confront obstacles and suffering. You’re primed to seek truth and purpose. In this sense, you’ve started out in good company, May said, really no different from Moses when he was found floating in the bulrushes or Jesus as he lay in the manger. But, hey, no pressure.

The key thing is that you now exist, your existence confirmed by a birth certificate signed by the county clerk. You may or may not have a name just yet. When you finally do get one, it could be the same name as that of a living or deceased family member, whose life story will, in a sense, live on as a result. Whatever your name, your existence may be further documented by a commemorative certificate featuring a pair of inky prints that affirm you have two small feet. Those feet are of no use at this stage. You’re not going anywhere on your own, and won’t for a good long while. You’re as helpless as any suckling in the animal kingdom, more helpless than most. You’re not yet equipped to collect memories. You can’t string together even a couple of primitive belches to form the simplest of sentences. You’re far from ready to take on the world. But you are cute, and make for a most appealing cover baby.

Above your beyond-adorable face on the cover is the imaginary book’s title. Compulsive editor that I am, I dithered over a good working title for us to use—nothing fancy, nothing smart-assed, we’re not talking the old Esquire here. I was going to go with Me: A Life, but that struck me as too generic and flat. The Life and Death of the Enduring Self was better, but after staring at it, I decided that it sounded a little, well, grandiloquent. And the “death” part bothered me a bit. So I tweaked it as follows, which is good enough for our purposes:

Our title in place, the pages are now ready to be filled. Let’s work together on it. What should come first? A book editor will tell you that a prologue is usually a good idea. It tees everything up, provides useful context. So take a moment to think about where, how, and when the story of your life really begins. It’s not an idle question. How you conjure your prestory can have a definite bearing on what you expect the ultimate point of your life to be. If you believe there’s something mystical about how your life story began, that’s one thing. It’s another if you believe the cosmos isn’t all that mysterious. Bereft of anything better, you could always use your prologue simply to note that your life story began with conception, a random collision, an infinitesimal bump—not even a fender bender—near the ampulla-isthmic junction.

Some of you, however, may feel that conception doesn’t reach back nearly far enough, doesn’t do your life story justice. You’d use the prologue to expound on how your life story began long before the tiny collision that occurred, for all you know, in a motel room or the backseat of a Nash Rambler. You might feel obliged to use your initial pages to acknowledge and praise the true author of your life story, Our Author who art in heaven.

Others of you wouldn’t be caught dead with a prologue like that. You kneel to science, not the supernatural. So you might want to use the front matter to explain how your life story began with a subatomic particle that somehow burst into what we think of as the cosmos. Something explosive, in any event. After the spark or whatever it was, one thing then led to another, ending with that baby mug on the cover. Still others might wish to use the prologue to underscore how neither you nor anyone else has the vaguest idea of how or why anyone’s life story begins. We’re each a Cosmic Orphan, anthropologist Loren Eiseley said, plopped into a universe through which we wander aimlessly, a thought bubble hovering above our head. Inside the bubble, a question: WHO AM I? There may even be a few of you who’d use the front matter to say, Sure, I have a name, birth certificate, and I’ll eventually have a Social Security number, driver’s license, passport, and eventually an AARP membership card, but there’s really no me. Or everyone’s me. Or I’m a tiny bit of everybody else, my so-called life story rising to nothing more than a narrative neutrino embedded in an endless saga titled The Life of Every Human Being Who Ever Walked the Earth.

Your life story can begin with whatever prologue makes you happy and is consistent with a chosen belief system, if any. Let’s just agree that the life story each of us is able to remember begins with our earliest memories, which happen to kick in when our capacity to understand and create stories kicks in, memories and stories being inextricably linked.

But what if you’re a crusty contrarian? What if you don’t want to write a life story at all? “We begin in the madness of carnal desire [and] end in the dissolution of all of our parts and the musty stench of corpses,” wrote Schopenhauer, philosophically as gloomy as ever. Why even bother to write a life story if that’s how empty life is? Because we have no choice, that’s why. We’re compelled to write a story of our life even though we never asked for that life. We simply must. Which is why, anatomically, there’s that small patch of space reserved in the skull for something or someone to arrange our memories into the chapters that comprise the plot. Is there any point to that? We won’t know for certain until the pages in our imagined book are mostly filled, and with any luck, that won’t be for a very long time. “Let us wait for the page proof,” replied Vladimir Nabokov when asked what the meaning of life was.

4      First Jottings

In The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self, Dan McAdams says that on day one of his developmental psychology class he gives his students an unusual assignment: write a hypothetical magazine article about your first day outside the womb. Terrific idea! I thought when I read that. I would have used the assignment for real back when I was editing Esquire. I would have called up a writer and asked him or her to take a whack at such a piece. Philip Roth would have been perfect, would’ve knocked it out of the park.

Truman Capote? Better still! Capote would have been intrigued by the thought of describing exactly what transpired in the hours after 3 p.m. on September 30, 1924, at the Touro Infirmary in New Orleans. Had Capote accepted and handed in the assigned piece—delivery was always a big if with him—I’m sure his account would have been unforgettable and more than a little Southern Gothic. Truman’s mother, Lillie Mae, never wanted the baby, but she waited too long to get a safe abortion. His father, Arch, did want a child, but he was an entirely untrustworthy, smooth-talking hustler in bottle-thick glasses, the makings of a great character in any delivery room. Lillie Mae and Arch were quite the pair, not exactly June and Ward Cleaver. Capote’s biggest childhood fear was that he’d be abandoned, so I’m sure he would have cooked up a harrowing depiction of his first day on earth. I’m equally convinced he’d have sworn on a stack of Bibles that every last detail was rendered precisely as it happened.

The fact is, the story of your life—as you remember it—doesn’t start on day one. If you think you really remember back to when you were a newborn and then a toddler, you don’t. Even Saint Augustine, inarguably closer to God than you or me, freely admitted that he couldn’t remember his first few years, came right out and said so in his Confessions.

The same goes for the rest of us. Over the first couple of years we actually do collect some memories, but they evaporate for reasons no one fully understands. We think we remember events from those earliest days and months because our brain makes memories out of what our parents, grandparents, and older siblings tell us later on. Photos in old albums also have a way of leaping out of their self-adhesive corners to become what we insist are real memories. There are other explanations as well: your writer-in-residence has her dates confused; you have an overactive imagination; you’re under the influence of a controlled substance.

Even though no memories are being stored, a dim awareness of “self” begins to develop prior to your first birthday. This rudimentary “self” isn’t much of a self; it’s a vest-pocket self, clueless that one day it could turn into a full-blown self that’s pitiable and self-loathing, though let’s certainly hope not. Your fledgling self expresses itself whenever you share your “subjective feelings” with a caregiver. Your subjective self is thus able to communicate but not via language. For example, you smile, which in turn prompts your mom’s face to gleam with unbridled delight, a moment she cherishes for the rest of her life, though you deserve little credit for it.

Within a year or so, the self you’ll come to know as you will finally begin developing in earnest. One day it’ll dawn on you that you have a body. You’ll begin exploring its most out-of-the-way parts. A human mind (in waiting) atop a creaturely bottom? How can that possibly be? If you asked yourself that, wondered about the apparent disconnect between your humanness and creatureliness, it would have marked the very first time you groped instinctively at what the point of your existence was.

As I’ve mentioned, it’s not until we reach three or so that the life stories we remember slip into gear. Very slowly at first. It’s around now that your bright-eyed and bushy-tailed writer-in-residence shows up for work, albeit haphazardly. Too small for the Aeron chair, she’ll scribble while curled up on a bean bag (for all I know). Now is when your love of stories, your need for stories, grabs hold. You awake one day and you’re hooked, a story junkie. “A child’s need for stories is as fundamental as his need for food,” says novelist Paul Auster.

If you’re a parent, I’m sure you’ve experienced how your kids quickly developed their insatiable appetite for stories. How many nights did your three-year-old browbeat you into reading and rereading Goodnight Moon when all you wanted to do was slug down apple martinis and binge-watch Downton Abbey or House of Cards? We remain story junkies from beginning to end. “We are told stories as children to help us bridge the abyss between waking and sleeping,” John Cheever wrote. “We tell stories to our own children for the same purpose. When I find myself in danger—caught on a stuck ski-lift in a blizzard—I immediately start telling myself stories. I tell myself stories when I am in pain and I expect as I lay dying I will be telling myself a story in a struggle to make some link between the quick and the defunct.”

It’s also now, when we’re three or so, that we start creating stories. A story can be extraordinarily brief. Margaret Atwood, one of a number of writers invited by Wired magazine to compose a short story using only six words, turned out a classic, right up there with Madame Bovary: “Longed for him. Got him. Shit.” Any toddler, upwards of a hundred billion neurons already straining at the bit, can create a story using only three words: “Me go poo.” “Me go poo” is the story a three-year-old can and inevitably will tell more than once before he moves on to a higher level of narrative construction. “Me go poo” may sound primitive, but it fulfills the criteria scholars say define a legitimate story:

1. There’s a protagonist (in this case, “me”).

2. There’s statement of a goal or desire (“to poo” or “have pooed”).

3. There’s an overt action relating to that goal or desire (will go/did go), which leads to the attainment or nonattainment of said goal or desire, which is to poo.

You and your writer-in-residence are now on your way to a storied future. From here on out, stories will not only entertain you, they will explain you to others and to yourself. Your life story will be how you’ll “self-continue,” narrative psychologists say. As long as your memories flow freely, you’re in business. But if something happens to disturb memory flow, you’ll have trouble self-continuing. Disorientation and worse—complete loss of identity—can result.

Even though our earliest autobiographical memories are highly suspect (“islands in the sea of oblivion,” a novelist called them), there are those who are convinced that they hold enormous significance. Our early memories are neither accidental nor inconsequential. Alfred Adler, whose close relationship with Freud dissolved into bitter acrimony—pioneering psychoanalysts have difficulty playing nicely in the sandbox—believed that our earliest recollections reflect a fundamental view of life that we carry with us for the long haul. Early memories, Adler said, contribute to a “guiding fiction” that persists all the way through The Life and Times of My Enduring Self. The memories we designate our “earliest” are the beginning of our private autobiography.

As if sporting an Alfred Adler mustache and pince-nez, I went around asking people to share some early memories with me. Only last week I asked a friend to tell me hers. She’s a well-adjusted, successful journalist, a loving wife and mother. Without missing a beat, she recalled how when she was six months old she was trapped in a tent with an angry, hissing snake. Not possible, I told her. You’ve just settled on that as a subjective starting point of the guiding fiction otherwise known as you, I explained. She was adamant, however, claiming to remember the snake as if it had hissed at her the day before yesterday. (Freud, of course, would have had an absolute field day with the snake.) Adler would say that even if the hissing snake memory was entirely “fancied,” the memory is fundamental to how my friend is trying to satisfy a need or quell an insecurity. He might propose that she made the snake her first memory so that her life story would have nowhere to go but up. Conversely, I read in one of McAdams’s books that if your self-selected “first memory” is suspiciously joyful, it could be that you’ve made it your first memory to set your life story up as a fall from grace.

My daughter, Katherine, a poised young professional woman, said her earliest memory is of peeing in a swimming pool while wearing a white bathing suit with garden vegetables printed on it. I’d be curious to know what Adler would do with that.

An old friend of mine—a woman who’s led a satisfied life despite some harrowing blips (house fire, rare tropical parasite picked up in the Caribbean)—reports this early memory: “My grandpa was dying in our apartment. I was little more than three, and my parents sent me to stay with second cousins. After dinner every night, the dad, a psychiatrist, would haul me over his shoulder, pick up the garbage from the kitchen, take me to the backyard and say: ‘I’m going to dump you with the garbage.’ I remember screaming and kicking and being terrified every night. After that, whenever we’d leave home, I’d leave half a glass of milk in the kitchen, or a game half played in my bedroom, figuring my parents would have to bring me home so I could finish it.”

Early memories are often highly cinematic. Do we amp them up for effect? Ronald Reagan had not one but two rip-roaring first memories, which he recalled on separate occasions. One was of nearly being crushed beneath the wheels of a freight train on a hot summer day in Galesburg, Illinois. The other was of being taken to view a passenger steamer that had capsized on the Chicago River, killing more than eight hundred people.

Even though you didn’t ask, here’s one of my earliest memories, as accurately as I remember it: My mother has taken me on a shopping trip downtown. We’ve had lunch at the Horn & Hardart Automat, which is where we usually went, the long-gone place where you inserted nickels into slots that opened little glass cubbies with your favorite food inside, in my case a tongue sandwich on a kaiser roll. After lunch we walk over to one of the big Philadelphia department stores—John Wanamaker, Strawbridge & Clothier, it doesn’t matter, they’re also gone. Leading me by my left hand, my mother steps onto an escalator going up. Because I’m daydreaming or distracted, or lagging behind whining that I’m bored or tired or hungry even though I just ate a tongue sandwich followed by chocolate pudding, I accidentally put my left foot on the stair my mother’s on, leaving my right on the stair below. As the stairs edge apart I find myself getting split up the middle, a tiny human wishbone. Behind me, a man in a suit tries to help out. He grabs my free hand. My mother yells for him to let go, which he promptly does, then she hoists me up to safety.

Though I remember all this playing out in super-slow motion, I’m sure the terror lasted at most a couple of seconds. No big deal. What’s odd, though, is that the escalator memory keeps returning in unexpected ways. It rises out of nowhere, or nowhere I can easily trace. Neuroscientists say a memory is “recorded” in a highly specific pattern of neural activity. Show me something that elicits the same neural activity and my brain will comply by coughing up the escalator memory. Occasionally, however, the escalator memory is brought back for a reason I halfway understand. Maybe it’s a “screen memory,” as Freud called it, a childhood memory that stands for a later event. The escalator memory flashed through my head when I first saw the scene in Goldfinger where Sean Connery is strapped to a table and an industrial laser moves horrifyingly up between Bond’s legs, headed straight for his crotch.

It also wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the escalator memory fills the final frames before my screen goes to black. One grief expert says that a person’s deceased mother often makes a cameo in a last-minute highlight reel. It’s not uncommon to envision “hands passionately reaching upward to some unseen force.” As on an escalator, maybe? Very Rosebud, no?

The pages of The Life and Times of My Enduring Self begin filling up quickly by the time we move into grade school. “I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t know what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose,” P. G. Wodehouse, at ninety-one, told an interviewer. By first grade the loafing’s over, at least for the young scribe upstairs. As your early self begins to round into shape, the scribbler turns it up a notch. He’ll start rank ordering certain memories. Some will get priority status. It’s a good bet that some of these select memories will relate to a subject I’ve managed to avoid almost entirely till now.

I haven’t dwelled on death for a few reasons. Why risk turning this into a downer before I have to? I’ve also minimized the subject because it isn’t yet a big deal in one’s life story. It’ll blossom, if that’s the right word, soon enough. In those weeks I was holed up in the house by the graveyard, I came across a long paper published a hundred years ago in the American Journal of Psychology. The author was G. Stanley Hall, a major figure in the early days of the field, a pioneer of childhood psychology who among his other accomplishments brought the word “adolescence” into mainstream use. Hall devoted a good portion of the paper to how young children instinctively react when encountering death for the first time—such as when they see a corpse at a viewing, a dead family member, for example. Hall described how a very young child is taken aback when he feels how cold to the touch a dead person is. Or when he’s met by an “immobility of face and body” instead of the prompt and tender response he always expected from the departed uncle or aunt. “There is no answering kiss, hug, pat or smile,” Hall wrote. “[Often] the half-opened eyes are noticed with awe. The pallor, shroud, and especially coffin are often focused on fetishistically. [The] infant who has been permitted such scenes often turns away, perhaps almost convulsively, to whomever holds it, as if in fright.”

Do you remember your first run-in with a dead something? I do. I’m supposing it couldn’t have been long after the escalator incident. We are in Atlantic City. I’m running on the beach, focused on something else, something very much alive, probably the ice cream man pushing one of those carts with bells on it. (The sound of those bells was once the sweetest music in the world, though now the incessant ringing drives me crazy as I squint into my Kindle on the beach by Lake Michigan.) Anyway, according to the old memory, I’m sprinting across the sand as fast as my chubby little legs will carry me when I nearly step on a festering fish carcass, eyes plucked out, scary looking and disgusting. I stop and stare, so transfixed I even forget about the Creamsicle. My mother runs over, wagging her finger, and drags me away. She points to the dead fish and tells me I am never, ever, to go near anything like that again.

I’m assuming that the writer upstairs tagged the dead-fish memory as notable, filing it away as a moment that could have some later significance in the larger story. Memories are fluid. “An event may be extraneous and irrelevant to one episode, but important for understanding another,” says a narrative psychologist. How do I now see the dead-fish memory? My mother was protecting me from mortal danger, much the way a mother bear, deer, or duck looks out for her cub, fawn, or duckling. She was shielding me physically and emotionally, not so much from the rotting fish as from the terror of death.

Shielded temporarily, that is. In Staring at the Sun, Irvin D. Yalom, the noted psychotherapist who has long studied death anxieties, describes how our fear of death waxes and wanes throughout one’s life cycle. As children, even as the scribbler’s doodling our earliest chapters, we catch our “first glimmerings of mortality… in dead leaves, insects and pets, disappearing grandparents, endless acres of cemetery tombstones”—the significance of which our parents are disinclined to enlighten us. We barely give death a further thought until we reach puberty. After that—well, these days, anyway—it seems like it’s all death all the time: video games, horror movies, the whole ball of wax. My kids have lived through successive death-infused genres: Death Pop, Death Rock, Death Rap. Their iTunes libraries are stocked with Death Row label releases. There’s an emcee who calls himself Necro (né Ron Braunstein, a.k.a. The Sexorcist and Mad Mooney), whose playlist includes tracks by Flatlinerz and Gravediggaz. In my day, “Tell Laura I Love Her” and “Teen Angel” were about as cadaverous as pop music got. But creepy nonetheless. We were more innocent then, it’s reasonable to conclude.

How much do you remember from back when? Is the early part of The Life and Times of My Enduring Self fairly sketchy? As kids we have no idea what we’ll remember and why, nor do we get any better at predicting whether twenty years from now we’ll remember something that happened yesterday. In his novel Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami tells of a day in a meadow that he vividly remembers eighteen years after the fact. In the moment he didn’t give a damn about it, his mind was elsewhere. Some of us, in fact, remember nothing, episodically speaking. It’s called “severely deficient autobiographical memory,” or SDAM. Those who suffer from SDAM remember facts and figures, and that’s about it. A sixty-year-old so afflicted told a writer from New York magazine: “I used to be really interested in photographs of me as a child—I would often get them out and look through them. And, evidently, one black-and-white photo showed me at three or four, sitting on a tricycle between my two brothers, wearing a pink dress. I happened to be looking at it with my mom and said something about my pink dress, and she said, ‘Oh, no, it was a yellow dress.’ I was really upset—here that was one of my embellishments to one of my childhood stories that I now had to change.”

As for my own preadolescent chapters, beyond the escalator incident and the dead fish on the beach, there aren’t a slew of memories rattling around up there. But there are some. Most have to do with my father. I follow him around like a puppy. We go fishing off a falling-down pier at the Jersey Shore. Carl’s Pier—I just this second remembered that, hadn’t thought of the name in decades. We keep the flounders (we call them “doormats”) we haul up, throw back sea robins and blowfish. We’re both wearing cotton pants with elastic waists known as “hobby jeans.” Mine were blue, his were green. Hobby jeans were popular in the fifties, advertised as “perfect for fishing, gardening, boating, golf, painting, shop, or hobby work, washing the car, puttering around the house or just relaxing comfortably!” (The ad copy I had to look up.)

On fall Saturdays my father takes me to Franklin Field, where we watch the University of Pennsylvania (his school, mine, my sister’s, my kids’, we practically bleed Red and Blue), once a football powerhouse. Week after week, the Quakers are thrashed mercilessly by the Notre Dames of the world. The whole family attends the annual Thanksgiving Day game against Cornell. My mother and sister Barbara, she’s five years older than me, wear yellow chrysanthemums pinned to their coats. From earlier in the season, I still have an impotent BEAT NAVY button pinned to my jacket.

I mostly daydream through elementary school. Scant memories of all that. I’m a safety patrolman with a silver Automobile Association of America badge on a white shoulder belt. (I’ll eventually make sergeant—hold your applause.) My tonsils are removed. I remember what I see as the ether knocks me out (can conjure the smell of it, too): a black-and-white checkerboard spinning furiously down into a black hole. I associate it with Alice in Wonderland.

Then comes a detailed subchapter in that long-ago early part of the story. My father takes the family on a trip to California, where he’s to attend a medical convention. I seem to retain more vivid memories of this week than of any other event prior to the age of thirteen. I’m sure you have memories like that as well, and it wouldn’t be surprising if they have something to do with travel. Going places rouses the senses. The day before we leave, I’m given a few dollars to buy a week’s supply of Pez, several comic books, and an issue of Sport magazine with a cover featuring Ted Kluszewski, the immense Cincinnati Reds first baseman whose biceps were so huge he had to cut the sleeves off his jersey. We leave Philly on the Pennsylvania Railroad, stopping in Chicago for a couple of days. We see a movie, The Student Prince, about which I remember nothing other than how sappy it was. The following day we drive north on Lake Shore Drive to the Northwestern campus in Evanston, where my father has a meeting. (We surely pass directly below the apartment Linda and I now live in and where I’m typing this. Part of me thinks I was drawn to this building because of that serendipitous drive-by, a connection to the past).

The next leg of the journey seems literally imprinted. We head west on the streamlined Super Chief, the new, all-Pullman train. We barrel through Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona. Real live Indians (as they were called) greet us at scheduled stops, selling turquoise jewelry and souvenirs spread out on colorful blankets. My parents buy me a cheap wooden peace pipe. On the bowl there’s a decal of a chief in a headdress. I think I still have it, though I can’t find it. Trust me, though, there’s a chief in a headdress on the bowl. In fact, I’m pretty sure every detail of the foregoing is true, though on reflection I wouldn’t swear it was Ted Kluszewski on the cover of Sport. It could have been Sam Snead. I’m dead certain it wasn’t Ted Kazanski, who couldn’t hit his way out of a paper bag, let alone make the cover of Sport.

Oh, and another memory from around that time. One day I’m on my bike and forget to duck as I pedal under a set of wooden stairs. I gash open my scalp. Frantically, my mother puts a dish towel over the wound and hurries me over to a doctor who lives in the neighborhood. Not any doctor, our family doctor. It’s dinnertime. He opens the door, still chewing. Rather than let us in, even for a quick determination of whether the injury might be fatal, he tells us to go to an emergency room for stitches. This is the right advice, but I still wonder whether finishing his dinner didn’t have something to do with it. Doctors were supposed to be gods, remember those days? Now, for the first time, I realize doctors have feet of clay, just like the rest of us. A few stitches and I’m home again. An intimation of mortality? Of course not. The worst part is going to school with a thick white bandage on top of a partially shaved dome. Embarrassing. Sidelined temporarily, I’m not allowed to play touch football in the street. For a week or so I sit on the stoop, watching my friends go at it. I wait for the afternoon paper, which is tossed my way by a kid on a bike, a canvas bag slung across his scrawny chest.

That I was reading the paper at that age signifies nothing: no precocious curiosity about world events that would later lure me into the Peace Corps and the deep satisfaction of doing my part on behalf of the developing world by teaching English in a village in Vanuatu. Nothing remotely that meaningful. I only looked at the sports and comics sections. But to reach those sections you had to thumb through a page or two that listed—in tiny type, signaling that the news couldn’t be all that important—“Births, Marriages, and Deaths.” At ten or eleven I had absolutely no interest in deaths, births, or marriages. Who does at that age? But I remember those pages even now. There’s even a specific image I associate with them, not literally imprinted I’m sure, but for some unfathomable reason inserted retroactively. I see a granny in glasses with tightly curled gray hair, ancient looking though it wouldn’t surprise me if she was all of sixty-four—which, come to think of it, wasn’t so young back then. Women weren’t expected to live beyond their early seventies. The blurry snapshot was probably taken at a Christmas get-together, with nieces, nephews, brothers, and sisters snipped out of the frame. Accompanying the printed photo was a little note. It went something like this—I’m making it up, but it’s close enough:

No one knows how much we miss you, life has never been the same. In our hearts your memory lingers, sweetly tender, fond and true. There is not a day, dear mother/grandma/Gladys, that we do not think of you.

At the time, those messages struck me as icky but not at all sad; exactly the reverse of how they strike me now. I’d forgotten the granny and those pages with all the little type until something I read not long ago brought it all back. I came across a small paperback titled On the Meaning of Life. It was written in the 1930s by historian Will Durant. He observed that “hidden away in the small type of our daily press, under the captions of ‘Births,’ ‘Marriages’ and ‘Deaths,’ is the essential history of mankind.” Everything else, Durant said, is “ornament.”

What do you make of that? Sounds good, doesn’t it? The meaning of life is that we’re born, we make babies, we die. Is that the point? If it is the point, it makes you wonder why we overthink everything, spend too much time working on philosophical puzzles about the unanswerable, even as the fundamental purpose of existence is staring us in the face. We’re born, we marry, we die. Isn’t that pretty much it?

5      A God-Shaped Hole

When social scientists go into the field to collect our life stories, they follow an established protocol. If you agree to an interview, you’re told that the session will last about two hours. “This is an interview about the story of your life,” they explain. “As social scientists we are interested in hearing your story, including parts of the past as you remember them and the future as you imagine it.” Then they assure you that it won’t be a therapy session. As researchers, they tell you, they collect life stories in order to understand the different ways we live our lives and how we reach an understanding of who we are. You’re then asked to imagine a book, just as we’re doing here. You’re informed that the interview will cover select scenes and chapters in this book. We don’t need to know everything, the interviewer says, we’ll just focus on a few “key things.” Included among the key things are eight events the interviewer may refer to as “nuclear episodes”—“nuclear” in the sense that they’re central to your personal myth. Nuclear events include a positive and a negative childhood memory; a “wisdom event”; a vivid adult memory; a high point and a low point; a spiritual experience; and a turning point. A turning point, the interviewer says, is an episode in which you underwent a significant change in self-understanding. It isn’t necessary to realize that an event’s a turning point when it happens, only in retrospect. There is no right or wrong answer to what is or isn’t a turning point, you’ll be told, nor is there a correct or incorrect answer to any of the other questions you’ll be asked during the interview. So try to relax for the next couple of hours. Let the good and the bad times roll.

While the life-story interview protocol calls for sharing only a single turning point, we all have more than one turning point in the story of our evolving selves. Most written stories of any length have more than one, too. Enroll in a screenwriting course and you’ll hear right off the bat that every good movie (every bad one as well) consists of three acts and x-number of turning points peppered throughout those acts. Five isn’t uncommon. These are strategically placed in the plot to signal an opportunity; a change of plan; a point of no return; a ratcheting up of conflict; an “all-is-lost” moment; and a final turning point that usually sets up a triumphant, happy resolution, Hollywood being Hollywood.

Our lives, I’ve now come to understand, are apparently built on the screenplay model, though they don’t often end as happily as Hollywood movies. If tonight you sneaked into my bedroom, jostled me out of a deep sleep, and told me to rattle off the major turning points in my life, I’d immediately tick off the twist of fate that got me my first job; my marrying Linda; the birth of each of my kids; and the turning point that preceded all of the above, which I’ll tell you about in a minute. There—the minimum five turning points needed for my life to qualify as a movie script—not that there’s a Lee Eisenberg biopic coming any time soon. You could list your five turning points if I woke you in the middle of night. (In fact, why not take a second and identify them now?) Having listed our respective five, if you and I kept the conversation going we’d surely be able to come up with numerous other turning points of varying significance. The right or wrong undergraduate major. The right or wrong doctor’s diagnosis. The right or wrong weather the day this or that was supposed to happen. The right or wrong decision to go to bed with someone. The right or wrong thing you said at the right or wrong moment. The day we found someone or lost someone.

“When with the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one’s past for such ‘turning points,’ one is apt to start seeing them everywhere,” wrote Kazuo Ishiguro in his appropriately titled novel The Remains of the Day.

Here’s that left-unsaid turning point, the one that came first. It’s a perfectly beautiful fall day, October 26, a Monday, a few months after the summer I was the youngest boy to make the softball team at Camp Arthur, though as I said, I didn’t see much game time. I’m thirteen. It’s right after school. My scalp is by now healed and I’m playing touch football in the street in front of our house. The curb’s lined with fallen leaves. Even now I can hear them crunch. I can smell them. I can see the paving stones that line the curb, the concrete steps leading up to our front door. Combining a memory of something that happened with a memory of where it happened yields details of surprising clarity, memory scientists say. It’s like a dream or a movie. Memory researchers also say the reason we remember a certain occasion in extraordinary detail is because a given narrative requires it. This particular memory validates both of those theories.

My mother, indescribably distraught (Munch’s Scream comes to mind, not a literal imprint), opens the screen door and yells for me to come in. I run up the steps. Even before I reach the landing, she tells me my father is dead. What I don’t remember is whether she actually used the word “dead.” It could have been “gone.” I’m sure it wasn’t “passed away.” It was most definitely not “gone to his eternal rest.” After she says my father is “dead” or “gone,” and probably not aware she’s even addressing me, she cries out a medical term, or what I take to be a medical term because it sounds like one. For years, whenever the scribbler pushed the memory of that day back to the surface, I tried to recapture the exact words she used, running the audio over and over through my head as if through an analyzer in a sound lab. One day I finally figured it out. Myocardial infarction. “He’s had a myocardial infarction,” she said, as if whomever she was speaking to would understand.

When did you first lose an important person in your life? How does the occasion currently read in your version of The Life and Times of My Enduring Self? Was it a turning point? Were you angry? Bewildered? Overwhelmed? Did you cry and cry?

Angry, bewildered, and overwhelmed though I was, I don’t remember crying very much. My mother made it even harder to cry because she kept telling me that crying would “let the hurt out.” I’m pretty sure I remember those exact words. They’re imprinted, but not literally. Was I too existentially confused to cry? Maybe. It was utterly astonishing to me that anyone could be alive today and banished to oblivion the next. I’m sure that thought has occurred to you as well. I remember staring at my father’s Longines Wittnauer wristwatch, which I’ve kept in a box on my dresser ever since, never once winding it in all these years. When my mother wasn’t around, I’d tiptoe into my parents’ bedroom and stare into my father’s closet, looking at his suits, dumbstruck at the idea that he’d never wear them again. A few months later, my mother donated the suits to Goodwill. The thought that others would be wearing them was beyond bizarre.

I remember only a little bit about the funeral. It’s not that I’ve repressed the rest. The scribbler hasn’t flattened, smoothed, or squashed my memories of the event. I’d remember much more if I’d been there. Instead, the scribe and I were sealed off by ourselves in a side room. “I want you to remember him the way he was,” my mother said on the way to the service. Recently I read Thomas Merton’s account of the day his mother was buried—he was a few years younger than me, eight or nine. He, too, was denied entry to the funeral: “Everything about sickness and death was more or less kept hidden from me, because consideration of these things might make a child morbid.” Well, yeah, but chances are a child who loses a parent will become a tad morbid whether or not he’s lucky enough to attend the funeral.

On the other hand, maybe my mother was right. A man in his late sixties said in an interview that his mother had died twenty years earlier. She went swiftly, barely a month after she was diagnosed. He confessed that he continues to be “haunted by her face in the coffin.” So, yes, perhaps my mother was onto something, that I’d only remember my father dead, not how we went fishing or to football games, all of which I’m happy to remember. I also recall my father from snapshots and home movies, which is not the same as remembering him when he was alive, but still. In her classic essay on photography, Susan Sontag said that all photographs are memento mori: “Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” That works for me. Now, whenever I look at a photograph of my father, I’m not so much looking at him as staring at time’s relentless melt.

Here’s another memory from that turning point. After the funeral, everyone comes back to our house. The mirrors are covered with black fabric; there are folding chairs in the living room; the dining room table is groaning under a mountain of cold cuts and pound cake. My aunt Ruth comes over and pinches me on the cheek. That pinch, by the way, feels powerfully imprinted—Ruth was a strong woman. The two of us then act out that old movie scene cliché. Aunt Ruth leans down and tells me I’m now the man of the household and it’s my job to take care of my mother. Instead of saying what I feel like saying—that I’m scared shitless—I respond the way every kid does in that lame movie scene. I nod and mumble solemnly that I’ll do my best. Dan McAdams would most definitely view that response as an attempt to launch a personal myth around a young man determined to show courage in the face of adversity.

In the days that follow, I’m convinced that my father will suddenly reappear in ghostly guise. This may be the only chapter in my edition of The Life and Times of My Enduring Self with anything close to supernatural overtones. Stephen Hawking once told Charlie Rose that he regards the afterlife to be “a fairy story for people that are afraid of the dark.” Though I had no fear of the dark to begin with, the idea that my father, much as I longed to see him, would show up in my room in the middle of the night is an excellent reason to fear the dark. Before going to sleep, I check under my bed. At school, I half expect to glance up in the schoolyard to see an apparition peering out from behind a tree, smoking a Benson & Hedges even though he was ordered to quit after his first heart attack.

For the next eleven months, twice a day, before school and after, my grandfather drives me to a nearby synagogue where I recite the Kaddish, the traditional Hebrew memorial prayer. While my grandparents are observant, my immediate family is not. I am under no pressure to endure this torture, but I have no other meaningful way to express devotion to my father. I suppose it was an act of penance, though I couldn’t tell you for what.

There are at most about a dozen old men who attend these sunrise and sunset services. It’s a social event, gives them something to do, gets them out of the house. I remember their faces quite well, or think I do. All are in their seventies or older, wizened and disturbingly cold looking, or so they appeared to me then. I have never felt more exposed and out of place. They don’t say ten words to me. They just stare. I’m sure they feel compassion, but it comes across as forbidding and harsh. The service, which lasts about forty minutes, is entirely in Hebrew. By then I can haltingly read Hebrew, but needless to say I have no clue as to what the words mean. Within a week, I know the mourner’s prayer by heart; that is, I can recite it phonetically from memory. I take no part in the service other than to stand up and recite:

Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’mei rabbaw (Amen)

B’allmaw dee v’raw chir’usei

v’yamlich malchusei, b’chayeichon, uv’yomeichon,

uv’chayei d’chol beis yisroel,

ba’agawlaw u’vizman kawriv, v’imru: Amen…

On it goes for another twenty-four lines.

When the eleven torturous months are finally over, I feel some small satisfaction that I made the effort, put in the time, endured the stares. I disliked everything about it, but I’d honored my father as best I could. Today I’m ambivalent about the whole experience. “What do I have in common with Jews?” Kafka wrote in a diary. “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”

Why am I telling you all this? About my not crying, Aunt Ruth’s pinch, the covered mirrors, checking under the bed for my father’s ghost? Yes, it’s good to air difficult memories. There’s research to prove it, plenty of studies. They start off with instructions like this:

I would like for you to write about your very deepest thoughts about an extremely important issue that has affected you and your life. In your writing, I’d like you to really let go and explore your very deepest emotions. You might tie your topic to your relationships with others, including your parents, lovers, friends, or relatives; to your past, your present, or your future; or to who you have been, who you would like to be, or who you are now. Don’t worry about spelling, sentence structure, or grammar. The only rule is that once you begin writing, continue to do so until your time is up.

In the allotted time—fifteen minutes a day, say, for three or four days—participants are expected to write about lost loves, deaths, and personal failures. And guess what? The researchers report a variety of mental and physical benefits, including improved immune function, less emotional anxiety or depression, even quicker reemployment following job loss. Routinely writing about anything has been shown to improve memory capacity. Why does writing about a difficult time make you feel better? No one’s altogether sure, though a long-standing theory holds that letting go on paper lessens inhibition, inhibition being a source of stress.

But that’s not why I told you about the death of my father. I wasn’t looking to throw off inhibitions. Nor was I trolling for sympathy. I shared these memories to make a point about turning points. Years after a pivotal event, a scribbler will often revisit and reinterpret the role it played in the overall story. The death of a parent, as devastating as that event is, can turn out to be a growth experience. Or a wake-up call. Or it can turn a life story into an irreversible nightmare. At the time, you just don’t know. All I knew then was that in the blink of an eye there was a giant hole in our family, as gaping as any “God-shaped hole,” a concept favored by those who believe that it takes something as big and majestically contoured as God to fill the emptiness of existence. I hadn’t realized there were such holes before. Now I did. My father’s death was the turning point that changed how I measured life. “It is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one’s own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says ‘you’re next,’” Christopher Hitchens wrote in his memoir, Hitch-22.

It was also a turning point for the writer upstairs. He understood for the first time that the gig wasn’t all fun and games. That he wasn’t up there to write bullshit, throw memories at the wall to see which of them would stick in the extended plot. He was up there, as yours is up there, to pay attention and write a coherent story that (as E. M. Forster said) begins with something we don’t remember and ends with something we anticipate but don’t understand.

As for the scribbler and me, we now had a rough sense of what the page count would likely be. There’d be just enough pages for what I’d come to think of as a novella, but not enough for a doorstop novel. There’d be pages enough to take me through my late forties, which is not only when my father died but his two brothers as well. The scribbler and I knew squat about genetics or actuarial tables. All we knew was what my father had often said during the three years between his first heart attack and the Monday morning myocardial infarction that killed him. He was a scientist to his bones, was recognized in his field, and taught at a top-tier medical school. He knew what he was talking about. Medicine and science, he remarked now and then, could work formidable wonders, “but it all comes down to the hand you’re dealt,” he said.

I remember—honestly, I do remember—taking out pencil and paper. I did some basic arithmetic. Assuming I’d been dealt the same crappy hand as my father and my two uncles, I wouldn’t be around to ring in the year 2000. That’s when everyone would surely be zipping to work in business suits with jet packs strapped to their backs. Nuclear-powered cars. Two-way, picture-phone wristwatches. Robomaids and vacubots. It was a bummer to think I’d never get to have babies with Annette Funicello and live happily ever after in a house with a robomaid and a vacubot.

6      Is the Beginning Important?

As we prepare to move from the beginning to the middle of the story, it’s reasonable to wonder: How much do the early chapters in The Life and Times of My Enduring Self determine what happens in the middle and the end?

Some will tell you the beginning has everything to do with what happens in the middle and the end. Saint Ignatius Loyola: “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.” Not so fast, with all due respect. Those who rely not on faith but on long-term data will tell you that nothing’s set in stone when you’re seven years old. It’s nature, nurture, and dumb luck.

By way of longitudinal example: In 1938, the Department of Hygiene at Harvard launched what became known as the Grant Study. It would be an ambitious long-term probe into how life stories unfold. Funding for the project came from W. T. Grant, the five-and-dime magnate, himself a tenth-grade dropout. Grant saw the study as an opportunity to predict what makes for a reliable long-term store manager. Researchers would track men over the course of their entire lives, from Harvard Yard to the graveyard. The goal was to document how “the stress of modern pressures” affects one’s overall well-being.

Two hundred and sixty-eight student guinea pigs (all male) volunteered to take part in the study. Each was screened physically and psychologically. Those with problematic health histories, or current or potential medical risks, or men who showed signs of academic deficiencies were booted out. The authors of the study insisted that the guinea pigs be as robust as possible. Longer lives would yield richer data. Accordingly, twice as many muscular mesomorphs made the cut as skinny runts and pudgy marshmallows. The participants’ life stories were then tracked in meticulous detail through extensive self-reporting and periodic interviews. Nearly eight decades later, the study is still running, albeit with a severely reduced number of guinea pigs.

Some of the subjects, as you might imagine, went on to flourish while others flamed out. Everyone went through life’s wringer. Their bodily functions peaked within ten years of the project’s launch. By age forty, they started shrinking a half inch per decade; by fifty, their taste buds were faltering; by sixty, they required three times more light to read by than when they were students cramming at Widener Library. Blood vessels stiffened. Brain volume decreased. By seventy, many were unable to make out high-pitched consonants such as k, t, and p, and were complaining that their wives, kids, and bridge partners were all mumbling. Marriages and careers fell apart, often more than once. Colleagues and loved ones bit the dust. There were wars and economic calamities to cope with. Many lives were shattered by excessive drinking. But for a writer upstairs, that’s not the worst of it. The worst can be expressed in the nicest-sounding but dirtiest words a scribbler will ever hear: “Benign senescent forgetfulness.”

In one of his essays, Somerset Maugham observed, “What makes old age hard to bear is not a failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of our memories.” Give me a break! the writer-in-residence all but cries out. What makes old age hard to bear is loss of memory. Loss of memory equals loss of self.

Based on the results of the Grant Study, and with all due respect to Saint Ignatius Loyola, what a boy of seven needs if he’s likely to turn out okay is a warm and loving relationship with his parents. Give a boy of seven a warm and loving relationship with his mother and the Grant Study will show you a man more likely to have a more successful career than one who grew up without a mother. Or a mother who was cold and disinterested. Give him a warm and loving relationship with a father and the study will show you a man who was less likely to suffer from anxiety and more likely to enjoy his geriatric years.

But there are no guarantees even with warm and loving early chapters in The Life and Times of My Enduring Self. Many of the Harvard guinea pigs’ stories were fated from the beginning. “Sleeper effects” from childhood were identified. Some sleeper effects had a positive impact on the story—a remembered encounter with an inspiring teacher, or a young love affair warmly remembered. Some sleeper effects worked in reverse. They haunted the story line—the predisposition for alcohol abuse or depression. We’re all at risk. A damaging sleeper effect can flare up out of nowhere and torpedo the plot just when we’re getting to what’s supposed to be a really good part of the story.

PART II

The Middle

Maybe all I can do is hope to wind up with the right regrets.

—A character in Arthur Miller’s The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

7      Beware the Elbow

Established in the mid-nineteenth century, the old country graveyard is home to tombstones that go back a century earlier, marking remains relocated from an overcrowded neighboring cemetery. Wandering up and down the paths, I marveled at the trove of great stories that had found their way here, a golden treasury of finished stories, no longer works in progress.

There are tales of valor. A Revolutionary War casualty along with his five wives. An eighteen-year-old seaman third class killed in combat in the South Pacific; and his father, a US Army corporal who survived campaigns in China, Burma, and India. The father died at age ninety-five, outliving his son by over half a century. A lieutenant corporal, US Marines, winner of the Navy Cross and Purple Heart in Operation Iraqi Freedom, killed in action at age twenty. A dozen or so military challenge coins sit atop his black marble headstone.

There are tragedies at sea. Whaling captains and crew members who perished in storms, their tumultuous ends honored by a memorial in the form of a broken ship’s mast (“Entombed in the ocean, they live in our memory”).

There are love stories. PARTNERS FOREVER is chiseled across a tombstone. On the left side, a man’s name and dates. On the right, another man’s name but as yet no dates. George Balanchine, the ballet master, is buried not far from that stone. Not far from Balanchine is Alexandra Danilova, the celebrated ballerina who went to school with him in St. Petersburg. They lived for seven years as woman and husband, never marrying because Balanchine was married to somebody else.

There are family sagas. Massive monuments pay stolid tribute to patriarchs, while matriarchs get short shrift, simply their names and dates on unprepossessing slabs. Surrounding many parents’ markers are itty-bitty stones, some just small rocks reading BOY or GIRL. They were babies who died at childbirth or not long after. It was customary not to name children till there was reasonable assurance they’d survive smallpox or cholera. In the town records there’s an epitaph for one who didn’t make it: “A bud on earth will bloom in heaven.” If you’re a believer, to bloom in heaven is point enough. For others, blooming in heaven is beside the point. Was the child’s time on earth well rewarded? That’s the point, according to Tom Stoppard. In a play of his, Shipwreck, Stoppard wrote: “[The death] of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question.”

There are tragedies of pathos and despair. Spalding Gray, the author and monologist, lies silently here. Two months after he disappeared, suspected of jumping off the Staten Island Ferry, Gray’s body washed up along the East River in New York City. His tombstone reads AN AMERICAN ORIGINAL, TROUBLED, INNER-DIRECTED AND CAN-NOT TYPE.

There are forgotten stories. Weathered rocks with neither a date nor a full name, brown stones not much bigger than a pumpernickel. S.E.N. rests next to C.T.N., who in turn rests next to FATHER, 1884, & MOTHER. Whether these stones were kept deliberately spare out of humble intent or because carvers charged by the word are answers lost to history.

And I was surprised to discover a series of stories I’d known personally, some better than others: journalist Nelson Algren; editor Clay Felker; novelist William Gaddis, whose books run close to a thousand pages but whose tablet is inscribed with only his dates and a single word: PAPA. And there’s Bob Sklar, who taught film history at NYU, was thoughtful and soft-spoken, a good friend and one of the founding fathers of Rotisserie League Baseball.

Before they ended up here, the stories in the graveyard had moved every which way. Some had gotten better as they went along, others slid in reverse—“Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” the final words of The Great Gatsby, and the line engraved under Bob Sklar’s name and dates.

Many of the stories in the graveyard carry illustrations: olive branches, anchors, horseshoes, cherubs, lilies, columns, crosses, poppies, doves, hourglasses, shells, mermaids, roses, snakes. Plots are also garnished with what narrative psychologists refer to as “objects of reminiscence”: toy cars, beach toys, costume jewelry, tchotchkes bequeathed by family and friends. Me? I’d be pleased with a fountain pen, a mini–fly rod, a tiny baseball bat, the kind you get in a gumball machine. A few CDs would be warmly received. Sinatra at the Sands. Ahmad Jamal at the Penthouse, the first LP I ever bought. Anything Thelonious Monk, I’m not picky.

I trust I haven’t given you the impression that the writer upstairs serves as an ink-stained guardian angel who keeps your life story reliably pointed in the right direction from beginning to end. Not everyone has a literary heavyweight up there, and even the best authors lose their way. “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety pages of shit. I try and put the shit in the wastebasket,” Hemingway wrote to someone who’d asked about the secret of his success.

It’s often the middle of the story when trouble arises. The middle of any story presents a stern test for even the most accomplished author. The middle’s hazardous. The middle’s where a plot goes to unravel. It’s where characters are prone to fall apart. I can’t tell you how many times I ran into middle-muddle back when I was at Esquire. A writer, often a highly praised and generously paid writer, one who should have known better, would hand in a piece that started off like gangbusters. The first third was confident, even electric. Then, without warning, a faint tremor rattled off the page. An irrelevant reference. A paragraph inserted for no apparent reason. Huh? The wobbles intensified from there as the ground shifted from under the story, and after another page or two you knew you had a reclamation project on your hands.

The editors on staff had a shorthand way of referring to the troublesome midsection of a story. We called it the “elbow.” I’m not sure how that got started. I may have said it one day and it caught on. After that, when an article or short story circulated, there’d be comments such as “weak elbow,” “the elbow sucks,” or “brilliant until you get to the fucking elbow.”

The reason a piece of writing often falls apart at the elbow is that the writer sat down at the typewriter with a ton of great material and started pounding away, in love with his own voice. He hadn’t bothered to think very hard about the point of the story. How it might build to a satisfying conclusion. Say the story’s about Leo DiCaprio. Okay, what about Leo DiCaprio? The writer wasn’t sure what about Leo DiCaprio. This minor detail went unnoticed—the prose was deft, it swept you along—until the story made it to the middle, where it swerved, sometimes stalled, just the way many careers and marriages swerve and stall when they make it to the middle. What an online writing coach says about writing a story also applies to writing a life story: “The middle has to do more than just fill up the space between beginning and end. It should be a time of ‘rising conflict’ where the protagonist is tested up to (and often beyond) the limits of his ability.”

Because there isn’t universal agreement about when the middle of a life story starts and when it ends, let’s not fuss over it. It’s when a leading character’s “no longer young but not yet old,” as some researchers define it. It’s when our focus shifts from “time since birth” to “time to live,” a gerontologist will say. If that’s still too vague, let’s leave it that midlife begins at forty and ends at sixty. For many, this stretch equates to twenty years of bad road. E. L. Doctorow once compared writing to driving a car in the fog. You can see only as far as your headlights but eventually you get where you’re going. For the writer upstairs, getting through midlife can be like typing at night without a desk lamp. And you may or may not get to where you’d like to go.

If you’re currently of a certain age, midlife or older, you grew up primed to be apprehensive about the middle of your life story. An almost certain cataclysm loomed. You hit the Big Four-O and all hell breaks loose. Your spouse is boring. Your kids have devolved into irredeemable louts. Your career’s dead in the water. A full set of these sorry symptoms can still be found on Dr. Phil’s website. In no particular order of anguish: You lament goals not achieved. You obsess over your appearance. You hanker for adventure. You wonder why you ever married her (him). You feel hopelessly tied down. You’re consumed with nostalgia. Sound eerily familiar? To me, too. If these be the hallmarks of the classic middle-age crisis, mine’s been on low-to-high simmer since my late twenties.

Still, I confess I was doubly spooked when news broke of a male menopause. By age fifty, I read in a magazine, my hormone production would tank, my head would bald, my sexual vigor would diminish, my parents would die. My friends would be clutching at their chests as our collective past floated by in a haze of hopes not realized, opportunities not grasped, potentials not realized, men or women not bedded. Looking to the future, all I’d see was my own mortality.

According to a raft of magazine articles and books in the seventies and eighties, our all-but-guaranteed rendezvous with menopausal doom fits neatly into one or another “human life course” model. Depending on the template, the human life course is composed of a series of ages, stages, phases, seasons, or passages. It’s comforting, isn’t it, to look at life this way? It doesn’t seem quite so unruly if there’s a schematic that explains life from A to Z. There’s nothing new about our search for a blueprint that satisfies. One night on a business trip, marooned at an airport hotel due to a canceled flight, I ordered a pizza and settled in to listen to a Joseph Campbell lecture on Dante’s four ages of man. (It was either that or the gentleman’s club across the road.) Campbell clearly relished Dante’s take on the human life course. There are four extended chapters. The first, which Dante called “adolescence,” is all about personal growth. We learn how to conduct ourselves with good manners, speak courteously, and so on. It gets us to our mid-twenties. The second stage, which Campbell refers to as “maturity,” spans the next two decades, age thirty-five being the critical midpoint. Now it’s all about “doing our job,” as Campbell puts it. We apply what we’ve learned in adolescence to transforming the world around us. We exercise courage, love, loyalty, “our knightly virtues,” in other words. Forty-five to seventy is “old age.” The task now is to give advice, impart wisdom and justice, be generous and affable to those around us. Finally, we reach the fourth stage, “senility” or “decline” or “decrepitude”—they’ve all been applied. Now is when we look back on our life with gratitude and look forward to “going home.” These four stages correspond to the daily transit of the sun: morning, afternoon, evening, and nightfall.

Shakespeare offered an alternative scenario in the immortal “All the World’s a Stage” soliloquy. We go from Baby (“puking in the nurse’s arms”) to Schoolboy (“creeping like [a] snail / Unwillingly to school”) to Lover (“sighing like [a] furnace”) to Soldier (“quick in quarrel”) to Justice (wise and with “fair round belly”) to Old Guy (shriveled and shrunken) to Really Old Guy, a helpless, debilitated bag of bones (“Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”).

In the 1970s and 1980s, psychologists stepped up to put the kibosh on all this poetic folderol. Forget the evocative metaphors, bring on some hard data. Magazines, newspapers, and self-help books feasted on a groaning board of studies purporting to illuminate what Yale professor Daniel J. Levinson called one of the best-kept secrets in our society and “probably in human history”—“the concrete character of adult life.” How best to nail it down? By chartering a multidisciplinary team of psychologists, psychiatrists, and sociologists—no poets or philosophers need apply. Under Levinson’s lead, the social scientists analyzed the testimony of forty men ranging in age from late afternoon to slightly later afternoon (Dante Standard Time). The study, documented in a book called The Seasons of a Man’s Life, focused on what many judge to be a less-than-representative sampling of guys. All forty men lived in the Northeast Corridor. Six of the forty happened to be novelists. That alone gives me pause. Martin Amis says novelists are a breed apart. They have two ways of talking about themselves: either they feign false modesty or they indulge their inner egomaniac, viewing one another as “blind worms in a ditch, slithering pointlessly around, getting nowhere.” From them we’re going to extrapolate the answer to one of the best-kept secrets in human history?

Methodological objections notwithstanding, the research findings generated plenty of media attention. Lots of juicy stuff to run with. In the preface to Seasons, Levinson notes that “middle age activates our deepest anxieties about decline and dying.” He decries how “overly negative imagery of old age adds greatly to the burden of middle age.” By the time a guy reaches his late thirties, he’s a lost lamb, reckoning with how well he’s fared in becoming his own man. With the precision of an expert arborist who’s carefully counted the rings on a tree stump, and based on the limited sample of men who all live in the Northeast Corridor, Levinson says the most challenging midlife transition ordinarily begins at age forty or forty-one and lasts five years or so: “We doubt that a true Mid-life transition can begin before age 38 or after 43.” While some men manage to escape the ravages of the elbow, the large majority—80 percent—have evidenced “tumultuous struggles within the self and with the external world.” They must straddle the “polarities” of being Young/Old, Masculine/Feminine, Destructive/Creative, and Attached/Separate.

It took almost twenty years, but Daniel Levinson went on to publish The Seasons of a Woman’s Life, a better-late-than-never acknowledgment that half the human race also has a life cycle to plow through. In his preface to the women’s book, Levinson explains, not altogether convincingly, that he started with men mostly out of a desire to understand his own adult development. He offers an apology for the many centuries science has held fast to a male-centered view of adult life. Now, however, “a gender revolution” is under way, the result being a breakdown of the division of labor “between female homemaker and the male provisioner.” Women are living longer, devoting proportionately less time to a “domestic career.” The divorce rate further reinforces their need for job skills that will allow them to take care of themselves. A homemaker who makes it to the “Mid-Life Transition,” her early forties, typically suffers through a “rock bottom” marital experience: a relationship that’s likely to be arid and stagnant, with infrequent sex, usually at her initiative, Levinson observes. A woman’s self-interest now has to be served through personal struggle and individual development. This requires her to ask “with greater urgency than ever before: Who am I? What is most important to me? How will I try to live in the next season of my life?” Chilling questions. “They raise the possibility of drastic, frightening changes in a self and a life structure that… are not readily altered.” “Every season has its own time, although it is part of and colored by the whole,” Levinson writes. “No season is intrinsically better or more important than any other.” The changing of the seasons, the transitions between all of them, are stormy. Transitioning into the midlife season is especially harrowing, replete with depression, anxiety, and the urge to take “manic flight.”

While there were conceptual differences among the modern human-life-course models, a common denominator was the presumption that each successive stage augurs a changing pattern of behavior. Psychiatrist Roger Gould saw a fundamental push-pull at work between and within each stage. It’s what Levinson referred to as a “polarity”—opposing tendencies or conditions. We’re being tugged back to the “safety” of our childhood while at the same time drawn forward by our need to be “autonomous”—in control of our own destiny. When we get to our late thirties or early forties, our kids (whom we’ve probably screwed up by now) have reached adolescence and are beyond our remedial grasp. We’ve become useless as parents. Our careers are likewise meh, beyond salvation. “We stand naked and exposed, toe to toe with life. Our naiveté is lost forever,” wrote Gould in Transformations. The challenge is how to move forward, how to “grow.”

The most popular human-life-course book proved to be Gail Sheehy’s Passages, which leaned heavily on both Gould’s and Levinson’s theories. Gould thought Sheehy leaned too heavily, suing her for plagiarism before agreeing to an out-of-court settlement. Amid the legal battles, the book sat atop bestseller lists for years and even today is promoted as a “humane, widescreen view of adulthood [that] speaks eloquently to men and women, to couples and singles, to ‘wunderkinds’ and late bloomers, to careerists and homemakers.… [The] only book that brings together a coherent vision of the passages we must all take through the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties toward what is potentially the best of life.” Still, a river of fear runs through it: “There is nobody to keep you safe. There is nobody who will not ever leave you.”

But before anyone jumps to the conclusion that fear-mongering the human life course was little more than trumped-up sensationalizing to sell books and newspapers, consider three case studies I’ve chosen from among many qualifying ones. Two involve towering figures who shaped Western civilization and whose midlife stories must bear serious consideration. The third was a lamentable shmuck who lived on Peapod Lane in suburban Connecticut.

Midlife Crisis Exhibit A is an 1884 essay by Leo Tolstoy. It’s titled A Confession, though it’s tempting to refer to it as “Tolstoy’s Complaint.”

Writing shortly before he turned fifty, the Russian master confessed to discomfiting fits of anxiety. When he was younger, everything was on the ascendance: “My muscles were growing and strengthening, my memory was being enriched, my capacity to think and understand was increasing, I was growing and developing.” As long as the trajectory was moving in the right direction, Tolstoy tried to convince himself that there was order to the universe, confident he’d discover a “universal law in which I should find the solution of the question of my life.”

Then, in the midst of a career already burnished by success—by now he’d written Anna Karenina and War and Peace—and even though Tolstoy was blessed with a loving family and sufficient rubles to be more than comfortable, things came unhinged: “Something very strange began to happen to me. At first I began having moments of bewilderment, when my life would come to a halt, as if I did not know how to live or what to do; I would lose my presence of mind and fall into a state of depression. But this passed, and I continued to live as before. Then the moments of bewilderment recurred more frequently, and they always took the same form. Whenever my life came to a halt, the questions would arise: Why? And what next?”

Driving at night in the fog, Tolstoy had run out of gas in the middle of midlife. He was fifty-one. Why, and what’s next? he asked. Death is what’s next. The more Tolstoy ruminated over his inevitable demise, the more he fretted that life was little more than “a stupid and spiteful joke.” How does one respond to such emptiness? Tolstoy studied how his “narrow circle of equals,” people like himself (educated, comfortable enough) were wrestling with the problem. He observed that we deal with our sorry predicament in one of four ways. To paraphrase:

1. We keep ourselves ignorant. We try not to think too hard about the point. What we haven’t figured out won’t keep us up at night.

2. We eat, drink, merry our way to the end. It’s how the Most Interesting Man in the World is dealing with late middle age. By staying thirsty, my friend.

3. We do the only brave and honorable thing: take gun, knife, pills, or exhaust pipe to the problem. Tolstoy said he could not bring himself to take this step, but we all know of those who could and did. A former neighbor of ours swallowed a bottle of pills then leaped off the old Tappan Zee Bridge. Whether in his case it was an act of philosophical, midlife courage, or a response to mounting debt, or a stroke of insanity, or all of the above, is a matter of interpretation.

4. We have no better solution than to live out our days in zoned-out uselessness, waiting for the final buzzer. Here’s where Tolstoy regretfully placed himself.

It wasn’t as if Tolstoy hadn’t already searched high and low for a better answer. Over the years he’d looked for the point “amid the gleams of mathematical and experimental science.” He found no satisfying answer there. He’d also looked to philosophy for solace, concluding that Socrates, King Solomon, and Buddha all viewed life as but the lounge act for the Grim Reaper, the eternal headliner. From Schopenhauer all he got was “the passage into Nothingness is the only good in life.” Borscht, cold borscht, for the soul. Undaunted, Tolstoy didn’t zip around on a Vespa, hitting on Crimean hotties half his age. Instead, he pondered the essence of Christ’s teachings, weighing them against how the church had exploited the scriptures in order to feather its own nave. He concluded that each of us is already invested with the essential teachings of Christ; that the purpose of life on earth is to serve not our lower animal nature but the power to which our higher nature recognizes its kinship with the Gospels, as Tolstoy scholar Ernest J. Simmons interprets the awakening. The point is to use that power to do good. This awareness is not lost on everyone, Tolstoy realized, only on some of us. The teachings are alive and well in the souls of honest, common working folk.

“In contrast with what I had seen in our circle,” Tolstoy wrote, “where the whole of life is passed in idleness, amusement, and dissatisfaction, I saw that the whole life of these people was passed in heavy labour, and that they were content with life. [They] accepted illness and sorrow without any perplexity or opposition, and with a quiet and firm conviction that all is good. In contradistinction to us, who the wiser we are the less we understand the meaning of life, and see some evil irony in the fact that we suffer and die, these folk live and suffer, and they approach death and suffering with tranquility.”

Tolstoy thus found his calling by reimagining the restorative power of faith. He didn’t genuflect back to the orthodoxy of his earlier religious upbringing. He didn’t launch a megachurch in the Russian sunbelt. He rediscovered in the Gospels the answers he was seeking. They lay in plainspoken precepts: rein in anger and lust; be kind to all men. He spent his remaining three decades as a Christian anarchist, preaching austerity, believing wholly in the Ten Commandments while holding the established church and authoritarian state in equal contempt. In this way, Tolstoy hit upon the elusive point and nipped his midlife crisis before it doomed what remained of his story.

Midlife Crisis Exhibit B: Had Tolstoy booked a therapy session with Carl Jung, he’d have heard a very different explanation for what was roiling his Russian soul in midlife. In his late thirties, Jung himself struggled mightily through his own major crisis. “A constant state of tension,” as he described it. He suffered hallucinations, heard voices in his head, imagined blocks of stone raining down from above. Thunderstorms raged, episodes so severe he relied on yoga exercises to keep his emotions in check. “I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in it seemed difficult and incomprehensible,” Jung wrote in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.

Having sampled midlife hell, and strongly influenced by Hinduism, Jung formulated his own map to the human life course. Like Dante’s, Jung’s scheme extends from morning to night. In the early hours, we exist as a “problem for others,” our job eventually being to cobble together an ego. In the afternoon, it’s to cope with conscious problems such as declaring independence from our parents and making a go of working, mating, and raising a family. In the evening hours when we reach old age, we “descend again into that condition where… we once more become something of a problem for others.” Life in the mid-to late afternoon is particularly unsettling. Jung observed that there was a dramatic rise in depression among patients when they entered their forties, particularly for men. Neurotic traits buried from childhood often resurface—what the Grant Study referred to as “sleeper effects.”

What’s going on here, Jung said, is a standoff with one’s unconscious. Like the sun, we grow weaker in the afternoon. We sense something’s missing. It’s akin to separation anxiety, but from what or whom? From the who we used to be, the who we were earlier in the day. We long for our former strength and effectiveness. We miss being Nurturer in Chief, Chief Family Medical Officer, Master or Mistress of the Family Universe. We feel less potent at the office and in the sack. Now is when daddy, having attained power and influence at work, feels increasingly feeble. He shimmies into jeans too skinny for someone his age. He so desperately wants it to be morning again that he can’t keep his sunrise boner in his pants. A stay-at-home mom, no longer with kids at home, reasserts her authority as best she can. She turns into what Joseph Campbell uncharitably mansplained was a “power monster,” a harridan who won’t let her paunchy spouse snack in the media room lest he drip ketchup on the recliner.

What do you do to quell this aching longing for the you who used to be? How do you shuck off the lethargy and gloom? Accept it, Jung said. Come midlife, you need to acknowledge that the younger you wasn’t built to last. Yet we assume otherwise, don’t we? Studies show that we typically believe that the we we are now will be the we we’ll always be. Psychologists call this “the end of history illusion.” One of the authors of such a study, Daniel T. Gilbert, said that “At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.” It’s useless to try to reclaim the old you, according to Jung. The old you can’t be resurrected by anything so banal as sleeping with younger partners, or by overimbibing or undergoing cosmetic face work. Nor, Jung wrote (giving the fish eye to his mentor Freud), will you make peace with your old self by lying on a couch and obsessing over what demons lurk in your unconscious past. Instead, you must find a pathway to the core of your being, discover the true self that lies within. The only way forward is individuation. We need to try to make ourselves whole.

In Jungian terms, thus does midlife trigger an archetypal crisis. Murray Stein, a leading Jungian psychoanalyst, describes it this way: “You wake up one day and you’re unexpectedly out of gas… the sweet milk of achievement is sour… the old patterns of coping and acting pinch your feet. The ability to prize your favorite objects—your ‘works’: children, possessions, power positions, accomplishments—has been stolen, and you are left wondering what happened last night? Where did it go?”

Midlife Crisis Exhibit C: There was a time in my lifetime when everywhere you turned you saw your future diminishing in front of your soon-to-be-failing eyes—you saw it in books, movies, New Yorker cartoons. The most depressing preview of what lay in store was Joseph Heller’s 1974 novel, Something Happened. The blackest of comedies, it chronicles the wretched existence of Bob Slocum, middle-aged basket case. When Heller conceived the plot, his previous work, Catch-22, was already out but had not yet caught on. He had no clue as to what he’d do next. Then, one day as he brooded on his Fire Island deck, the plot details and the story’s leading character came to him in a flash. It then took Heller a dozen difficult years to finish the book, the whole of his fearful forties and beyond.

A friend of mine, a veteran book editor, considers Something Happened “the best novel of the last half of the twentieth century.” But he says he hasn’t had the nerve to look at it since it came out, he was that bummed the first time through. I hadn’t gone back to it either, not until I was researching midlife and forced myself to reread the book.

Strictly speaking, I realized this time around, it isn’t midlife per se that turns a well-adjusted human being into a contemptible, cowardly jerk. Bob Slocum was always a contemptible, cowardly jerk, afraid of the dark from the day he was born, fearful that he would open his eyes and it would still be dark. Midlife, however, has loosened his screws even further. Slocum misses being young, fears getting old, disparages his colleagues (of whom he’s terrified), finds promiscuous sex with younger women less pleasurable than it’s cracked up to be. He daydreams about divorcing his wife but is overwhelmed by the mechanics of filing for a divorce. At the dinner table each night, his teenage daughter taunts and ridicules him. His prepubescent son “wants to cast me away and leave me behind for reasons he won’t give me.” It gets even worse. A third child, born with brain damage, is a social embarrassment. This is not an admirable person, it’s clear from page one. Anyone who’s read the book will remember the immortal opening lines: “I get the willies when I see closed doors… the sight of a closed door is… enough to make me dread that something horrible is happening behind it, something that is going to affect me adversely.” The dreadful “something” that happens happens at the very end of the story, which I won’t give away. In between, and relentlessly so, Bob Slocum’s midlife doesn’t amount to an existential hill of beans. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Kurt Vonnegut referred to Slocum’s predicament as a “written-to-death situation”—that situation being existential angst in general, life at the perilous elbow in particular.

Tolstoy found his way out of midlife darkness through the unfettered teachings of Jesus. Jung found his way via the pathway to individuation. Slocum, too, sees a speck of light at the end of midlife’s dark tunnel: “I know at last what I want to be when I grow up,” he says. “When I grow up I want to be a little boy.” In other words, Slocum misses the person he used to be, exactly what Jung had warned us about. “I miss the forsaken child,” Slocum says.

Just a couple of years after Something Happened appeared, another something happened, according to Tom Wolfe. It was a cultural shift that wasn’t remotely anticipated or alluded to once in the 569 pages of Heller’s grim but hilarious novel. Bob Slocum’s suburban neighbors made a mad dash for daylight. However they could pull it off, they were determined to get whole. In his zeitgeist-defining essay “The Me Decade,” Wolfe chortled over how every Tom, Dick, and Harriet in the suburbs was working to reboot by emulating affluent seekers such as those pictured in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, who in turn were following in the barefootsteps of hippie communalists. Middle-class dunderheads were leaving hearth and kin to make solitary pilgrimages to the Wailing Wall or Konark Sun Temple. Or they were spending their weekends getting Rolfed; or being indoctrinated into est or Arica. It was, in Wolfe’s view, the start of the “Third Great Awakening” in American spiritual history.

What everyone had awakened to was how easy it was to remake, remodel, elevate, or otherwise transform one’s existing self into a more enlightened and whole human being. Everyone suddenly felt entitled to write their own ending to the well-worn Clairol slogan: “If I have only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” Just take out “blonde” and fill in the blank you wanted to be: Free spirit? Transcendental meditator? Primal screamer? Moonie? Nowhere in the long essay does Wolfe mention what lay at the core of all this questing—the search for a meaningful life story.

With the benefit of hindsight, we may take a more considered view of the Me Decade. It was the start of the American “Soul Rush,” in the words of Marion Goldman, a professor of religion. It was the dawn of the age of “spiritual privilege.” Suddenly, we could mix and match ideas and traditions from all over the world and throughout history to try to find some semblance of spiritual fulfillment. And there was quite a smorgasbord out there to sample: Zen, yoga, tai chi, African drumming, workshops on integrating the mind, body, spirit, and psyche. When I was a kid, all we had on the spirituality menu was a shul on the one hand, and on the other, a downtown Russian-style bathhouse, the shvitz, a dank labyrinth of rooms reeking of pine-scented disinfectant, where for a little extra you could pay a husky Eastern European attendant to pummel your back with a yenik of palm fronds.

The great Soul Rush began in California—where else? Ground zero was the Esalen Institute in Big Sur; yes, the place that inspired the shooting location for Don Draper’s mountaintop epiphany, the one that made him (more or less) whole in the final episode. The national media had a field day with Esalen back then: nudity in the coed hot tubs; mind-bending trips fueled by LSD; ego-blasting encounter groups with uncontrolled hugging and weeping. Esalen was easy to make fun of. But in fact, Esalen’s magical hot springs fed directly into the mainstream, bringing the New Age along with it. Back in the day at Esquire, George Leonard, one of Esalen’s early apostles, wrote regular features under the rubric “Ultimate Fitness.” He applied his mastery of aikido—George was a black belt—to improving not just a yuppie’s physical condition, but clarifying his mind and enhancing his spirit in the process. It’s called realizing our human potential. Esalen was where the pioneers of humanistic psychology gathered for symposia that emphasized the primacy of personal growth. Esalen incubated the notion that each of us has an inalienable right to find spiritual and emotional satisfaction without having to set foot in a traditional house of worship. Big Sur was its own church. It was here at Esalen that a new religion was born: “the religion of no religion.” You could baptize yourself in a spiritual hot tub filled with leading-edge psychologists, futurists, mystics, and philosophers, from Abraham Maslow to Aldous Huxley to Alan Watts. And on any given day, run into a familiar face in the dining lodge—Dyan Cannon and Cary Grant, Jane Fonda, etc.

It was, and still is, easy to punch holes in Esalen. It was male-dominated, pulsing with erotic and psychedelic avails, all comprehensively documented in Jeffrey J. Kripal’s mostly reverent history of Esalen. There was psychodrama aplenty. Gestalt psychologist Fritz Perls, an Esalen fixture, traveled to Hollywood, where he led a poolside encounter session at Jennifer Jones’s home. Natalie Wood was assigned the “hot seat.” Frustrated in his attempts to pry loose anything that amounted to a closely guarded secret (gestalt denotes a whole that’s more than the sum of its parts, so you can’t hold anything back), Perls lost it, calling Wood “a spoiled brat” and attempted to put her on his knee for a good spanking. Rushing to her defense, Roddy McDowall offered to fight Perls. Wood stalked out of the party without saying ciao. Not long after, according to George Leonard’s account, the same thing, minus the spanking, happened between Perls and Tuesday Weld.

As part of my research, and with Linda along to protect me from evil shamans hiding among the giant redwoods, I signed up for a workshop at Esalen. The hope was to gain a deeper, more holistic understanding of the Esalen mystique. I’d been curious about the place ever since Leonard started writing for Esquire. Though it’s evolved over the years—it’s in part a corporate conference center now—my expectations ran high, and in many ways Esalen delivered on them. You really do find yourself slipping into “being mode.” There’s not a more spectacularly beautiful place on earth: the ocean crashing against the rocks, the seabirds, seals, sunsets, they’re all timelessly breathtaking. The coed hot springs are exactly as advertised. They leave a body wholer than ever. The workshop itself? Well, let’s put it this way: not my cup of oolong. The facilitator of the week-long session opened the agenda by slipping on a red clown’s nose and a rainbow-colored Afro wig. He then performed a pantomime—not my favorite form of performance art—which I was too unenlightened or impatient to comprehend. We were then handed cards with animals printed on them (I was a beaver, Linda was a squirrel, if memory serves). We were instructed to hold our card to our forehead without looking at it—a variation on what binge-drinking frat boys call the “forehead idiot game.” We were invited to roam the room to find the only other person with the same creature on his or her head.

It was then that I decided that my week-long plunge into wholeness would be better served by trekking the incomparable cliffs and forests of Big Sur. At night when we returned from those hikes, I read Henry Miller’s memoir of his years living along the jagged coastline. This was decades before there was Esalen and a religion of no religion. No, that’s not right. Before there was Esalen. A religion of no religion had been in place for a very long time. Every morning, Miller writes in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, he opened his cabin door and raised his hand in benediction. He blessed the trees, the birds, the dogs, the cats. He blessed the flowers, the pomegranates, the thorny cactus. He blessed men and women everywhere. “An inviting land, but hard to conquer,” Miller said of Big Sur. It was “the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look.”

Meanwhile, back in the real world and living in the now, it’s reasonable for us to wonder: Did our growing awareness of our own potential, our quest for wholeness, our adoption of a religion of no religion, reduce the severity of what we used to think of as the “midlife crisis”? Or was there never a generalizable midlife curse to begin with, Tolstoy, Jung, and Bob Slocum’s considerable traumas notwithstanding?

Whatever happened, as Dan McAdams observes, by the end of the 1980s we were no longer moaning about our middle-age crisis, we were cracking jokes about it, telling ourselves to enjoy the fun because sooner rather than later life would return to normal. Are we that much more enlightened and sure of ourselves now? Is it our daily use of homeopathic eyedrops that did the trick? Our disciplined insistence on sustainable seafood? Our ten minutes of Hatha each morning? Have we been narcotized by digital technology? Has a new generation of antidepressants put a lid on the midlife blues? Or was there really no such thing as a generalizable midlife crisis embedded in the universal human life course?

The fact is, hardly anybody today refers to the midlife crisis with the same foreboding as they did back in Bob Slocum’s day. Indeed, numerous studies over the past couple of decades reached the conclusion that midlife itself has little to do with whatever torment we’re feeling in our forties and fifties. A paper in the journal Gerontology reminds us that twenty-five-year-old men also buy red sports cars. If, in my early forties, I did set new goals for myself, it was because I’d either succeeded in, failed at, or gotten tired of my old goals. It takes a while to even have goals, after all. At twenty-five I didn’t have any, so what was to reset?

Simply stated, there’s “no evidence for specific changes in personality due to age,” one extensive midlife survey concluded. “What changes… are your roles and the issues that matter most to you. People may think their personality has changed as they age, but it is their habits that change, their vigor and health, their responsibilities and circumstances—not their basic personality.” The report noted that if you’re reasonably content and emotionally together at twenty-five, you’ll be reasonably content and emotionally together a few decades later. Indeed, studies show that in many professional fields one’s forties are our most productive decade. They point to how seniors look back on their forties and fifties as their most fondly recalled chapters. “The stereotype that people become cranky and rigid as they age does not hold up,’’ one study said. How we feel about our life story depends on the day, not the season.

But some studies have turned up tantalizing gender differences. Women in midlife become “less guilty about aggressive and egocentric impulses.” About time! Men grow “more receptive to affiliative and nurturant promptings.” About time for that, too! Men more commonly take stock of their accomplishments and attempt to map out fresh goals. Why more men than women? Women, a researcher speculates, are by nature more “self-reflective” throughout their lives. So, reading between the lines, it doesn’t come as such a swift kick in the groin to discover that life doesn’t always deliver on its promises.

8      Interlude: Other Voices

Throughout this project I opened conversations with a diverse group of men and women who were willing to answer intimate questions about how their life stories were playing out. I wasn’t after stories of operatic dimension, lives wracked with unusual distress or graced with saintly purpose. These were ordinary people who ranged from twenty-somethings to seniors. As far as I know, no one was filthy rich or destitute. No one was famous. There’s little reason to think any of them will be remembered a hundred years from now. I mostly wanted a reality check on how we think of our life as a story, with chapters, characters, turning points, a beginning, a middle, and, sooner or later, an end.

A few people I talked to were leery of my snooping into other people’s life stories. It was a dicey business, they admonished. Who died and made me Plutarch? A friend looked at me cross-eyed when I told him I was working on a book about what the point was. Like Oscar and Felix, we’ve been bickering about anything and everything for decades, going back to when we were young editors in New York City. My Oscar can be nettlesome. (His wife, only half kiddingly, says her tombstone will read “I Lie Corrected.”) But Oscar is uncommonly astute, and I value his counsel. And it’s not as if there’s a sage under every lamppost. In fact, I just typed “sage” into the Craigslist search box and it returned exactly one result—a Chicago party planner.

“You’re talking about the meaning of life, right?” Oscar asked. “That’s ‘the point’ you’re referring to?”

I nodded, bracing for the controlled aggression I’ve come to know and love. Oscar advised me to be extra careful. He said not everyone has the “luxury”—adequate time or means—to go looking for what life’s point is, as if access to the answer is reserved for the top 1 percent, akin to copping a Hamptons beach-parking sticker. He said readers with kids to raise and/or aging parents who require care, those working double shifts or who can’t find jobs, people who don’t live in New York or L.A., billions everywhere who devoutly believe in a supreme being, all these and others were primed to be pissed off at someone like me mucking around “the point.” Not only that, Oscar continued, clearly looking to fire another missile, I’d had a career that wasn’t “typical” and would strike many as hard to relate to.

I was tempted to push back but held my tongue. The older I get, the more inclined I am to let things go. Who has time to spar? In younger days I would have launched into a sermon on how finding meaning isn’t a luxury. How there are studies that show that those who struggle to find purpose suffer from a broad range of emotional disorders, phobias, and substance abuse, up and down the socioeconomic ladder. That finding meaning can be more challenging for those who are reasonably comfortable—more choices, distractions, superficial wants that scramble priorities. How throughout history it didn’t matter if you were rich or poor, a pharaoh or Neanderthal, you faced the same bleak abyss. Surveys indicate that personal attachments are the prime determinants of life satisfaction, far surer predictors than income, age, gender, race, or GPA. As for my career, Oscar and I both know it’s been more erratic than calculated, built on a lucky break that happened when I was too young to know what I was doing. But no, my life’s not “typical.” I was going to ask him whose is, but checked myself there as well.

I thanked Oscar for his feedback and concern. I told him I’d be mindful. And that I’d make sure to say loud and clear how grateful I am—I’m grateful!—that I now could take the time to figure out why I’m here, why any of us are here.

Oscar and I then had a brief spat over something I don’t exactly remember, but I’m sure it was existentially pressing—e.g., who was the better horn player, Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins?

Unbowed, I plowed ahead and engaged complete strangers on matters of life, death, and meaning. Saying nothing about any scribbler upstairs, I prodded them with questions such as these:

Do you ever think about the so-called meaning of life?

A man in his mid-sixties said that he does all the time. He and his wife have taken to reading aloud to each other. When you read serious fiction, he said, you’re always contending with what matters in life. (That answer earned a gold star in my book.)

Looking back on your life, what’s been the least meaningful chapter?

A woman in her fifties said it was the four years she’d spent working as a lawyer. “Dehumanizing—fifty-hour workweeks and systematic pressure to obtain billable hours.”

If your life story were to be narrated, whose voice would you like to hear read it?

A woman in her mid-twenties said Joseph Campbell, explaining that she likes to think of her life in mythological terms, as a kind of journey.

When you were growing up, was there a particular character in a book you identified with?

A woman in her early thirties mentioned a book called The Road to Damietta by Scott O’Dell. She said it’s about a young girl who falls in love with Saint Francis, renounces her possessions, cuts off her hair, and ministers to lepers in order to remain close to Francis. She’d found the point.

Where do you think your story will go from here—in five years or in ten?

A man in his late fifties said he doesn’t have a bucket list, then shifted into talking about his sons. One’s in his late twenties, the other in his early thirties. The man worries that they’re floundering professionally, so if he did have a bucket list, it would consist of doing something to help his sons figure things out.

What, if anything, would you like to outlive you?

“My daughter,” said a man in his forties. “I can’t think of anything else.”

Talk to me about time. How conscious are you of it?

A woman in late midlife said that technology’s causing her to be “hyperfocused,” but not on anything she thinks is worth focusing on. She said this is the first time in her life she routinely loses track of time. It’s not the dreaded onset, she was quick to clarify. It’s all those cable channels with nothing worth watching. It’s TMZ, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, the Yahoo! News page. The result, if you ask me, is that we pay what’s been called “continuous partial attention” to everything and full attention to little or nothing. I read somewhere that people fifty and older spend an average of about thirty hours a week online. Assuming you have twenty years left to live, you’ll spend a full three and a half of those years checking stock quotes and pinning photos of holiday sweaters.

Most people seemed flattered to be asked questions like the ones above. As they became more comfortable, they’d admit to a host of coulda’s and shoulda’s. And woulda, had not x, y, or z gotten in the way: Went to the wrong school. Did what my parents wanted. (Or didn’t listen to my parents, and for once they were right.) Had mouths to feed, what else could I do? Was young and foolish. Didn’t have the guts. Had I only known then what I know now.

These cascading woulda’s and shoulda’s came as no surprise. I’d heard them all before. Some years ago, I wrote a book about why many of us confuse money with what really matters, carrying on a tortured relationship with money that lasts over the human life course. Money drives families apart; screws up priorities; befogs the point. One of the takeaways was that we’re not altogether sure what money’s good for. Or we think it allows for “the abstract satisfaction of every wish,” as Schopenhauer said.

To help readers put money in its proper place, I included an exercise I borrowed from a financial adviser. It asks that you imagine you have only twenty-four hours to live—so think hard about “Who you did not get to be” and “What you did not get to do.” You’d think, wouldn’t you, that there’d be a huge number of different answers to “Who did you not get to be?” and “What did you not get to do?” But there aren’t. Our answers fall into a handful of categories: Didn’t give enough back. Didn’t make peace with a loved one. Worked too hard. Wasn’t creative enough.

The interviewees for this book echoed those answers. A good many of the woulda’s and shoulda’s were connected to a perceived untapped talent of some sort. “I wasn’t creative enough,” basically. A middle-aged woman told me she still fantasizes about being the lead singer in a rock band. A middle-aged man secretly thinks he’s the second coming of Johnny Cash. Someone else is trying to reclaim a passion for painting that’s been dormant since college. A good friend’s auditing a course in journal writing.

As for what traveling through the elbow specifically sounds like, here’s what some people said:

A soon-to-be midlifer, on the road to a PhD, says she’s experiencing the most disappointing chapter of her life. She wishes she’d never started down the academic path. Almost from the beginning she realized she’d make a mistake but “didn’t have the courage to risk being perceived as a failure.” What she didn’t anticipate, she says, was how “useless an experience” her thesis would turn out to be. Useless as far as any knowledge it’s generating. Hopelessly useless as far as getting a job goes. She’s been looking for a job for a year and a half. She says if she could turn the clock back she’d pursue an MBA. “I’m feeling overqualified and completely lacking in basic skills,” she reports.

One man, fifty years old, an accountant who lives in a midsized midwestern city, goes on and on about how happy he is at work. Career satisfaction, however, isn’t doing much for the rest of his life. He says he knows “happiness comes from the inside” and yet he has talked repeatedly to a friend, a plastic surgeon, about getting a hair transplant. He keeps putting it off. “It might change people’s perception of me,” he says, “but inside I’d still be the same.”

A fifty-year-old woman, born in the United States and now living abroad, longs for “the writing life.” After earning a graduate degree in English Lit, she took a job in the corporate world, eventually married, and had three kids. The birth of the first she regards as the most meaningful chapter of her life. During her maternity leave she started a novel, then worked on the book for the next decade. It was eventually published after numerous rejections. With children still at home, she says she’s able to write only occasionally, a book review now and then. She yearns to do more. She says had she known then what she knows now, she’d have started writing when she was right out of school, when there was so much more time. She wishes she’d pushed herself harder, had been more “tenacious and confident.” It wasn’t procrastination that did her in, she said, something more “insidious and detrimental.” She didn’t think she was “any good,” so she held back.

A man in his mid-forties, living in Northern California, talks glowingly about how much his parents, a museum director and a curator, loved their careers. Their jobs were also their hobbies, he says, which is the ideal. Their personal passions carried right through the weekend, when they enjoyed going to auctions and restoring furniture together. He says he regrets having spent most of his own career in a corporate setting, where he built his “work muscles at the expense of his play muscles.”

A woman only now approaching the elbow lives in the Northeast and spent two years counseling victims of sex abuse in the military. She says she found the job frustrating because of how little progress is being made to confront the issue, which is widespread. Just “a lot of noise in the media,” she says. She’s currently working for a nonprofit devoted to women’s health issues, a mission she’s passionate about but the job doesn’t allow for “personal expression”; she’s tethered to official talking points. Recently she stopped drinking, which “had gotten to be a problem.” Moving into midlife marks a clear-cut pivot point, she says. When we’re past our twenties, she believes, we need to assume full responsibility for the choices we make.

A woman in her late forties with a run of health problems—Crohn’s disease, a misdiagnosed glandular condition followed by two strokes—says she’s lucky to have a good relationship with her husband, knock wood, who’s there to take care of her. Things are as good as can be expected, she says.

An insurance broker in Virginia, mid-sixties, recounts various personal misfortunes, concluding: “They made me aware of life’s impermanence—that anything can happen at any time.” He tells me he was drawn to Buddhist teachings in the hope they’d help him cope with adversities yet to come.

Now and then in a conversation, I’d reach back for the high, hard heat and throw out the $64,000 question:

The point. The meaning of your life. Do you ever think about that?

A few people grew peevish, exactly what Oscar had warned would happen. They said they were too busy surviving to gaze at their navels. Indeed. The real wealth of 90 percent of American families has been declining for years. Single parents and working couples struggle to find enough time to spend with their kids. Millions of middle-agers are woefully short of having what it takes to retire.

“What do you mean, ‘the point’?” one woman demanded. When I explained, she reacted as if I’d said I was compiling a guide to artisanal cheeses. “Oh,” she exclaimed in a startlingly loud voice. “The meaning of life! How timely!”

She was spot-on. The point is timely. It’s been timely since time began. I held my fire, though. I could have mentioned that the point was timely for Adam and Eve the instant they bit into the apple. It was timely back when we wrote with sticks and stones, when anonymous Mesopotamians carved The Epic of Gilgamesh onto a clay slab: “The life you seek, you will never find.” It was timely when Lao Tzu calligraphed the Tao Te Ching (“Heaven and earth are not sentimental; they regard all things as dispensable”). It was timely for the Greeks, who, if they made it out of infancy alive, went on to live almost as long as we do. It was timely when Christ returned to show us the Way. It was no less timely two millennia later when Nietzsche announced that God was dead: “Do we not feel the breath of empty space? How shall we comfort ourselves?” And timely when Bertrand Russell, philosopher/mathematician/activist/confirmed atheist, declared in his autobiography that the point was three things rolled together: love, because love relieves loneliness; knowledge, because knowledge enables us (in theory) to know how the universe works; empathy, because empathy allows us to hear the cries of pain of the oppressed in a world of poverty and pain. It was still timely when Time magazine reminded us that God was still dead on its famous 1966 cover. And it was as timely as ever two years after that when, on the very first page, the Whole Earth Catalog echoed what Nietzsche had said a century prior: “We are as gods, and might as well get good at it.”

And it was timely when jazz critic Nat Hentoff (with his CAPS LOCK key evidently jammed) wrote a letter to bassist Charles Mingus. It was in reply to a letter the musician had written Hentoff on the kind of night “you’re feeling the pain… and the larger questions that seem to have no answers loom up before your eyes”:

FOR ME A MAN’S MEANING, THE REASON HE HAS TO KEEP ON LIVING, IS THAT WERE HE TO LIVE… THOUSANDS OF YEARS HE WOULD NEVER FULFILL ALL HIS POSSIBILITIES, NEVER COMMUNICATE OR CREATE ALL HE IS CAPABLE OF. SO HE MUST USE WHAT TIME HE HAS CREATING NOW FOR THE FUTURE AND UTILIZE THE PAST ONLY TO HELP THE FUTURE, NOT AS A RAZOR STROP FOR GUILTS AND FEARS THAT INHIBIT HIS VERY BEING. OR LIKE IT SAID AT THE END OF A LABOR UNION SONG I LIKED A LOT WHEN I WAS A KID: WHAT IT MEANS IS, TAKE IT EASY, BUT TAKE IT.

I DON’T KNOW IF THIS HAS MADE SENSE OR IS OF ANY USE BUT IT’S WHAT I THINK.

NAT.

But however timely the point was, is, and will always be, it’s not so easily talked about. At dinner one night, I grilled a few friends about what makes their lives worth living. They were far more interested in assessing the pig’s bladder and the other dozen small plates on the table. Looking to outflank them, I resorted to a familiar party game. If you were stranded on a desert island, what would get you through your isolation? My friends, let’s face it, aren’t a particularly representative focus group unless you’re plumbing the psychographic proclivities of sardonic New York City gourmands in midlife. One of them, after thinking about what he’d need to fight off isolation and despair, said he’d pray that “eighteen pounds of marijuana” washed ashore. Another, looking gnomic, took mild exception, saying if there was booze on the island he’d opt for lansoprazole, a gastric-acid inhibitor. If there wasn’t booze, then a generous supply of Wellbutrin, the widely prescribed antidepressant.

9      Breathing Space

With each passing day in midlife, the past grows longer, our future shorter. While we know precisely how long the past is, the length of the future’s uncertain. Recently, a person I hired at Esquire fresh out of college dropped dead at age fifty-nine. Just a kid, right? Looking to the shrinking future, we may or may not have plans for what to do with it. Or our plan is to have a plan before it’s too late. Or we may not even have that, in which case the present and future appear blank or bleak. Plans or no plans, the past will grow longer still, the future that much shorter. A zero-sum game. It explains why in midlife the writer-in-residence is restless as a cat, hungry to take the story in a viable new direction. “At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary.

Okay, so maybe it’s not an all-out crisis. But something’s for sure going on.

An ex-pat living in Paris laments in an op-ed about how it feels to be a woman in her mid-forties who’s marooned in “the world’s epicenter of existentialism.” She complains that waiters call her “Madam” without so much as an ironic wink. (Ouch.) She finds there are “no grown-ups anymore,” everyone’s just “winging it.” If there’s a bright side, it’s that she no longer needs to pretend she likes jazz or feel inadequate that she doesn’t know how to cook a leek. (Really—what’s so hard about cooking a leek?)

Or maybe you’re just feeling bad about your neck, as Nora Ephron did.

Or you’re in your early forties and you know your marriage is decent and everyone’s healthy but you hear yourself humming Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” in the shower.

That rosy-cheeked baby on the cover of The Life and Times of My Enduring Self? All she required when that photo was snapped was food, warmth, and security. Eventually, we call out for more. Just as a baby needs food, Jung said, the human psyche cries out for meaning. Jung reckoned that fully a third of his patients suffered from nothing other than the perceived “senselessness and aimlessness” of their lives. And every patient over thirty-five, he said, borrowing from Hamlet, battled the sense that the world felt “weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable.”

Meaning isn’t a luxury. Meaning is crucial. We have a “will to meaning,” Viktor E. Frankl declared. To be human is to live in three dimensions—the physical, the mental, and the spiritual. It’s this spiritual dimension that compels us to seek answers to why we exist. Frankl is rightly celebrated for his extraordinary Man’s Search for Meaning, which was originally published in the United States under the less-than-winning title From Death-Camp to Existentialism. The book, which I commend to you if you haven’t read it, has by now sold in the tens of millions. It’s not strictly speaking a memoir of the Holocaust, though Frankl’s personal experiences in Nazi camps are sharply drawn and affecting. He uses the horrific setting to lay out the principles of what he called “logotherapy,” an analytic framework for treating emotional issues and addiction. Among these principles is a need for “a defiant spirit,” an insistence on finding purpose in the face of powerful challenges. On a grander scale, logotherapy (logos, the Greek word for “meaning”) is a “complete blueprint for living and dying well,” says psychologist Paul T. P. Wong. The concept is founded on the premise that life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most adverse, and that our principal motivation for living is finding the value and purpose in it. “Self-transcendence” is, at the core, connecting to something larger than yourself. This calls for continual self-improvement, cultivating faith, courage, and compassion.

How does one accomplish this, exactly? You won’t find specific to-do lists in Frankl’s writings. No ten easy steps. “[The] true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche,” Frankl wrote. The more you offer yourself to a cause or person you love, the closer you get to finding meaning in life. “To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man’s life,” as T. S. Eliot wrote. According to Frankl, you might find the useful, the courageous, the beautiful in nature or in art or in work, or by knowing at least one human being in all his or her uniqueness. And you will find it in overcoming suffering. What each of us needs, Frankl said, is “not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.”

In another of his books, The Doctor and the Soul, which is more technical than Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl devotes a lengthy chapter to the meaning of work. Given its centrality in our lives, work commonly gets the credit and more often the blame for whether we deem our lives to be fulfilling. We spend a lot of time at work. Our self-worth is on the line. Frankl expounds on what’s at stake. He distinguishes the social status or material rewards we derive from work from the degree of meaning a job offers. No occupation per se offers the road to salvation, he says. You can be a doctor or a nurse, both professions providing necessary and admirable services, but the meaning to be derived lies beyond making the right diagnoses and incisions, or drawing blood and cleaning wounds. These tasks, while important, won’t satisfy the human spirit. “To practice all the arts of medicine is not to practice the art of medicine,” Frankl says. The art of medicine is finding the right words to say to a patient. Now apply this to the modern doctor’s predicament. Exhaustion and overwork, a young physician writes in the Times, are among the reasons doctors are twice as likely to commit suicide as nondoctors. There’s not enough time to look for the right words, so the work lacks meaningfulness. Being the right human being is what counts, Frankl says. This applies to any trade, any job, white collar or blue, however menial.

Having no job can be cataclysmic. Unemployment leads directly to the Existential Vacuum, Frankl says. “The jobless man experiences the emptiness of his time as inner emptiness, as an emptiness of his consciousness. He feels useless because he is unoccupied. Having no work, he thinks life has no meaning.” This is precisely the message Pope Francis delivered in 2015, when he issued his encyclical on the plight of the planet. Francis laments not only the environmental crisis that’s been brought on by the rampant consumption of fossil fuels, he observes “how the orientation of the economy has favoured a kind of technological process in which the costs of production are reduced by laying off workers and replacing them with machines.” Work, the pope declares, “is a necessity, part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth.”

Personally, I’m drawn to Frankl’s contention that meaning is to be found in our acts and deeds; in the degree to which we encounter and experience others; in how we overcome the challenges we face. But I’m presumptuous enough to add a crucial ingredient that Frankl and the pope overlooked—the need to make a story out of it all. We have a body and we have a brain, no argument there. Each is vital, obviously. The body and the brain allow us to live in the physical and the mental dimensions. They provide conclusive evidence (in the form of sensations and ideas) that yes, we do indeed exist. But neither the body nor the brain, if said brain lacks a narrative mechanism, can drive the story home to us. That’s where our friend in the attic comes in. Until something (the scribbler) whips our physical sensations and mental capacities into a story, it won’t make sense. This is clearly a process best managed in proximity to where our memories are housed—the brain. Which is why, thanks to hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, the writer-in-residence resides in the brain and not elsewhere, such as the pyloric sphincter or an equally intolerable place to write.

The search for meaning, while fundamental, can wear a body down. Especially in midlife. One steel-gray afternoon, staring at a halfway-frozen Lake Michigan, I found myself thinking about my father’s all-too-brief passage through the elbow. While I don’t remember him as a melancholy person, certainly not a depressive, it occurred to me that my father would often gaze expressionlessly at nothing in particular. He was in early middle age, forty-three, with two young kids and a wife at home. He was living under the sword of heart disease at a time when there weren’t the miracle drugs and surgical procedures we now take for granted.

Staring at the lake, I remembered that each week, on Sunday night, right around the time the Ed Sullivan Show came on, my father heaved a sigh and said to no one in particular: “Well, back to the salt mines tomorrow.” I was confused by that. He was a microbiologist, not a salt miner. He didn’t tote a pickaxe to work, he carried a battered brown leather briefcase stuffed with notes for some journal article he was writing. On Saturday mornings, he’d often drive me down to his lab at the hospital, a crystal palace of beakers, funnels, and flasks. He delighted in showing me how microscopes worked. He fired up Bunsen burners to demonstrate chemical reactions. I remember the smell of the place—faintly metallic. He loved everything about his world and was recognized for his contributions to research. But maybe it wasn’t enough. The weekly sigh, what was that all about?

Staring out at the lake, I made a connection. When Viktor Frankl proposed that the search for meaning is endemic, he wasn’t saying that we necessarily sit around disconsolate all day. (Although some of us do.) But he did argue that the need for meaning plays gotcha. “The Sunday neurosis,” Frankl called it. It settles in when the rush of a busy week subsides. The busier we are during the week, the faster we run, the harder we crash come Sunday. Joseph Heller’s Bob Slocum suffered from it. “Sundays are deadly. Spare time is ruinous,” he says midway through Something Happened. My father, otherwise never to be compared with the objectionable Slocum, had a case of it as well, I realized on that day by the lake. He’d been in overdrive his entire life. His parents had died young. Orphaned, he worked his way through high school and university while helping to support his younger brothers. He graduated from college at some ridiculously young age—nineteen? Failing to get into medical school thanks to the ethnic-quota system—at Yale, for example, the applications of Jewish students were clearly marked with an “H”—he earned an advanced degree in microbiology without breaking stride. He was kept out of the war so he could work on a new generation of antibiotics. He was thirty when my sister was born; thirty-five when I came along; forty-three when he wrote the book that my mother always kept prominently displayed, Antimicrobial Therapy in Medical Practice; forty-four when he suffered his first heart attack; forty-seven when he died. He had barely made it to the elbow when he was heaving those Sunday sighs just as Ed Sullivan came on. Maybe what he needed was a time-out, a chance to regroup. Sitting there by the lake, I wondered if he’d been able to take a brief time-out it might have made a life-saving difference.

A thought then came to me: What if life, like a hockey game, was divided into three distinct periods? Biologists already think of the human life course that way. There are three distinct phases of growth: progressive, stable, regressive. In life-story terms, what if period one ended at age forty, period two at sixty, and period three ran to the bitter end? Now, here’s the interesting part: What if there were two intermissions, as in a hockey game, one between the first and second periods, the other between the second and third? Everyone—rich or poor, salaried, hourly, or unemployed—would be eligible for these sabbaticals (not just tenured professors). Knowing that a hiatus was upcoming, you could plan for it long in advance, never incurring a lousy change fee if your sabbatical called for air travel. These intermissions would not be construed as vacations. They’d be working sessions, offsite retreats, at which you and the writer upstairs could stop, take a breath, and gain your bearings. The agenda? Three bullet points, that’s it. They’d apply to both sabbatical number one and sabbatical number two:

• Review whether your life story’s been meaningful so far.

• Assess whether it’s meaningful at the moment.

• Brainstorm what it would take to keep it meaningful or make it meaningful before it’s too late. In other words, figure out what it would take for you to die satisfied.

Imagine the difference it could have made had Tolstoy, Jung, or Bob Slocum been afforded the luxury of an offsite retreat before they turned forty. Imagine if Tony Soprano, Walter White, or Don Draper had had the benefit of a premidlife sabbatical. What if you, assuming you’re now in midlife or beyond, had taken a sabbatical, given yourself an honest performance review, assessed whether your life was meaningful enough, and if not, devised a plan to do something about it, if and when circumstances allowed? And if financial circumstances didn’t allow, you’d use the offsite to figure out how to make some changes, if only in attitude?

So let’s imagine what such an offsite might be like. You’re about to navigate the hazardous elbow. You and your scribbler are in a meeting room at a Courtyard Marriott. There’s an easel holding a giant notepad, a box of colored markers, a tray of pastries on the table. Cell phone’s in airplane mode. Imagine that the scribbler’s gone golf-resort casual for the occasion: he’s wearing a Tommy Bahama polo shirt and pleated Bermudas, dark ankle-length socks, fisherman’s sandals, and a Tilley hat, which is not a good look for him.

If, like me, you’ve been forced to sit through an offsite or two, you’re doubtless familiar with the drill. The presiding alpha dog, in this case you, steers the discussion from a seat closest to the doughnuts. A toady in the room, in this case it’s your scribbler, “volunteers” to take notes on the giant pad, ripping off sheets as he goes, taping them up one by one on the walls around the room. It takes maybe two minutes before the agenda you came with—Review! Assess! Brainstorm!—is placed on hold. Why? Someone raises a question nobody’s planned for but should have. It goes like this: I know we’re here to try and get to the point, but don’t you think we ought to know what the point actually is before we figure out how to get there? Whereupon you and the scribbler start throwing out possible answers to what the point actually is, the scribbler capturing them on the giant pad:

The scribbler, irritable over how things are dragging out—writers hate meetings like this—is inclined to go with happiness and the hell with it. He just wants to get out of there. The point is happiness. To be happy all the time. If he’d take a step back, however, he’d realize that trying to make a life story entirely about happiness is a one-way ticket to self-indulgence and disappointment. Happiness isn’t a goal, it’s an outcome. Happiness is a by-product of something else.

Thus do retreats go south. The goal is to leave “aligned,” “strategically focused,” “everyone on the same page.” But nothing on the list taped to the wall makes it through the gauntlet. All it takes is for someone to piss on a given item and off it comes. Art? Too esoteric. God or gods? Divisive. Nature? What if you’re allergic? The aim of the offsite is to leave with a takeaway grander than you could ever have come up with back at home. Sadly, that’s not what usually happens. At offsites, it’s been my experience, what usually happens is a reshuffling of what little you knew going in.

You look at the scribbler. He looks at you. An impasse. Okay, let’s go at this from a different angle, you say finally. Would it help to know whose point we’re talking about here? My current self’s point? My ideal self’s point? My true self’s point? Whose sabbatical is this, anyway?

By the time we reach midlife, the storywriter isn’t at all sure which of our assortment of selves she’s working for. Let’s not call it an identity crisis. Let’s call it an identity skirmish, reserving the c-word for what you went through when you were a teenager and couldn’t choose from among a raft of competing identities, or decide whether you even had an identity to start with.

According to narrative psychologists, we go through life testing out a multitude of selves. We slip in and out of them with no greater effort than it takes to change socks. It’s a Western culture thing. A practicing Buddhist isn’t concerned with which socks to wear, which self to be. He exists as a no-self. In Buddhist teachings, the self is more of a process than a who. Because the Buddhist no-self resides in eternity, it has a strikingly different relationship with fellow creatures and with the universe as a whole. The no-self is at one with the universe. We in the West, and especially when we’re at Esalen, are attracted to this idea because it seems gentle and relaxing. But we find it hard to pull off. So instead, we keep changing in and out of selves in the hope that in one of them we’ll feel somewhat closer to our fellow creatures and to the universe as a whole.

Who are these selves aspiring to be the self? Ulric Neisser, often referred to as the father of cognitive psychology, proposed that we consist of at least five selves woven together: a “private self,” who lives deep within our inner experience (“I am me and you’re not”); an “ecological self,” who relates to its surrounding environment (“I am here at this place right now”); an “interpersonal self,” who reveals itself in how it interacts with others (“I am here right now interfacing with you”); a “conceptual self,” who belongs to a social or cultural category (“I’m a husband, an American, and I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a king”); and a “temporally extended self,” the self we’re concentrating on here, the self who lives in one’s memory and projects itself into the future.

Multiple selves needn’t signify schizophrenia. Venerable thinkers have defined us fundamentally as multiself organisms. In 1890, William James spoke of a “Self of selves.” Your body and your possessions are your material self. Your relationships are your social self. Your values represent your spiritual self. These component selves are at times in conflict, with one self or another making a power grab for whatever reason. Your spiritual self, for instance, may have a hard time living with your material self—as in, $800 for a pair of Prada flip-flops is beyond egregious in light of the homeless woman on the corner, but screw it, I only live once, and life is short, one self whispers in another’s ear.

What happens in midlife, according to the scribbler theory, is that your Self of selves gets sick and tired of all the squabbling going on among its component selves. Your Self of selves wishes everyone could join hands and commit to a single true self. “It is common,” linguist George Lakoff writes, “for people not to be satisfied with the kind of life they are leading. You may feel that your job is unrewarding or that your whole way of life is somehow not compatible with your judgment of what counts as living a rewarding life.” Hence, your true self believes there’s a great novel in you if you could only muster the time. Your true self would trade your MBA for a theological degree.

There are exceptions. Some people are fine with the self they are—abrasively so. “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” said Donald Trump. Mark Cuban, NBA franchisee and billionaire provocateur, says he knows which self he is and wouldn’t change it for the world. In a magazine profile, he declared, “When I come back I want to come back as me.” (The piece, by the way, was titled “The Twelve-Year-Old Owner.”) If you’re lucky enough to be Trump’s or Cuban’s writer-in-residence, you’ve got a plum assignment. Your boss’s self is so self-satisfied—he knows who he is, his story’s his story and he’s sticking to it—you can pretty much spend your afternoons at the gym.

Dan McAdams contends that the self you are at any given stage evolves out of an elaborate process. By nine or ten, we begin to understand that our needs and wants aren’t always satisfied in the short term. We come to realize that goals and desires are addressed over time. We learn that we have motives, just as characters in stories have motives. We’re motivated to love or be loved; to be powerful; to achieve. Our motives drive the creation of that “personal myth” described earlier, a story we create about ourselves, a one-of-a-kind story, a “detailed, conscious autobiographical narrative of one’s past that is highly valued and presented to oneself and others as comprehensive and complete.” So goes the textbook definition. It’s through the development of a personal myth that each of us “discovers what is true and what is meaningful in life,” McAdams says. We don’t find out who we are via personal mythmaking. We make ourselves who we are. It’s how, as Nick Carraway came to understand, James Gatz became “just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent.…” Gatsby was Gatz’s personal myth writ large. He eventually self-destructed. And so did the man who conceived him. In The Crack-Up, his first-person Esquire account of his descent into booze, failure, and self-pity, the forty-year-old Scott Fitzgerald wrote: “So there was not an ‘I’ any more—not a basis on which I could organize my self-respect. [It] was strange to have no self—to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do—”

Creating a personal myth gives each of us a shot at setting out on a mythic-like journey. Now that I’ve been immersed in all this, I realize that I left Philadelphia in pursuit of something, but I’m not sure what. Bliss? as Joseph Campbell would have it, a deep sense of “doing what you absolutely must to be yourself”? This is, after all, mythology’s first function—to evoke, as Campbell said, “a sense of grateful, affirmative awe before the monstrous mystery that is existence.”

It’s in the service of a personal myth that we try on so many different selves. Metamorphosis makes for a good story, always has. In the Odyssey men turn into pigs. Jekyll turns into Hyde. Kafka turns an ordinary salesman into a giant vermin. Gregor has no good explanation for the self he’s become: not even a baby vermin, a fully mature specimen. In biology this is called the imago stage, the adult stage of a bug’s life. Psychologists use imago to describe an idealized image of self, a mini-me, says McAdams, who “plays the main character in a segment of a person’s life story.” This character can come and go throughout the human life course: “I was the boy (or girl) who never got into trouble.” “I’m the corporate executive playing out the American dream.” Or, more simply, “I’m a clown,” “I’m the athlete,” “I’m the loyal friend.” There’s nothing wrong with being multiple imagoes at once, assuming they’re not in conflict. To be “I’m the coolest dude in the room” and “I’m a hopeless nerd” doesn’t always click. I know, I’ve tried it.

You might want to ask yourself which imago(es) you are at the moment. Currently I’d say I’m gyrating between Kindly Mentor, generous of spirit, and Irascible Curmudgeon, subscribing to Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy that in life it’s every man and woman for themselves, fighting if not for survival then at least for an affordable place to live in New York City or San Francisco. The Kindly Mentor imago seems more meaningful to me than the Irascible Curmudgeon, but sometimes it’s hard to give up an imago you’ve bonded with.

Other people take an avid interest in how we’re constructing our personal myths. There’s no shortage of informed and uninformed commentators who prattle on with sincere or smug assurance about what’s a meaningful personal myth and what isn’t. They started buzzing around when you first embarked on your personal mythmaking, back in grade school. Expectations were hurled from every direction: do this, or do that, and you’ll grow up to be the central character of a myth deemed to be socially worthwhile. The scribbler tries to keep up with all this unsolicited advice, but it would take a writers’ colony of scribblers to capture the competing suggestions.

Whether you’re a girl or a boy makes a difference in terms of the expectations others set for you. Even more so when Linda and I were growing up. Linda, never a reprobate, had her knuckles routinely rapped by her parochial-school nuns, not an especially good tactic in that they also hoped she’d find the personal myth of nunhood so alluring she’d one day join the flock. Later on, they urged her to bide her time as a demure, nicely groomed, celibate typist until she could secure a meaningful life via marriage and motherhood. Leave a mark? Not part of the expectation set. For me, it was the opposite. “Don’t settle, you’re better than that. Go to medical school!” It wasn’t until recently that I understood how the nuns and my father were, in their separate ways, pushing their own “immortality formulas,” as anthropologist Ernest Becker put it. Had Linda joined the order, she’d be endorsing the nuns’ own reason to exist. Had I become a research scientist or a doctor, I’d validate my father’s life purpose. The nuns and my father—can’t imagine how else I could ever put them in the same sentence—would be passing off something of themselves to us and through us. Symbolic immortality, it’s called.

But it wasn’t in the cards, for them or for us. We went looking for our own what-matters. Linda broke from the church (quietly, no hair-on-fire rebellion), insisting on going off to a secular coed college. Then it was on to a corporate career, eventually marrying and bearing children, yes, but with an unredeemed apostate. As for me, I don’t know the difference between Staphylococcus aureus and Staphylococcus epidermidis. There’d never be a Godfather moment, as in when Michael Corleone, tucked away in Italy for safekeeping, asks a local mafia chief to get a message to Don Corleone: “Tell my father I wish to be his son.”

Our personal mythmaking accelerates when we hit adolescence. Mythic role models get tacked up on the bedroom wall. Che Guevara. Farah Fawcett. Tony Romo. Jennifer Lopez. (Not all in the same bedroom, of course.) As teenagers we begin to seek out personally meaningful answers to the Big Questions. What do I believe in? Who am I? Suddenly your scribbler’s gone from having a low-stress day job inside an innocent kid to working overtime for a bizarro, sullen nutcase desperately trying on one self after another.

The plot eventually simmers down. By your twenties and early thirties, the scribbler has more or less found her groove and you’ve settled into a reasonably stable mythical drift. Although yours is a wholly individual personal myth—like fingerprints, no two personal myths are identical—your myth probably falls into one of a handful of classic genres, I gathered from one of McAdams’s books: comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony. The first two suggest that yours is a mostly optimistic personal myth. Linda, for example, is living a romantic myth. I’m wedged somewhere between tragedy and irony.

While thinking of ourselves as personal myths can be fun and enlightening, it’s important to recognize how attaching ourselves to the wrong mythic identity can have unfortunate consequences. I’ll give you a personal example. The moral of the story is, had I not pushed back on the mythic identity I’d adopted in my teens, my life story would have turned out differently and not half so well. In fact, it could have turned out to be a fucking disaster.

The chapter goes like this: Nearing the end of my second year in grad school, I have no clue as to where I’m heading. Zero prospects. An issue of Esquire arrives in the mail. On the editor’s page there’s a notice saying the magazine is holding a contest. The winner will land an incredibly alluring job in New York as a junior editor. There are only two qualifications: you must be under twenty-five and be shameless enough to believe you have a “good sense of humor.” If you’re shameless enough to believe that, you’re invited to rewrite certain elements of that particular issue.

I sit there thinking, Hey, I can do this. But for weeks I can’t bring myself to enter the contest. Or the personal myth I’m attached to can’t bring itself to. My existing mythic identity—Tragic Hero or Noble Failure, not sure which—refuses to concede that fate can once in a blue moon hand you a gift. It revels in the certainty that it will wind up writing inane advertising jingles and drinking itself to early liver disease after failing to write the great American novel. My mythic ID, in short, is too proud or fearful of failure to enter the bloody contest.

After a few weeks, however, an alternative mythic identity somehow manages to slip through an open window. It gags and binds the Noble Failure. I enter the contest and eventually get the job. A call to adventure, the start of a heroic journey, as Joseph Campbell might see it, though maybe I’m flattering myself.

10      Paper and Dust

There are any number of ways to reach out for a fresh personal myth in midlife. Thankfully, booking a meeting room at a Courtyard Marriott isn’t one’s only option. When the weather turned too cold for lakeside reveries, I tucked the scribbler in under a wool watch cap and off we went to a university library, where there are six hundred thousand square feet of vintage cultural artifacts quaintly known as books. If an offsite calls for defining “Meaningful Life,” and if a monastery or ashram isn’t within convenient reach, a university library might offer up ideas worth pondering. Yes, I could have done much of it online, but nothing beats the smell of “paper and dust and years,” as George R. R. Martin describes a library in A Clash of Kings.

But where does one start? A sizable tranche of the millions of volumes in the building has something to offer on what the point is. Where best to roll up one’s sleeves? The philosophy shelves? Anthropology? Biology? Physics? Art? Poetry? History? Archeology? Psychology? Nursing? A glutton for punishment, I set up base camp in the philosophy stacks, where I put my lumbar region at risk by sitting on a little rolling step stool, hunting for quarry to drag back to a six-by-six-foot study cell.

The ancient Greeks spent a lot of time thinking about the point. They had plenty of open-field running room. In search of clues, they reached for the moon. And the stars. And the anatomy of crustaceans. And the composition of matter. At the same time, they understood that the quickest route to an answer to what the point is—it’s always the quickest route—was to do whatever the gods said. Make the right sacrifices and you’ll be home free. Epicurus refused to buy into that solution. Instead, he warmed us to the possibility that the point of life is pleasure. Unfortunately, we ran more than a little too far with the invitation. Epicurus didn’t mean that the point of life was filling out your fantasy football roster while scarfing Buffalo wings. Pleasure derived from leading a gentle and agreeable life in a fair garden, teaching, learning, and debating important matters. As for the wrath of the gods, nothing to sweat, Epicurus said. The gods don’t rule the universe. Atomic structure accounts for everything: trees, rocks, living creatures. How lilies smell depends on how their atoms are hooked together. Atoms determine whether a stone is smooth or jagged. The soul is made up of atoms. After we die, our soul atoms disperse back into the universe’s atomic pool, where they link up again with other atoms, perchance to attach themselves to atoms that once formed a horse or determined how a grape tasted.

Aristotle, for his part, viewed the point not in terms of pleasure but in terms of happiness—here again, though, not how we typically think of “happiness.” Aristotle said happiness derives from gaining wisdom and knowledge, wisdom and knowledge being more meaningful than money or power or fame or the other things we routinely confuse with happiness.

In time, the world grew considerably more complicated than even the knowledge-hungry, pleasure-loving Greeks could imagine. Eighty years ago, Will Durant wrote a popular book called The Story of Philosophy. I spent a few hours with it in the stacks. Durant laments how over the centuries Western philosophy (and religion) wilted in the face of scientific discovery. The telescope captured stars too numerous for man to count. Geology showed that the cosmos was billions of years old, not a scant couple of thousand. Biology uncovered an entire world within the cell. Physiology discovered “inexhaustible mystery” in every bodily organ. Psychology perceived deep mysteries in a single dream. The disciplines of anthropology and archeology and history proved that human history as we understood it had barely scratched the surface. The universe was composed of atoms, yes, the smallest unit imaginable until quarks, leptons, and bosons entered the picture.

“Human knowledge,” Durant said, “had become too great for the human mind.”

Leaving the Greeks to their gentle gardens, I mounted my rolling step-steed and moved to a new location in the stacks. I was curious to find out what modern philosophers have to say about what the point is. The current crop needs no convincing that knowledge is too great for the human mind. Today’s philosophers grew up in a time of unparalleled scientific and technological advancements. They’ve lived their entire lives skirting one or the other or both chambers of the existential vacuum. There’s the “terrestrial” chamber, in which existential upset is induced by genocide, religious extremism, nuclear threats, melting ice caps, and indestructible new viruses. Then there’s the existential vacuum’s “cosmic” chamber, where all evidence points to a world gone mad a long time ago. W. B. Yeats wrote: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” And Barack Obama (not quite rising to the rhetorical occasion) said: “The truth of the matter… is that the world has always been messy… we’re just noticing now because of social media.”

You’d think that finding a way to circumvent the existential vacuum is what would attract the best and brightest to modern philosophy. Think again. You take your life in your hands if, at the department’s end-of-semester picnic, you dare use “meaning” and “life” in the same phrase without attaching a caveat, subclause, or stipulation. Philosopher Susan Wolf says in a lecture that a fresh-faced student who so much as inquires about “the meaning of life” is setting himself up for classroom shaming. The question annoys today’s philosophers because they’re hell-bent on ridding the field of ambiguity and obscurity. They hear the age-old question “What is the meaning of life?” as unintelligible. “When we ask the meaning of a word… we want to know what the word stands for, what it represents,” Wolf explains. “But life is not part of a language.… It is not clear how it could ‘stand for’ anything, nor to whom.”

Philosophers also dislike the question because the only conceivable correct answer is… “God.” If God exists, they concede, then there’s an avowed purpose to life: to be fruitful and multiply, and so on. But answering “God” doesn’t go down well with modern philosophers, 73 percent of whom, when polled, say they’re atheists. So if they don’t think about the point, what do today’s academic philosophers think about all day? E. D. Klemke, editor of a widely cited anthology titled The Meaning of Life, says that when philosophers gather for symposia they present papers with titles such as “Negative Existentials,” “On Referring,” “Parenthetical Verbs,” and “Elementarism, Independence, and Ontology.” So much for ridding the field of obscurity and ambiguity. It’s enough to make you wonder whether this is what Plato had in mind when he offered up his immortal cave parable: Philosopher leaves cave. Sees world for what it really is, returns to cave. Everyone still staring at shadows on wall. Delivers lecture first night back: “Is Existence a Predicate?”

Susan Wolf and other dissidents propose that philosophers quit nitpicking and tap their ample reservoirs of logic and reason to have a go at what the point is. It’s the least they can do. The rest of us need help figuring out what we should be doing with our lives, in midlife especially. Einstein told us that the man “who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life.” A good place for philosophers to dig in, Wolf says, is to reach some agreement on what constitutes a meaningless life. She volunteers to get the ball rolling. Certain life stories are patently pointless: for instance, a life story we might call Blob! The Nonadventures of a Human Sloth, the slow-moving saga of a slacker who watches all-day reruns of The People’s Court, engaging in little or no social interaction. It’s a life story of “hazy passivity,” says Wolf. Lack of engagement is destructive to body, mind, and spirit. Social ostracism, whether self-inflicted or imposed, has been shown to be physically and emotionally debilitating.

Another example of a pointless life story is one I’m tempted to title Confessions of a Shopaholic, but that’s been done. So let’s call it Useless! How to Successfully Take Up Space and Fill Up Your Time Without Standing for Anything Other Than How You Look or How Much You’re Worth. The prevailing theme here is uselessness. You make money to make money, or partake in some other orgy of self-gratification that has no connection to anything beyond yourself. By way of illustration, Wolf cites the pig farmer who buys more land to grow more corn to feed more pigs to buy more land to grow more corn to feed more pigs. It’s an amusing reference, but I have trouble with it. On the surface, it does look like the farmer is chasing his own tractor. Then, one morning over at the grain elevator, you find out that the farmer has five kids, and that college costs are rising at a rate in excess of the price of pigs and farmland. A conscientious dad, he figures his only solution is to grow more corn to feed more pigs, and at a clip faster than the cost of tuition’s going up.

What’s lacking in the lives of both blobs and the useless, Wolf says, is active involvement with something that holds “positive value.” Positive objective value. Wolf understands that she is now tottering on a slippery slope. Who’s to say what’s of “positive objective value”? Nearly all of us will agree on a broad set of behaviors that qualify—loving unconditionally, giving generously to charity, doing something well that’s worth doing. But there’s a vast gray area. Taking videos of shepherds who marry their sheep may be meaningful to some. Are there no anthropologists who conduct longitudinal, ethnographic studies of shepherds who marry their sheep?

Wolf makes sure we understand that a “meaningful” life isn’t always an admirable or moral life. I’m thinking of Edward Snowden. Meaningful life? Many of us would say yes, absolutely. Thanks to Snowden, we’re having an overdue national debate on government overreach and the right to privacy. We’ve rolled back ill-conceived legislation as a direct result. To Dick Cheney, though, Snowden betrayed his country and put American lives at risk; ergo, Snowden’s life is meaningfully traitorous.

A “meaningful life,” Wolf reminds us, is not necessarily a happy life. Tchaikovsky is sometimes brought into the discussion at this juncture. Weeks following an ill-advised marriage, the composer waded into the icy Moscow River in the hope that he’d contract pneumonia and thus find a way out of his marital misery.

Finally, a meaningful life needn’t be a celebrated life. We all know this, but Wolf reiterates it. You don’t have to be a Madame Curie, or an Oskar Schindler, or even a Benedict Cumberbatch to live a meaningful life. Raising kids the right way is a project of profoundly positive, objective value, however thankless it may seem at times.

The scribbler and I credit Susan Wolf for at least trying. Her willingness to take a machete to these weeds gives college kids a definition they can chew on in freshman seminar: A meaningful life is one that satisfies personal desires; connects to something beyond yourself; and results in something of objective, positive value.

Is that it, then? Is that the point?

I tried, really did try, to buy into that definition. It touches the right bases and looks good on paper. But we don’t live on paper. We live in our own stories. The stories need to move forward in a satisfying way. A Julian Barnes fictional character at midlife draws the distinction between “adding on” and “adding up.” Until and unless we live out a story that over time connects our personal desires with something beyond ourselves and results in positive value, we won’t feel that we’re adding up. It’ll just feel like an isolated chapter or two, not a full-length story you hope never ends.

11      Who Needs Happiness?

One of the nice things in theory about an offsite, and this is the last thing I’ll say about offsites, is that you can take the giant sheets off the wall, roll them up, put a rubber band around them, then revisit your bright ideas at a later date. We always say we’ll do that with those rolled-up sheets, but we almost never bother. We’re too busy catching up with the e-mails we didn’t reply to while at the offsite. But if we were to circle back to the sheets from our hypothetical sabbatical and we unfurled them for the people I interviewed for this book, three of the scribbled proposals would stand a chance of adoption. Each is an arguable reason we’re here in the first place.

Let’s start with “procreation,” which is Linda’s first choice. Of course it’s the reason we’re here: to keep the human race going. Having and/or raising kids is all-consuming and gratifying, and indeed repopulates the planet. Yes, it can be a heartache, but let’s not get hung up on the so-called parenthood paradox—the more intensely one parents, the higher the incidence of stress and guilt. Let’s also not get hung up on how we may not have done certain kids any favors by bringing them into existence. I’m not talking about whatever unfortunate physical inheritances we bestow. Genes also play a determinative role in whether a child turns out to be friendly, confident, and reliable, qualities essential to forming the solid social and romantic relationships that are at the heart of a meaningful life. Some of us, face it, aren’t genetically coded to be warm, fuzzy, and outgoing. By passing less-than-endearing qualities along, are we condemning our offspring to long, lonely nights that add up to long, lonely chapters in their life stories?

When I ask unmarried twenty-somethings how they envision their lives five to ten years from now, women invariably see kids as central to any meaningful future, men less so. A national survey of millennials bears it out. Women exceed men by 10 to 20 percent when asked whether a successful marriage and being a good parent are among the most important things in life. But kids have a way of growing up. Then what? Those in midlife who’ve already procreated say they’re scrambling to find an alternative investment. And what about those who don’t want or can’t have kids? Some of us aren’t wired physically or temperamentally to have children. If procreation’s the point, are lives lived without children pointless by definition? Meghan Daum, who edited a book about why people—okay, not people, writers—decide not to have kids, says those who take a pass “bear no worse psychological scars.… In fact, many of us devote quite a lot of energy to enriching the lives of other people’s children, which in turn enriches our own lives.” A contributor to the book, novelist Geoff Dyer, professes astonishment: “In a park, looking at smiling mothers and fathers strolling along with their adorable toddlers, I react like the pope confronted with a couple of gay men walking hand in hand: Where does it come from, this unnatural desire?”

Based on my conversations, other strong contenders for what the point is are “kindness” and “happiness.” Of these, kindness—doing unto others—is far and away the most favored answer. “How would you like to be remembered?” I will ask.

“As loving, caring, thoughtful, as someone who was curious and inquisitive. And who wanted to help eradicate the kind of ignorance that marginalizes people.”

“Only as someone who tried to improve the lives of those who knew him.”

“First and foremost, as a kind person and a wonderful mother, who didn’t realize in her youth how much being a mom would be a part of her life, and then how it became her career.”

“As someone who was steadfast in her beliefs, but who also tried to have an open heart and endeavored to have difficult conversations even when they were tiring for all concerned.”

One midlife respondent didn’t care at all for the question. “It’s not important how I’m remembered,” he said. As for kindness, “I’d rather not live for others. Just do things for the right reasons.”

Now and then, if someone scratches his head for a couple of minutes and can’t think of a point, I’ll prime the pump and ask how he feels about kindness. Yeah, of course, sure, kindness, absolutely, he’ll reply. But I can tell the heart isn’t in it. Kindness—what else is new? Do they think kindness is for wimps, as in the old Italian proverb: “So good that he’s good for nothing?” But I invite even the most self-centered, ironically inclined millennial to do himself the supreme kindness of reading George Saunders’s classic commencement address at Syracuse University (2013). Saunders recalled that the greatest regret of his life was not being kinder in the seventh grade to a small, shy girl, a new kid in school, who wore blue cat’s-eye glasses and had a habit of chewing on a strand of her hair. Saunders confessed that he’s been unable to forget how lonely she looked when teased or ignored—“eyes cast down, a little gut-kicked, as if, having just been reminded of her place in things, she was trying, as much as possible, to disappear.” Then one day the girl moved away. Forty-two years later—smack in the middle of midlife—Saunders remains haunted by his failure of kindness.

The problem with “kindness” as the guiding universal theme of a well-wrought life story is that you’re either kind enough or you’re not. The scribbler can’t simply wave a staff and canonize you Saint Mother Teresa. Not me, for sure. While I don’t think of myself as an unkind person, some of my kindest accomplishments have been accidental. I can’t claim credit, let alone build a guiding philosophy around them.

Years and years ago, on a flight from New York to Los Angeles, I apparently offered someone a piece of advice that changed her life forever. And for the good. I was completely unaware of this beneficence until a couple of years ago, when an e-mail arrived. It was from a woman whose name, Valarie, didn’t ring a bell. She recalled that, back in the days when there were upstairs piano bars in 747s (those were the days), “our paths crossed several times as I was a flight attendant for American Airlines with an irrepressible urge to write. I had written six chapters of a novel and you told me that if I wanted an absolutely honest critique I should send you my first chapter.” And so she did. And true to my word, I must have given her a brutally honest critique. Whatever I said it was more than enough, Valarie wrote, to keep her from writing anything for years. “It wasn’t because you discouraged me. It was because you helped me realize how much I needed to grow as a writer before I could tackle something so big. As you said, it was especially ambitious—a woman trying to write a novel in the first-person POV of a gay man! Ha! No shit!”

I’d like to say that I knew exactly what I was doing. What I thought I was doing was anything but kind. In fact, it was kind of nasty. I wanted to keep the world safe from another self-deluded wannabe. But somehow it backfired into an act of kindness. Valarie spent the next fifteen years “learning how to write and raising a family,” she told me in the e-mail. Today, she lives in a town in North Carolina, is a former newspaper columnist, and is at work on a novel, presumably (and hopefully) not written from the first-person POV of a gay man. Toward the end of her e-mail she said this: “Life is good and mostly easy in this wonderful Carolina town where I’m very much at home and am recognized by strangers when they hear my name. Just last week someone said, ‘You’re the writer?’ It still feels so good to have realized a dream, to have reached a goal set at the tender age of twenty-seven, when I met you (my son’s age now). All these words are to let you know you made a difference in my life—a positive, life-affirming difference. You helped me know that if writing was what I had to do, I had to learn how to do it better and keep at it until it was good enough. I truly don’t know how I could have lived a full life without writing. Thank you for your words (wherever that letter is)… and for taking the time for me in 1980.”

I actually grew a little misty when I read that. Ned and Katherine happened to be in town just then, and I showed them Valarie’s e-mail, feeling as proud of myself as I’ve ever felt in my career.

It was clearly a one-off. Those who extend acts of kindness even at enormous personal risk—harboring Jews from the Nazis, for instance—say it isn’t a choice, it’s just how it is. People like that perform no cost-benefit analysis before displaying extraordinary selflessness. “I did nothing unusual. Anyone would have done the same thing in my place,” they say. Those who were highly altruistic during the war were highly altruistic before and after the war as well. Bestowing kindness at a high level is in their bone marrow.

Like every other proposed single-word reason to exist, “kindness” has built-in practical and philosophical drawbacks. If you live to be kind to others, the last thing you want is to hurt someone’s feelings. Kindness can blow up in your face. The “ideal man,” said Aristotle, believes that “to confer a kindness is a mark of superiority; to receive one, a mark of subordination.” On top of that, if bestowing kindness is the one and only thing you live for, but if your heartfelt offers of boundless kindness are then refused, you’ll be left with nothing to live for. This applies to all stand-alone reasons to live. Finding and maintaining meaning in life is no different from building a solid financial plan—diversify or suffer the consequences.

“Happiness” is the other contender that begs for serious consideration as a reason to live. Here again, it’s not so simple. The baby on the cover of My Enduring Self may one day wrestle with a wicked trade-off: Do I want this story to be a happy life story or a meaningful life story? Maybe you’ve wrestled with it as well. You probably did if you weren’t among the coolest, most popular kids in your high school class. Remember those nights when you sat alone in your bedroom, reading A Separate Peace, asking yourself whether, given the choice, you’d trade your brains and untapped talent for the good looks, clothes, and vacuous but happy social lives of the A-crowd? Does it have to be a trade-off? Can you not be deeply reflective and vibrate with day-to-day, simpleminded joy? Of course you can, up to a point. The pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of meaningfulness feed off each other. Roy F. Baumeister, a psychologist with long-standing curiosity about what distinguishes happiness and meaningfulness, has done a number of studies that show how happiness and meaningfulness overlap. But they also diverge.

For example, people who are inclined to say their story’s a happy story are people who are happy because their material wants and needs are satisfied. Stuff makes them happy: a big, comfortable house, great vacations, a new outfit when they’re feeling a little down. For them, money can purchase a feeling of provisional well-being. Those who consider their lives meaningful, however, know that money buys neither happiness nor can it be exchanged for additional meaningfulness. (To have little or no financial wherewithal works against both meaningfulness and happiness, but affects one’s level of happiness more than it reduces one’s sense of meaningfulness.) Paradoxically, Baumeister reports, a sense of meaningfulness is often associated with anxiety. This explains why, even though you were blue sitting up in your bedroom reading A Separate Peace, you may have felt a smidgen of pride. Believing that one’s life is difficult correlates positively with a sense of meaningfulness, likely because adversity and suffering beg for a meaningful response. Baumeister suggests that the more we take on difficult challenges, the more likely it is we’ll wind up disappointed. This doesn’t make us happy, but it does leave us thinking we at least reached for something worthwhile.

As for whether it’s better for a life story to be happy or meaningful, the A-crowd’s lifestyle or yours, there’s a small-arms war going on over that question. Facing off are so-called positive psychologists (PPs) versus existential psychologists (EPs). The PPs say happiness is the point. No, meaning’s the point, the EPs counter. Uh-uh, the PPs reply, finding meaning is but one important component of achieving happiness along with others, such as experiencing positive emotions (warmth, comfort, pleasure); engagement with absorbing activity; maintaining solid relationships with others; and personal achievements.

And what do the EPs, their guiding light being Viktor Frankl, say to that? They say it’s wrong, that meaning is the wellspring from which happiness flows. (The director of Harvard’s Grant Study says that happiness is the cart and love is the horse, which works for me, too.) Happiness, according to the EPs, comes to those who are open to new experience; who live in the moment; who are creative and constructive. No meaning, no happiness. If you don’t think your life story holds meaning, you’ll feel dissatisfied, disengaged, anxious, helpless, and frustrated. And you’ll be colossally bored.

Both camps only want the best for us, which causes them to lose patience with each other, sniping back and forth. Dispatches from the frontlines published in academic journals offer evidence that PPs think EPs are pessimistic and self-absorbed, harp on the negative and tragic, and are overly obsessed with death and dying. For their part, EPs think PPs are Pollyannas living in la-la land. They’re sloughing off the enormity of moral quandaries and the effects of social injustice, making life sound too easy. When their underlying principles are whipped up into self-help books, it can sound suspiciously too easy (Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment).

The great thing about the scribbler theory is that it works equally well on both the positive and existential sides of the street. The mission is to write a life story that satisfies the leading character’s goals. There is no one kind of story that fits the bill. What’s important is that the story pays off. For you. So maybe it comes down to what type of story your writer-in-residence is best at. Mine happens to be drawn to the work of Kafka, Roth, and Edgar Allan Poe. EP-type stuff. Yours may be partial to up-with-people-type stories—I think I can, I think I can!—the kind vetted and recommended by the Oprah Book Club. One isn’t inherently a better kind of story than the other.

The other night, a friend of Linda’s turned the tables and started grilling me. She asked whether I had learned anything while working on this project. Had it changed me in any way? Ooh, good question! I thought. After a moment or two, I told her that like everyone else, I always said that what I want most for my kids is for them to be happy. And healthy, of course. Now, I told her, I’m not so sure about that. I then looked around and saw I’d gotten the attention of everyone else in the room. No, I said, trying desperately to recover, I obviously still want my kids to be healthy, but I no longer say I want them to be happy. Plenty more dark stares. Well, of course I want them to be happy. But, you know, not happy happy. Because if all they are is happy happy, then one day something will happen that’ll make them unhappy. And as Viktor Frankl said, our culture doesn’t think it’s right or normal for anyone to be unhappy, which means my kids may begin to worry that there’s something wrong with them, even though they have excellent reasons to be unhappy. They’ll walk around feeling unhappier still because everyone will be wanting to know why they’re so miserable. Which will make them unhappy squared… do you know what I mean?

No one seemed to know what I meant. Look, I said, it’s a be-careful-what-you-wish-for kind of thing.

12      The James Dean Story

With the end coming into hazy view, we eventually reach the closing stretch of the elbow. Having made it down the long, winding road of midlife, it’s only natural that we ask ourselves whether we’re heading in the right direction. Is the story on track? Is it adding up as well as adding on?

Back when Kurt Vonnegut gave master classes in creative writing, he used chalk and a blackboard to illustrate how a story line can be plotted on a simple graph. He believed you could chart every story this way, from a Greek myth to The Avengers: Age of Ultron. The notion went back to when Vonnegut was a grad student in anthropology. He proposed a topic for his master’s thesis that was quickly rejected “because it was simple and looked like too much fun,” Vonnegut said.

Standing at the blackboard, Vonnegut drew two axes. The horizontal axis, marked “Beginning–End,” denoted the plot of a story. The vertical axis, “G–I,” denoted the degree to which the story’s main character experienced good fortune (prosperity, health, and so on) or ill fortune (poverty, sickness, and so on). He then chose a story—he was partial to Cinderella—and plotted out the heroine’s ups and downs over time. The graph reveals how things get better and better for Cinderella after her fairy godmother drops in to doll her up for the ball. The line on the graph keeps climbing as Cinderella turns heads when she gets to the party, dances with the prince, etc. Then, when the clock strikes twelve, Vonnegut’s graph dramatically illustrates how Cinderella’s good fortune plummets to earth with the vehemence of a major stock market crash. Vonnegut then drew a straight line to indicate how, in his words, Cinderella “poops along” for a while. But eventually, of course, the day comes when the prince knocks on Cinderella’s door, the shoe fits, and Cinderella’s good-fortune line rockets up and off the chart.

It’s with a touch of wistfulness that I admit that I, too, was developing a primitive method for graphing stories. In fact, I thought I was blazing the trail. Mine wasn’t concerned with written stories, however. Mine had to do with how we might graph our own life stories. I was all set to call it my exclusive “M (for Meaning)” graph when, a few weeks into development, I found evidence that others had gotten there before me. Not just Vonnegut. I discovered that philosopher Robert Nozick had laid out much the same notion as mine in an essay written thirty years ago: “Imagine graphing someone’s total happiness through life; the amount of happiness is represented on the vertical axis, time on the horizontal one.” My concept was similar. It consisted of a y-axis labeled “Meaningful” and an x-axis labeled “Time”:

To test out the idea, I began putting down dots that denoted various satisfying events in my past. Drawing on these memories yielded a graphical representation of The Life and Times of My Enduring Self. I hopscotched through my grade school years, where there were just a couple of meaningful dots; then added a bunch of dots denoting satisfying things that happened in high school; then on to college, where the dots flew hot and heavy (lots of creative satisfaction in college, mainly having to do with an on-campus theater group). From there I dotted the early years at Esquire, a dizzying chapter with plenty of satisfying dots; then on through major and minor relationships, career successes and disappointments in my thirties; up to and through marriage to Linda, birth of my kids, all the way to now. It wound up looking like this:

Pretty nifty, right? Am I sorry I wasn’t first to the party? Not much. Ownership is unimportant. What’s important is the takeaway. What matters in life isn’t the sheer number of meaningful or happiness dots in one’s life story graph, or even how high the dots reach on the y-axis. What matters is whether the dots are moving in the right direction as a life story extends from the beginning to the middle to the final chapters. Most of us, as Nozick observed, would willingly give up a little happiness in exchange for a narrative that moves in the right direction. A meaningful life story is a story that’s moving onward and upward. Adding on and adding up along both axes.

Finnish philosopher Antti Kauppinen, picking up on many of the themes in Robert Nozick’s essay, cites any number of others who argue that it’s better to live an improving life than a deteriorating one, even if there’s more absolute meaningfulness or happiness in the deteriorating one. It’s the shape of a life that matters. A life story in which our satisfying chapters go from good to not-so-good is less satisfying than one in which our satisfying chapters go from not-so-good to good—even though there may be more satisfying dots in the story that goes from good to not-so-good. Scholars refer to this phenomenon as bonum progressionis—the progression of the parts can matter more than the sum of the parts.

A trajectory that moves in the right direction isn’t usually dependent on a single source of ongoing satisfaction, such as a job. Some of us commit to long-term projects, most of us bounce from one thing to another. Taylor Branch, an old friend, is one of the former. He spent twenty-four years reporting and writing his three-volume history of the Martin Luther King Jr. era. His commitment was full-bore and nonstop. Taylor stretched his book advances as far as he could, taking a part-time job to help his family through the early years of the project. He continues to address King’s legacy a dozen or so times a year in speaking engagements, focusing on “race as both a good and bad barometer of our democratic experiment.” “So I’m a Johnny-one-note,” Taylor says, “although to me it’s a resonant note.”

The majority of us, and I speak from personal experience, change jobs or careers multiple times, in which case new sets of goals need to be established if the right trajectory is to be maintained. Men or women who drop out of their careers to raise kids or pursue a personal passion are tasked with finding satisfaction in each successive chapter. Retirement, of course, presents its own special challenges—it’s one thing to downshift, it’s another to stall out.

When the end draws near and your days along the x-axis dwindle down to a precious few, the trajectory your dots are moving in counts for everything. A study conducted a number of years ago illustrates it nicely. The study was designed to determine whether we judge a good life story that ends abruptly more desirable than a not-quite-as-good life story that drags on. Is a shorter really good life more satisfying than a longer not-so-good life? Researchers presented a subject pool with a fictional life story of an unmarried woman who perishes suddenly and painlessly in a car crash. There are multiple versions of her life leading up to the tragic event. There’s an extremely happy version in which she had a great job, enjoyed exciting vacations, and a wide network of friends. There’s another version, a happy enough one, in which she had a reasonably okay life. And there’s an unhappy version, in which she grew up depressed and angry, had a terrible job, no close friends, and spent her time watching TV (this was before the current “golden age,” when TV wasn’t worth watching). The study’s participants were variously told that the fatal crash occurred when the woman was as young as twenty-five or as old as sixty, with a few ages in between. They were then asked to numerically rate how “desirable” the woman’s life was. For both the younger and older participants in the study, how things were going at the end mattered significantly. An extremely happy life that’s snuffed out near the moment of peak fulfillment was held to be preferable to an extremely happy life with just a few blah years tacked on at the end. Adding years to a wretched life was judged to be preferable if the additional years were not quite as wretched as what had come before.

Again—how things were going at the end was what mattered—in the abstract, anyway. Adding a mildly pleasant chapter to an extremely happy story doesn’t make the story more appealing: “the James Dean Effect,” the authors called it. At twenty-four, Dean had already achieved meteoric stardom the day he died on a California highway, crashing his brand-new Porsche 550 Spyder. Better to go out like Dean, the study’s participants felt, than make a string of so-so movies, then die a couple of years later.

In the abstract. Most of us, if given a choice, would opt for additional years, even if it meant trading down from a Porsche to a Ford Fiesta. Of course we would. Why? Because you never know. Things could always turn around and get better for us. Looking back, though, when our story’s over with, we might feel it would have been a better story had it ended earlier. I say that all the time about books and movies—they should have quit while they were ahead. In terms of a life story, there’s only one good way to test the premise: conduct a survey in a place like the old country graveyard. “Given how things turned out, my good sir or madam, would you have preferred a shorter story, an earlier final curtain, when things were honky-dory? Or were the extra years worth the trouble and pain?” Only the dead can answer that question with full authority.

13      How We Live On

We’ve all read stories like the ones I just mentioned—where the plot wheezes out with a big chunk of pages still to go. As readers, we have a dilemma. There are two ways to go. We can soldier on, repeatedly stopping to decide whether the clump of remaining pages is worth our time and attention, or skip to the last page to see how things turn out, putting ourselves and the story out of our misery. The same applies to a life story. The trick is not to let The Life and Times of My Enduring Self turn into a downward-sloping slog when it reaches the last third. Robert Nozick, having come up with a simple way to plot happiness on a graph, likewise thought of a cool way to keep a life story from running out of steam.

It’s surprisingly easy. You train yourself to think you’re never more than halfway through a given run of chapters. For example, telling himself he wasn’t quite halfway through life took Nozick happily up to the elbow, age forty. Plenty of time left to do good stuff. Five years later, Nozick told himself he was only halfway through his post-college work life. Still plenty of time left to do good stuff. At fifty, he was just halfway between college and the end. By the time he got to sixty, Nozick said, he’d have thought of something else he was halfway through. You see the point. The philosopher’s clever trick doesn’t add more pages to a life story. You don’t get to live longer. What it does is provide a more manageable view of the time left in which you can do good stuff. It can help you choose which goals can be reasonably set and successfully achieved over the next designated run of pages. Right now, as I approach the elbow of this book, I’m beginning to think about what I’m going to do next. Probably another book, which I’d like to complete in no more than two or three years. After that, I’d like to do some traveling with Linda. In Nozick’s terms, I’m telling myself I’m roughly halfway between the time I started this book and the time I will have written a couple of books and done some fun traveling. Notice that I haven’t told myself anything about how many or how few pages there are to go in the overall story.

Nozick said there’d never come a time when he wouldn’t be halfway through something or other. He died of cancer thirteen years after publishing his goalpost-shifting maneuver, his half-lives having been trimmed to an insupportable sliver. He was sixty-three.

The stretch between the age Nozick was when he died and the presumed end date for most of us (currently, just shy of eighty) calls for major readjustments. On the one hand, you get discounts at the movies and on buses and subways, and Uncle Sam pays your doctors. On the other hand, if it’s not one aching joint, it’s another. The Patriots’ Tom Brady, then thirty-six, said that “you don’t have to suck when you get older.” Well, you really do kind of have to suck when you get older. Years ago at Esquire, we published a talked-about cover story called “How a Man Ages.” The feature was a detailed, decade-by-decade accounting of many of the eventualities I listed earlier in connection with Harvard’s Grant Study—deterioration from head to toe. From age sixty on, we’re all too aware that these changes are happening to us; no need to read about them in a magazine. And yet most sixty-year-olds will say, in all innocence and candor, “But I don’t feel old. I certainly don’t smell old.” (FTR, there is such a smell. In 2012, the Monell Chemical Senses Center conducted a study in which forty-one sniffers confirmed that there’s a recognizable odor associated with age. “Elderly people have a discernible underarm odor,” said Johan Lundström, a sensory neuroscientist. The good news is that it wasn’t judged to be particularly unpleasant or especially intense. “However,” Lundström added, rather gratuitously, “it is possible that other sources of body odors, such as skin or breath, may have different qualities.”)

Some of us do what we can to convince ourselves that all is not lost as we shuffle toward the end of the x-axis. Until recently, I worked for a company that provided an extraordinary fringe benefit for vice presidents and above: an annual physical at the Mayo Clinic. In a single day, you had your blood and urine sampled; your chest X-rayed; your pulmonary function assessed; your bone density measured; your heart stress-tested; your skin examined for cancerous growths; your eyes examined; and, if the time had come, your colon scoped.

To be honest, I looked forward to the Mayo visit, where I could smugly congratulate myself that I wasn’t sucking nearly as much as others my age. (No, it’s not a competition, but you can’t help comparing.) At Mayo, when you’re called in for an ECG or a chest X-ray, you go in as part of a forced march with eight other males, all of them battle-scarred baby boomers. Everyone troops into a hall of changing-room stalls where you state your serial number, in this case your DOB. I was invariably five, sometimes ten, years older than the others in my platoon—but I looked pretty damn good, all things being relative. This alone made me feel frisky whenever at Mayo, so I flouted the rules. I ordered a martini or two the night before my blood work, even though the instruction sheet proscribed it in italics. When morning fasting was called for, I’d eat a banana anyway, haughty in the belief that a banana would go entirely undetected by even the most finely calibrated, advanced medical device, which in my case I’m not sick enough—not yet—to warrant. I enjoyed myself at Mayo, went from one test to another with a bounce in my step. I chatted up lab techs and receptionists with uncharacteristic bonhomie. At Mayo I almost felt like a kid again, even if, for all I know, I did smell a little.

When you get to be my age, when your life story’s halfway between the birth of your kids and the end of the x-axis, or halfway between your first false-positive mammogram or PSA reading and the end point on the x-axis, there’s a good possibility you’ll start wondering where your story will go from there. How important is it that your story live on? Isadora Duncan believed it was incredibly important. The dancer said that she wanted to be remembered as a legend. Not so a lot of people I’ve talked to. “What’s to live on?” they ask with a shrug. The story’s a dud, they’ve already decided.

Others say it’s a stupid question and that they don’t give a rat’s ass if their stories live on—when you’re dead, you’re dead. Unwittingly, they’re channeling Franz Kafka. Why Kafka? In an interview Philip Roth gave not long after he retired from writing, he talked about how one of his characters lived in accord with something Kafka, his literary hero, had said: The meaning of life is that it stops.

I wish the interviewer had followed up by asking Roth whether he personally agreed with that. And if he did agree that “the meaning of life is that it stops,” was it not gratifying to think about how he’d keep on attracting new and admiring readers long after he’s gone? That there was an immortalizing principle at work? That’s what I would have asked. But the interviewer didn’t pursue it. The two went on to talk about other things, such as how Roth had recently reread every single word of every book he’d ever written, thirty or so over a span of fifty years. “I wanted to see whether I’d wasted my time,” Roth explained. The interviewer did follow up on that one. He asked Roth what the verdict was. In reply, Roth quoted another hero of his, boxer Joe Louis: “I did the best I could with what I had.”

Bingo! I thought. “I did the best I could with what I had” is a sneaky good stab at what the ultimate point may be. Unlike most attempts to nail down life’s purpose, “I did the best I could with what I had” is refreshingly concise, a mere ten words, just thirty-nine characters (with spaces). “I did the best I could with what I had” can thus fit handily on a tombstone and falls well within the limits of a routine tweet. Indeed, “I did the best I could with what I had” makes for a dandy final tweet.

As for “the meaning of life is that it stops,” I kept turning the possibility over in my mind. It, too, is tweetable and would fit on a headstone. But it troubled me for reasons I couldn’t quite figure out. Then, not long after I’d discovered the Roth interview, news came that Emory University had acquired thirty boxes of Flannery O’Connor’s letters and assorted effects. The author of indelible collections of short stories, including “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” O’Connor had died fifty years before, at age thirty-nine—right on the cusp of midlife, two years younger than Kafka was when he died. She’d never married, living her final thirteen years with her mother in Milledgeville, Georgia.

Included in the boxes now at Emory were leftover props from O’Connor’s brief but illustrious life story. A hand-drawn children’s book about a goose. A few old toys. Unpublished journals. A self-portrait taken in a mirror. More than six hundred letters to her mother. Would O’Connor be astonished to know that these letters and artifacts are so treasured today? Possibly. Throughout her life, however, she expressed doubt that anyone would ever be interested in her life story. “Lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy,” she once wrote.

Most of us say things like that, don’t we? Our story’s humdrum, what’s to live on? Do we really mean it? Did O’Connor really mean it when she dismissed the possibility that anyone would ever be interested in the years she spent shuffling back and forth between the house and the chicken yard? There’s reason to think she didn’t really mean it. For in a journal entry written when she was twenty, O’Connor says: “It is a pity I can’t receive my own letters. If they produce as much wholehearted approval at their destination as they do at their source, they should indeed be able to keep my memory alive and healthy.”

What that suggests to me is that she really did care about whether her life story would live on. That her life story was worthy of living on. That even though life stops, a life story doesn’t. Anyone care to argue? Kurt Vonnegut cared to argue. “If a person survives an ordinary span of sixty years or more,” Vonnegut wrote in Deadeye Dick, “there is every chance that his or her life as a shapely story has ended and all that remains to be experienced is epilogue. Life is not over, but the story is.”

Vonnegut had it ass-backward, in my opinion. He was being ornery and arch, perhaps at sixes and sevens with himself at that moment, for all we know adrift at the elbow.

Having reflected on it, I’m now convinced that as a guide to better living, “I did the best I could with what I had” beats “the meaning of life is that it stops.” If everyone really believed that the meaning of life is that it stops, would we be kind to one another? Would we bother to try to save the whales, recycle bottles and cans? Would we vote in local elections? Would we ever reevaluate the choices we’ve made, let alone wish to correct certain mistakes before it’s too late? Would we bother to start a business? Would we no longer regret missing our kids’ soccer games even if we had started a business? Would we bother to care for and nurture our kids? Would we even bother to have kids?

The preceding fusillade of questions was chosen for a reason. When we care about the future of the planet, participate in the community, make time for kids, we do so not only because these are nice, socially admirable things to do, we do them because they’re all activities that benefit those whose stories will outlive our own.

Think about it: if you set a child, yours or anyone else’s, on the right road with the right values; if you raise funds to keep the local library open; if you start a children’s theater in your town; if the company you founded creates good, long-term jobs; if you trade your oil-burning furnace for solar panels; if you’re a scout leader or Big Brother or Sister; if you sponsor a child in Indonesia; if you teach a kid to fly fish and to always release the catch; if you do any of a limitless number of things in the name of the future, a part of your story will live on.

“Generativity” it’s called, which is variously described as an urge, a need, a motive, a trait, an instinct, a drive. The term was coined by Erik Erikson in his 1950 groundbreaking work, Childhood and Society, the book that made him the most celebrated psychologist in America. He was featured on the cover of Time, invited to lead conferences at the White House, and was the therapist to whom the rich and powerful turned for professional counsel when their offspring showed disquieting emotional symptoms.

Erikson’s own life story is odd and interesting unto itself. The short version goes like this: He was born in Germany in 1902. His mother, who was Danish, was abandoned by her first husband and never married Erik’s biological father, a man whose identity remained murky. Erik was told that his true father had died shortly after he was born. When he was three—just when his memories and narrative capacity were kicking in—his mother married for propriety’s sake a devout Jewish pediatrician named Homburger, who formally adopted Erik. Now the boy was Erik Homburger, Nordic in every respect, tall, blond, and blue-eyed, who had a “father” who was slight and had brown hair and eyes. Erik attended religious services at Dr. Homburger’s synagogue, where congregation members, as well as classmates at school, referred to him as the goy. It didn’t make for a firm early identity. In his early twenties, Erik took off for Vienna, dabbled as a painter, and taught art at a school where he met Freud and Freud’s daughter Anna, under whom he studied psychoanalysis. Within a few years, he met and married Joan Mowat Serson, a gifted Canadian student with identity issues of her own. They eventually made their way to America, where, with Joan’s active collaboration, Erik would leave his mark on the history of developmental psychology, first as Erik Homburger and then, at age fifty-eight, as Erik Homburger Erikson, the new surname perhaps chosen to underscore the idea that if Erik was anyone’s son he was his own—Erik’s son. It’s not for nothing that Erik Homburger Erikson became known as “the architect of identity.”

In a memoir, Erikson’s daughter Sue Erikson Bloland, the youngest of three siblings, describes an unhappy childhood in a blissful Northern California setting. Erikson was, by her account, “an awkward father,” given to irritability but capable of shy affection. Socially, he was charming and widely admired. The family story was riven when a fourth child, Neil, was born with Down syndrome. Doctors said the boy had three years to live. While Joan was hospitalized following postbirth surgery, Erikson consulted two friends (one of whom was Margaret Mead) and unilaterally decided to place Neil in a special-care institution. Joan, who never even held the baby, wasn’t consulted. The other kids were told the baby had died at birth. (Neil lived to be twenty-one.) It’s reasonable to suppose that Erik Erikson wasn’t crazy about this chapter of his story living on.

“We were not a family that ever talked about the things that hurt or angered us the most,” Sue Erikson Bloland says in her memoir.

The concept of generativity is rooted in Erik Erikson’s enduring contribution to developmental theory: the idea that the human developmental process doesn’t screech to a halt at adolescence. We continue to evolve through eight “psychosocial stages.” Erikson summarized the process as follows: “In youth you find out what you care to do and who you care to be.… In young adulthood you learn whom you care to be with—at work and in private life.… In adulthood, however, you learn to know what and whom you can take care of.”

Each one of Erikson’s eight developmental stages (some prefer “tasks” to “stages”) carries an intrinsic challenge for our writers-in-residence. As infants, stage one, the task is to figure out what or whom to trust. Since the writer upstairs hasn’t moved in yet, we need to figure this out for ourselves. Stages two through six have to do with gaining autonomy, finding a sense of purpose, forming solid relationships. Stage eight, the final stage, calls for us to reflect on our stories. It’s during this last stage that the writer-in-residence may conclude that our life story’s one of fulfillment and satisfaction; or, if we fail to resolve the earlier crises or tasks, bitter and full of regrets.

The penultimate stage, stage seven, is where generativity—not a great word but the best Erikson could come up with—comes into play. While there are no hard-and-fast rules for when Erikson’s stages take place—they’re not strictly successive, but rather meld into one another—stage seven is concentrated in midlife. At the elbow. It’s when we ask ourselves, Who am I? And through our actions and values we answer: I am what survives me. Generativity is concern for, and taking care of, the next generation. It’s passing something on. James Michener, who never had kids of his own, sent 150 of them through college. Generativity in action. If you send care packages, take part in breast cancer walkathons, mentor the disadvantaged, or would sooner go hungry than eat takeout that comes in a polystyrene box, you’re being more generative than you may have realized.

Generativity pays dividends. Your story’s better off for it. Donating blood, volunteering at a school, tending a community garden help satisfy your “need to be needed,” Dan McAdams says. It also addresses your narrative’s need for a “sense of an ending.” You’ve done things for others, left the world a better place. A life story, one can argue, is hardly worth talking about if it lacks a healthy dose of generativity.

Caring for the next generation is also a terrific theme with which to self-promote. Pay attention, if you can bear it, to stump speeches and candidates’ campaign autobiographies. Progressives’ proposals to reduce greenhouse gases are for “our children’s and their children’s sake.” Conservatives demand reduction in the national debt for “our children’s and their children’s sake.” In a revised epilogue to her memoir Hard Choices, Hillary Clinton writes: “I’m more convinced than ever that our future in the twenty-first century depends on our ability to ensure that a child born in the hills of Appalachia or the Mississippi Delta or the Rio Grande Valley grows up with the same shot at success that Charlotte will,” she says, referring to her granddaughter, who emerged just in time to be a key sound bite in the campaign to come.

The alternative to generativity, story-wise, is not nearly as appealing. Erikson called it “stagnation.” Or “self-preoccupation.” If your life story lacks a generative element, Dan McAdams’s interviews show, it likely starts out with a psychological injury. Or there was no generative role model in the person of a parent, teacher, or other adult who demonstrated a personal connection to the future. The plot of a stagnant story doesn’t move forward so much as revolve in vicious circles, says McAdams. It ends up as a life that’s been lived chiefly in the moment. Those who lack the generative impulses indulge themselves as if they were their own children, Erikson declared.

In one of his books, Outliving the Self, John Kotre revisited Erikson’s view of generativity in light of the social and cultural changes that had occurred in the three decades following Erikson’s introduction of it. By then, we’d been through the contraception revolution, which resulted in more women putting off having kids or choosing never to have them. We were living longer, which in turn meant that even if we had kids, we were spending more years in the empty nest than at any time in history. Both developments meant that we were now living “biologically sterile” for a longer time than ever. The challenge, Kotre said, was figuring out how, in this new paradigm, we’re to remain, in a figurative sense, “fertile.” To help us figure that out, he outlined four distinct types of generativity: biological (the old standby—begetting and nursing offspring); parental (educating, disciplining, initiating those offspring); technical (mentoring, passing skills along to others); and cultural (contributing something new through art, science, technology, you name it).

Kotre also questioned some of Erikson’s assumptions. Generative impulses are hardly confined to midlife, something Erikson had merely nodded at. My daughter, when she was a college sophomore, decided to major in Health and Society. Inspired by a museum exhibition, she saw an opportunity to put her passion for design to work in the field of global development. I can trace my own urge to leave something behind all the way back to when I was thirteen, suddenly aware that the clock had a way of running out with nary a two-minute warning.

Acting in a generative way isn’t strictly altruistic. Some psychologists say that it stems in part from a desire to be “symbolically immortal.” There’s something to this. Yes, symbolic immortality is small beer compared to literal immortality. (“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my works,” said Woody Allen. “I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”) But symbolic immortality is more reassuring than no immortality. You don’t live on but some vestige of you does. Your story, or parts of the story, for instance. Generation to generation, the stories we hear, the stories we tell, and the stories we build upstairs commingle and live on indefinitely.

As I’ve said, having and caring for kids is the easiest and most natural way to strive for symbolic immortality. Well, at least the most natural. Your children, knowing your story, will pass bits of it along. Moreover, your genes will live on, which edges you to within a whisper of literal immortality. “Our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation,” Einstein wrote in a letter of consolation to the widow of a Dutch physicist. “For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.” “The point is to be a good ancestor,” many have said, including Jonas Salk, who lived on not only through his own kids, but through his polio vaccine, which saved the lives of millions of other kids, giving them in turn an opportunity to seek symbolic immortality for themselves.

There are numerous other avenues to symbolic immortality. Putting something into the world that wasn’t there before can act as a buffer against existential anxiety. Studies suggest that taking pride in, and being admired for, one’s own good works suppresses, at least to some extent, one’s anxieties about dying. Some say the drive for symbolic immortality is what art is all about, creativity in general: putting something into the world that wasn’t there before. Stephen Sondheim’s Georges Seurat memorably sings, “Look, I made a hat—where there never was a hat.” Plato himself likened creativity to procreativity. He referred to creativity as the “pregnancy of the soul.”

But there’s a dark side to all this as well, John Kotre points out. A soul can be so pregnant, the drive to create so ferocious, that the artist becomes a self-possessed monster. My work will live on, but the rest of you can go to hell for all I care. In a probing analysis of Martha Graham’s long career as one of our most influential choreographers, Susan A. Lee, a professor at Northwestern, cites evidence of how the so-called mother of modern dance was seen as a “bad mother” by young dancers in her corps. Graham was ungenerative in the extreme, notoriously demanding and cruel.

We take a million small steps toward making ourselves symbolically immortal, not that we’re aware of our motives:

A friend in his seventies, an orthopedic surgeon no longer operating but now mentoring residents, is passing along his experience to others. His story will live on. (The doctor has also managed to hold on to his childhood collection of baseball cards these many years. They still give him pleasure, no more so than when he passes them on, one by one, to his ten-year-old grandson.)

A piano player—he’s pushing eighty—shares his set with a musician in her twenties. His story will live on. When the young musician plays Johnny Mercer, Cole Porter, and Sammy Cahn tunes, the songwriters’ stories live on. Same goes for when a Chinese American poet (Ha Jin) credits a Yiddish storywriter (Isaac Bashevis Singer) as his literary muse; Truman Capote cites James Agee; J. K. Rowling acknowledges C. S. Lewis. Their stories live on.

Paul Kalanithi was a young neurosurgeon who in 2015 died of lung cancer at thirty-seven, a few months after his first child, a daughter named Cady, was born. Shortly before the end, Kalanithi wrote an essay in Stanford Medicine magazine, a powerfully moving reflection on generativity and symbolic immortality. It read in part:

I hope I’ll live long enough that she has some memory of me. Words have a longevity I do not. I had thought I could leave her a series of letters—but what would they really say? I don’t know what this girl will be like when she is 15; I don’t even know if she’ll take to the nickname we’ve given her. There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.

That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied.…

The writer upstairs stands foursquare behind the nurturing of the next generation. Why wouldn’t he? If our story lives on, his work lives on, thus making the scribbler likewise symbolically immortal. But however important living on may be, it’s not the only thing the writer-in-residence cares about as you and he saunter through the latter stages of the elbow. The state of your memories is the scribbler’s principal and overriding preoccupation. Will they hold up? If so, which ones? British psychotherapist Philippa Perry has a generativity-friendly theory about that. “As we get older it is our short-term memory that fades rather than our long-term memory,” she says. “Perhaps we have evolved like this so that we are able to tell the younger generation about the stories and experiences that have formed us which may be important to subsequent generations if they are to thrive.”

14      Snowbirds at Sunset

Birth, marriage, death,” historian Will Durant said. “Everything else is ornament.” If only we’d left it at that. Instead, we’ve convinced ourselves that life’s one hell of an obstacle course. There’s the treacherous elbow to navigate. Eight psychosocial phases to struggle through, each with its own conflict or task. One damn passage after another—the Urge to Merge, the Trying Thirties, the Deadline Decade.

I think back to when Linda and I escaped to Florida for a brief respite. I was far enough into this project that I needed some distance from it. So we took off for a small island just off the mainland. We needed to clear the decks, put our electronic devices to sleep. The place had nothing going for it, just what the doctor ordered. Not a single fast food joint. No condominium towers. Not even a CVS or Walgreens on every corner, not even on one corner. God help you if you needed a Lipitor refill. No Starbucks. No movie theater. Nightlife? Nonexistent. Everyone flosses and tucks in early. The only celebrity was a middle-aged novelist who goes there to fish, a pastime he’s always found meaningful to the point of transcendental, much the way Hemingway did until he took what he thought was the honorable path and blew his brains out.

The day before we left, news came that the actor/screenwriter Harold Ramis—everyone knew him from Ghostbusters and Stripes—had died at age sixty-nine. His longtime friend Dan Aykroyd issued a statement: “May he now get the answers he was always seeking.” The obit carried no hint as to what the questions may have been.

On the island, it took about ten seconds before I was back in the fray, gathering field evidence on how the region’s three principal species—birds, fish, and snowbirds—were wrestling with the demands of their existence. At first I kept my eagle’s eye on the birds. There’s a wide assortment on the island: herons, egrets, cormorants, American coot, and, most prominently for us, ospreys.

A pair of those fearsome hawks happened to be tending a nest on a platform you could see from our window. The female osprey was straight out of a Thurber cartoon (or R. Crumb, if you like). She was much larger and more vocal than her mate, whose natural role—which he performed without argument or apparent resentment—was to commute back and forth from the nest, each time bringing back a doomed fish in his talons. The female ripped the fish apart with her formidable beak and dropped bits into the mouths of her two chicks. Those ospreys seemed to know exactly what their life story at that moment called for: generativity. Nurture the next generation and resist the impulse to eat it, which ospreys have also been known to do. Thanks to some sort of instinctive osprey prenup, and when not consuming their own offspring, male and female work in partnership for eight or so weeks until their chicks are able to launch themselves from the nest. The island is perfectly suited to supporting this ageless scenario. The bay outside our window teemed with pinfish that even the clumsiest of henpecked ospreys could pluck from the water at will. Not that there’s such a thing as a klutzy osprey. An osprey can dive-bomb into the water at forty miles an hour from a height of fifty feet and almost always get its pinfish. Ospreys have opposable thumbs, just like us, which is where any similarity ends, except that we, too, want to launch our kids safely from the nest.

As for the fish, I spent some time along the bay shore, caught a few sea trout and unsavory hardhead catfish, releasing them back to continue their voyages through whatever psychosocial stages a fish must swim through. Around the time we left the island, an impressive armada of silvery tarpon moved in. They come here to spawn. Thus will the species replenish itself, though some number of ill-fated procreators will be hooked and gaffed, then mounted to be displayed in seafood restaurants or in man caves. No life cycle for you—sorry, Charlie. These casualties aside, procreation and generativity, birth and marriage, play out according to plan on the island, one season to the next.

As for the snowbirds, it wasn’t clear to me how they fit into the grand scheme of things. The island is seasonal home to several thousands of them: late midlifers or golden agers who migrate here annually from colder climes. Neither procreation nor nurturing their young is the order of their day. Their procreation window had closed. Their kids were launched from the nest a long time ago. John Kotre hit the nail on the head in Outliving the Self: biological sterility can be a fact of life for decades, now that we’re living longer.

Not surprising, then, that when you’re of snowbird age, whether lying in the sun down south or freezing your buns off up north, you take stock. There are memories to preserve, and before it’s too late. A friend of mine gathered old snapshots and a journal his mother kept and published a limited-edition book about her life. Linda, sensing an opportunity, has come up with a business scheme: a Digital Mausoleum, she calls it. It would be marketed to those who want to produce a polished tribute to a recently departed loved one but don’t know how to go about it. So you’d go to the Digital Mausoleum site, where you would hire an experienced creative team—writer, editor, and graphic designer—to produce a multimedia life story that will live permanently in the cloud. Or as permanently as technology will allow. Should someone someday rewrite the code, or if a digital format became obsolete and unplayable on future hardware, or were the cloud itself to dissipate—then what? Personal photos, diaries, all vanish. Departed loved ones would die all over again, this time for good, which is the only catch that I can see.

More evidence: the New York Times reports that we’re in the throes of a creative writing boomlet. Not quite Paris in the twenties, but a definite trend. The article mentions a growing number of adult education programs set up to teach “techniques to retrieve and describe compelling moments.” We’re living in “the age of memoirs,” one instructor says. I’m totally supportive of this trend. These would-be memoirists, a good many of them of snowbird age, have something they need to nail down. They sense there’s a worthwhile story banging around inside that they’d like to capture by writing it down. When I ask about this, some midlifers sheepishly confess they don’t have the discipline to get off the dime. (No one seems aware of the Christopher Hitchens crack: “Everybody has a book in them, but in most cases that’s where it should stay.”) When I then ask why getting the story down is so important to them, a few bemoan how families are now scattered all over the map. When relatives are in the same room on a special occasion or a holiday—Thanksgiving, say—nobody tells family stories anymore. Everyone’s glued to a screen, often two screens at a time. Even Gramps snoozes in front of the football game with an iPad on his lap. We don’t tell or listen to family stories the way we used to. E-mail or Skype isn’t a substitute. (Lady Gaga, from the stage at SXSW: “When you leave this earth,” she said, “no one’s gonna give a fuck what you tweeted.”) Instant messaging isn’t conducive to keeping family lore alive. A clan’s Facebook page is mostly untended, and nobody looks at it anyway. Writing a personal history is a way of filling these perceived gaps.

But the most common answer I hear about why midlifers want to get their stories down is this: “For our kids’ sake.” Their kids or their kids’ kids might be curious someday, they say. Wishful thinking? Maybe. But you must admit it’s comforting to think that our kids or our kids’ kids might wonder about us someday, and that our stories will live on as a happy consequence. Yet when I ask people whether the desire to get their stories down might have something to do with “immortality,” suggesting that the “age of memoirs” is the result of baby boomers wanting to make sure that proof of their existence won’t evaporate in the mists of time, most are quick to dismiss the idea. “Nah,” they say with a wave of the hand. “When you’re gone, you’re gone.” The meaning of life is that it stops.

I really don’t believe they believe this.

Look, our stories, parts of them anyway, do live on. I hope I’ve established that much. They endure for a variety of reasons, some on an epic scale, others in bits and pieces. A story lives on in a big way if the leading character plays a role in a drama of historical significance. Gandhi’s and bin Laden’s life stories live on. Other life stories live on because the leading character leaves behind something of unsurpassed originality and beauty. Michelangelo’s, Shakespeare’s, and Billie Holiday’s life stories live on for that reason. Elvis’s life story not only lives on, Elvis himself deigns to make a public appearance from time to time.

Less celebrated life stories live on, too. We encounter evidence of it all the time. Minutes ago, I checked my e-mail and found an unsolicited letter from someone I never knew but who was an alum of a school I’d gone to. She said she was writing in reference to another alumna, a woman named Anca Romantan. Anca, born in Romania, had gone on to get a PhD. At the time of her death at age thirty-three, she was a professor at UMass Amherst, remembered for “her proficiency in multiple languages, her deep commitment to complex social theories, and… the care with which she advised graduate students.” In Romanian Orthodox teaching, memorials are held for the deceased at intervals up to seven years following death, which was approaching in Anca’s case. The letter asked for a donation to endow a fund that would offer grants to current students—a “living legacy to Anca and her passion for research.” Anca’s story lives on.

And your story, my story, will live on, too. At least for a while. How long can most of us reasonably expect? If you have kids, and they have kids, about seventy years, more or less, which seems to be the consensus view of those who study life stories. Your grandchildren will almost certainly remember your name and perhaps quite a bit about the beginning, middle, and end of your story. Your great-grandchildren will know little or nothing about your life story, unless you do something stupendously good or bad and wind up making history. Seventy years is seventy years. It’s not forever. But it offers way more comfort than “the meaning of life is that it stops.”

PART III

The End

If life passes into anything, it passes into pages.

—James Salter, Burning the Days: Recollection

15      Ghost Theory

I can’t honestly say that I fully succeeded in depriving death of its strangeness by hanging out in the old country graveyard. I did make a bit of headway, however. Thanks to those books about death and dying that were piled up in the spare bedroom, I sifted through some key questions: To what extent does the end shape what comes before? And were it not for death, would we care whether the point is everywhere but we just don’t see it, or is it somewhere and we just can’t find it? Or is it nowhere?

I might have made more progress on these sticky questions had I not gotten hung up on what others, Freud in particular, had to say about the end. “If you want to endure life, prepare yourself for death,” he advised. Easier said than done, my good Sigmeister. Who the hell wants to think about the end? Who wants to prepare? Recently on an airplane I saw a fifty-something man with a copy of Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. He’d force himself to read a page or two, then put the book aside, retreating into a sudoku puzzle he kept in the seat-back pocket as a handy escape.

One of the lesser pleasures of my weeks spent on Long Island was cobbling together a conscientious list of the reasons we’re so mortally afraid of dying (thanatophobia, Freud called it, Thanatos being the Greek personification of death). My inquiries told me that death is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma enveloped in the heebie-jeebies and shrouded by stabs in the dark. Getting over the fear of it? Now there’s a hill to climb. Maybe you have to get lucky. Like the woman who survived the sinking of the Lusitania. In Dead Wake, Erik Larson tells of a woman whose lifelong horror of death was cured when she almost drowned after the ship was torpedoed. “The only explanation I can give,” she said, “is that when I was lying back in that sunlit water I was, and I knew it, very near to death.” She wasn’t at all frightened. “Rather, somehow, one had a protected feeling, as if it were a kindly thing.”

It’s hardly a wonder that we need to deprive death of its strangeness. The Grim Reaper is a shapeshifter. “It is the unknown we fear… nothing more,” said Dumbledore to Harry as they confronted the dead bodies guarding the Horcrux. Dumbledore, sharp as he was, didn’t put a dent in the multitudinous reasons we fear death. Holed up in that spare bedroom, I inventoried a profusion of death anxieties. There are, you’ll excuse the expression, three main buckets: We’re afraid that death will disrupt our personal goals. We’re afraid that death will do damage to our close relationships. We’re afraid of what happens in the hereafter. To break these down a notch further: We’re afraid of pain and suffering. We’re afraid of nothingness. We’re afraid we’ll miss out on something. (“I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me,” David Foster Wallace, then thirty-one, said in an interview fifteen years before his suicide.) We’re afraid we won’t finish our important business, even if we’re not sure we have any important business to finish. We’re afraid we won’t meet our Maker. Or we’re afraid we will meet our Maker and find out that what happens after death is worse than death itself. We’re afraid of losing our future and our past. Milan Kundera observed that memory loss is a foretaste of death, the single greatest fear the writer upstairs harbors. No more memories, nothing left for a scribbler to do. One more writer out of a job.

We’re also afraid of leaving alone and unprotected those we love most. I ran across a short article by a retired grief counselor who’d been diagnosed with ALS. He said he was worried that his wife wouldn’t be able to hold things together after he’s gone. In the next breath, though, he let on that she’s been the one who’s held everything together throughout the decades they’ve been together. His concern for her, he had to admit, was really a “proxy for self-grief.”

This hit home for me. Linda and I have gone around and around about who wants to go first. We sound like third graders at a slide. I want to go first! No, I want to go first! While on the surface wanting to go first seems selfless and noble, who are we kidding? Going first isn’t doing the other one a favor. It’s the survivor who gets to suffer.

How would you like to be the writer upstairs who must try to make sense of a life story with so much apprehension about death echoing through the paper-thin walls of the brain? The late surgeon Sherwin Nuland observed that doctors and nurses see death all the time but rarely write about it. On the other hand, poets, essayists, philosophers, and, of course, writers-in-residence—those who rarely come face-to-face with death—are obliged to take on the subject.

My quiet walks through the graveyard yielded some respite from all this theorizing. They also inspired a brainstorm or two, not a few of which were, thinking back, pretty weird. Take, for example, this day:

I’d spent the morning poring over G. Stanley Hall’s turn-of-the-nineteenth-century journal article about how young children don’t naturally cozy up to a corpse even though they have no inkling yet of what death is. Hall went on to reflect on why corpses are disturbing to the human psyche at any age. Why, for instance, from earliest history on, have we felt compelled to place the dead where the sun never shines, chop-chop, as soon as humanly possible? Hall said it’s because we don’t want to confront in the flesh what’s going to happen to us corporally. Judging from Hall’s monograph, it would appear that in the early twentieth century folks really did believe that the worms crawled in, the worms crawled out, the worms played pinochle on your snout. (A “poetic abomination” Hall called that ditty, but you have to agree it was hilarious when we first heard it in the schoolyard.) Hall went to some lengths to make sure we understood that we, in fact, don’t wind up as carrion for worms, grubs, and maggots. What happens is at once more benign and more terrifying than that. We’re gently and gradually consumed by our own bacteria. It made me wonder whether the patriarchs in their massive mausoleums had deluded themselves into thinking that tons of limestone might offer decay prevention, like fluoride in toothpaste.

Hall also had interesting things to say about why we’re afraid of ghosts, none of whom, by the way, I’d crossed paths with in the old cemetery. There are four principal reasons why ghosts annoy us: (1) the way they look and dress; (2) the way they float through the air and pass through solid doors and walls; (3) the fact that they have nothing to lose so they’re capable of highly irrational acts; and (4) how they haunt us with guilt. This last I found intriguing. After friends or loved ones die, we often admit to ourselves that we weren’t nearly as nice to them as we could or should have been when they were alive. Thus, since they’ve got nothing to lose, the ghosts of those underserved loved ones may return to give us our deserved comeuppance. Reading that, I understood for the very first time why kids are said to feel guilty when a parent dies. And it reminded me of those bleak nights long ago when I checked under the bed before going to sleep.

Hall’s lengthy paper made no mention of anything resembling a writer upstairs. Nor was I expecting it. Then, on a sweet afternoon in the graveyard, as I sat under a sign that read NO PLANTINGS, FOUNDATIONS OR MONUMENTS WITHOUT PERMISSION, a thought hit me, one of my higher-grade brainstorms, or so it seemed at the time: an absolutely never-before-imagined thesis that goes a long way toward explaining the true nature and mission of ghosts.

What if these avenging apparitions aren’t the spirits of the dearly departed? What if a ghost is actually the spirit of the dearly departed’s scribbler, who returns to deliver payback for how we may have slighted or wrecked the departed’s life story? Maybe we didn’t offer enough love or support. Maybe we turned our back on an aging parent, shunting off the task to a hapless sibling. Maybe we leveraged a colleague’s bright idea, hogging the credit and rewards. Maybe we were a shitty husband or wife and never made amends. Whatever we did, we did something to turn someone’s life story into a less meaningful tale, and this understandably offended his or her ghostwriter. Maybe we fucked up someone’s point. Wouldn’t you be pissed if you were that scribbler and had invested so much time and effort in getting the story right, only to have a thoughtless or selfish sibling, boss, friend, parent, or child come along to muck it up for all eternity?

16      In Search of a Good Ending

I don’t want to leave the impression that I was starting from square one in those weeks on Long Island. I’d done a bit of spadework on the subject of death prior to arriving there. From the start, questions about death and dying were included in the interviews I’d been collecting. One woman—she’d recently turned fifty—said she accepts the idea of death “so long as it comes at the right time. In an ideal world, I’d like to live to 110.” She quickly added that her children’s mortality terrifies her more than her own. On the bright side, her grandmother was fortunate to have had a really terrific end, she said. She had been a cellist who’d performed with a string quartet on the day before her unexpected death. “Her mind was sharp as a tack,” the woman recalled. Shortly before she expired, her grandmother watched Jeopardy!, which was her favorite show, and right before that had completed in full the New York Times crossword puzzle. Then, feeling a little tired, she lay down for a nap and that was that.

While many of us want our end to be low-key, like falling off a log, things rarely work out so conveniently. “‘Natural death,’ almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful,” wrote George Orwell in an essay called “How the Poor Die.” Slow, smelly, and painful is precisely the kind of end most people say they’d prefer to avoid. Especially if it takes place in a soulless hospital where—after days or weeks of expensive, futile medical procedures, gruff manhandling by Nurse Ratched, and clumsy groping by interns no older than Doogie Howser—death is “cleansed of its organic blight [and] packaged for modern burial,” as Sherwin Nuland describes the terminus that awaits eight out of ten of us.

Many people told me they’d be agreeable to a humane, responsibly assisted end, the kind of end still inexplicably outlawed in all but a handful of states and a few countries. But no one I interviewed said anything about death that I consider particularly original. It takes a really fine writer to capture death in a compelling new way. Don DeLillo is one of the few who’s managed to pull it off: “a swan dive, graceful, white-winged and smooth, leaving the surface undisturbed” is how one of DeLillo’s fictional characters said he wanted his end to turn out.

I’d go like that in a heartbeat, wouldn’t you?

So, tell me, if I may ask now that we’ve been together for a while: How are you coping with the idea of death? Is the end driving your life story? Are you convinced that you’ll burn in hell if you step out of line even a tiny bit? Do you regard every minor twitch as a warning sign of a terminal affliction? If so, life can’t be much fun. “Spending your life concentrating on death is like watching a whole movie and thinking only about the credits that are going to roll at the end,” says novelist Nicholson Baker.

Or, if you’re not actively obsessed with death, are you sending mixed messages upstairs? That, you know, you’ll actually “die happy” if this or that thing happened in your life? As I write this, the hometown Cubs are shaping up as one of baseball’s most promising young teams. Sooner or later, they’ll make it to their first World Series in over seventy years. Then what? Chicago meets Jonestown? Is Rahm Emanuel preparing for city-wide mass extinction? Perhaps he should. Untold numbers of Cubs fans young and old have sworn blood oaths that they’ll die happy if the Cubs ever win a World Series. A perceptive writer upstairs knows—maybe Rahm does, too—that they’re blowing smoke. A wise scribbler will have a hard time picturing diehard Cubs fans queuing up at the stairway to heaven as soon as the ticker tape settles in the Loop. What the scribbler can picture is every last one of them jammed into the Billy Goat Tavern, getting shitfaced and chanting for a repeat. Just one more, maybe two, and then they’ll die happy.

Do you kid around about death as if it’s no big deal? Clive James, the marvelous essayist, is right now battling leukemia. He’s a veritable quip machine. He says that he no longer has to worry about quitting smoking. That he’s in the “slightly embarrassing” position of writing poems saying that he’s going to die, and then he doesn’t. As for me, I freely admit to a decades-old case of AKS, Allan Konigsberg Syndrome, more commonly known as Woody Allen Personality Disorder. It’s the tendency to veil one’s true feelings about death and existentialist gloom in general under a blanket of wisecracks. (“Can we actually ‘know’ the universe? My God, it’s hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown.” “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”)

No, I don’t like the prospect of death one bit. Nor do I like talking about it, though I really do believe my time in the graveyard has loosened me up, deprived death of a trace of its strangeness. Before, I talked about death obliquely. I reminded Linda that I wouldn’t be around forever to show her how to download a JPEG. I’d find spontaneous occasions to unburden myself, as in, “Oh, you know what I just realized? I’ll never have to buy another shirt!” It happens that I really do have more shirts than I’ll ever need, because until recently I traveled on business a great deal and needed a bunch of clean shirts ready to go. Apparently I’m not the only one who tiptoes around death this way. There was an op-ed by a novelist named James Collins, who’s in his early fifties, I gather. Collins has gone to the trouble of figuring out that he has 4,850 staples left in a box that originally held 5,000. Estimating that he uses fifteen staples a year, he calculates it will be another 323 years before he’ll need to buy another box of staples.

I, too, have more than enough staples, but that doesn’t give me the night shivers. Knowing I’ll never have to buy another shirt, however, is sobering. One’s personal myth is more closely tied to one’s shirts than to one’s staples—at least mine is. I have enough shirts for two healthy men to get by on for at least another fifteen or twenty years, which should give me peace of mind but makes me a little melancholy.

Getting back to you, though, and if I may ask: Are you not entirely sure how you feel about dying? If so, then there’s a handy exercise in the appendix (page 255) that may help you know where you stand. Answer a few questions and you’ll arrive at your Death Attitude Profile-Revised. The DAP-R is a widely accepted scale that “terror management” counselors use to establish where on the death “acceptance” spectrum a person falls. Researchers also employ the DAP-R to measure attitudinal differences about death among various population sets. Who’s more accepting of death? Women or men? Believers or nonbelievers? Papuan tribesmen or actors living in Greenwich Village? In other words, whatever comparative set piques a researcher’s interest and warrants grant funding.

If you’re curious, give the Death Attitude Profile a test drive. Once you’ve calculated your DAP-R score, you may discover one of the following about yourself:

You’re neutral about death: you accept it as part of life. To be neutral about death suggests that you neither fear death (terribly) nor look forward it.

Or you lean in toward death: you accept it on the assumption that it’s not really the end. If you lean in toward death, you’re likely to believe in an afterlife. You may also approach acceptance of death if you have zero religious faith in any afterlife. In this case, you’ve convinced yourself that you’ll live on in some symbolic way, such as through the work you’ve done or the people you’ll leave behind.

Or your DAP-R results might point to how you view death as an escape: you accept it as a welcome alternative. It’s not that you want to be dead, but under the circumstances—you’re seriously ill, desperately alone, or profoundly unhappy—it’s preferable to be dead than alive.

I see no reason to beshroud one’s DAP-R findings under HIPAA privacy rules, so I’m happy—well, not happy, but willing—to share my own. Then we can compare.

First—no surprise to me—my DAP-R results point to a strong propensity to disagree with any suggestion that death takes us to a happier or better place; or that death offers the likelihood of a reunion with loved ones; or that my soul will rocket into orbit and make an eventual soft landing back on this or another planet.

Second, I take a decidedly neutral stance on acceptance of death. I view it as undeniable and unavoidable. Death is what it is. It’s part of life.

Third, notwithstanding my overall neutrality, of course there are days when the idea of death gives me a raging case of the willies. But the uncertainty of not knowing what will happen to me after death has never once kept me up at night.

17      Butterfly in the Cafe

One morning, this was a few weeks before heading east for Long Island, I got up, showered, put on one of the several dozen clean shirts in my closet. I contemplated an event I’d not been looking forward to. Linda, who’d agreed to join me, was as calm and collected as always. We climbed into the car and drove up to Evanston. It happened to be one of those gorgeous spring days that make you feel happy to be alive and death be damned. But gamboling hand in hand through some fragrant arboretum wasn’t on the agenda that day. We were off to attend the inaugural meeting of a local Death Cafe, one of some fifteen thousand chapters around the world. Maybe you’ve heard about the Death Cafe. It’s a self-described “social franchise,” a nonprofit—not sure what to call it—cause? movement? crusade? catharsis?

The Death Cafe phenomenon started in London a few years ago, inspired by a similar concept that had been tried in Switzerland ten years prior. Whether it takes place in Oslo, Tasmania, or suburban Chicago, a Death Cafe is an informal gathering of the living. Most attendees haven’t met before. You come together at someone’s home, a church, a bakery, or a pub, where you’ll share a cup of coffee, munch chocolate-chip cookies, and admit, if you’re so inclined, to deep-seated death anxieties. Or, if you harbor no such terror, you can muse sociably about what death and dying mean to you in the abstract. Some people are naturally reserved and say very little. Others chatter on as if at the Laundromat, waiting for the spin cycle to complete. Some talk so much they suck the air out of the room, which is enough to make you want to strangle them right there in their folding chairs.

Our session was held at a bustling social center for seniors. A large poster had been set up in the busy lobby—DEATH CAFE—with a big green arrow pointing down a long corridor. I can only surmise what unsuspecting seniors made of that placard. Funeral parlor pop-up store? If I were eighty and saw a sign pointing to a Death Cafe, I wouldn’t proceed down that corridor for a million dollars. Keeping my head down, I’d hasten straight to water aerobics.

The folks who showed up for the Death Cafe ranged in age from the mid-forties to late eighties. They were overwhelmingly female. I was one of only a half-dozen men, all of us with neatly trimmed facial hair, which I’m sure has to do with wanting to project virility or is a futile attempt to fool the Reaper into thinking we’re not as old as we really are.

Who were all these people? A mixed bag. There was a woman who worked in a grief-support center (you’d assume she’d have something more pleasant to do on her day off); an octogenarian who’d been a Jungian analyst; a former librarian; a Holocaust survivor; a nondenominational minister who said he has to console grieving families but is personally terrified at the thought of death. One woman said she’d come because a friend had taken her to a Cubs game, so she brought the friend to the Death Cafe as a way of returning the invitation.

The session’s organizer—she was very chipper—opened up things by reading a poem about a butterfly. Then she suggested we go around the room so we could introduce ourselves and offer a personal tidbit about how we felt about death or what we were looking to accomplish at the Death Cafe. When Linda’s turn came, she smiled, nodded at me, and announced straightaway that ours was “an interfaith marriage”—as if no one could tell by looking. She then explained how she’d been raised Catholic and that over the years she and I had had several “contentious discussions” about whether or not there’s an afterlife. In fact, I can remember exactly one such contentious discussion, and it lasted all of two seconds. We were walking along the lakeshore when, for reasons I honestly don’t recall, we got onto the subject of what happens after we move on (from life on earth, not Chicago). Linda said how “comforting” it was to think that there might be something that comes after this life, and that keeping one’s mind open to the possibility elevates the spirit. I truly forget what I said in reply, but it was snarky enough to end the discussion before it grew any more contentious. Looking back on it now, yes, I was a pill. Why do I, why do so many of us, keep ourselves incurious or intolerant of others’ spiritual beliefs, not least those belonging to the people we love? So, yes, I’m apologizing here and now in case I get hit by a bus later on.

When my turn came, I naturally took the high road. I said nothing contentious about the afterlife, nor did I get into what we really bicker about: that Linda’s always leaving lights on in unoccupied rooms, and that my eating toast while standing up in the kitchen gets a lot of crumbs on the floor and annoys the hell out of her. I confined my brief remarks to how the two of us generally approach the subject of death—legalistically, you might say, keeping our emotions at a safe distance. Are our estate documents up-to-date? Should we revisit our wills now that we’ve moved to Illinois from Wisconsin? The guardians and powers of attorney we assigned decades ago, do you remember who they are, and are they still alive, and if not, whom do we know who isn’t ancient and can be counted on in a pinch?

The next two hours went by quickly. The conversation ranged widely. The Holocaust survivor said that she hasn’t the slightest fear of dying; she’d come close to it “nine times before.” There was much back-and-forth about the difference between a “good death” and a “bad death,” a distinction I personally have trouble making. Someone talked about how much she’d benefited from Tuesdays with Morrie. Another person recommended The Four Things That Matter Most: A Book About Living. Curious to know what those four things were, I looked them up when I got home. Before you die, the book advises, you should (1) ask for forgiveness; (2) extend forgiveness; (3) thank the people who’ve loved you; and (4) say you love them as well. (This presupposes that you really mean it.) The nondenominational minister said a “good death” is when a dying person can say, “I’m at peace with my loved ones,” which earned the most sustained, collective head nod of the entire session.

Finally, there was a fascinating exchange between Linda and the retired Jungian analyst. Synchronicity? Linda mentioned that the opening butterfly poem had brought back the memory of the afternoon her mother died. She’d spent three weeks at her mother’s bedside, keeping vigil at a hospice. When the end finally came, Linda went out into the garden and sat down on a bench to collect her thoughts. A large white butterfly suddenly appeared. It hovered just inches away, and for a remarkably long time, as if to attract and hold Linda’s attention. The analyst listened, then told of how the butterfly (psyche in Greek, which also means “soul”) is an archetype that commonly appears in dreams involving death. Jung associated butterflies with transformation, resurrection, and the immortality of the soul. Some Jungians also associate the creature with observation. A butterfly can be seen as watching us. It alights and closes its wings, then gently opens them, as if uncovering its eyes to stare.

Then it was back to the emotional security of our homey apartment, where, as I say, death isn’t routinely discussed. All in all, Linda and I agreed, the Death Cafe was a worthwhile experience. For those few hours, death had lost some of its strangeness. Listening to people talk about death is of special benefit to the writer upstairs. A scribbler will realize that there are other scribblers facing the same challenges: those mixed messages of ours, our denials, the laundry list of fears. It also helps a scribbler understand that death can sometimes be, as we say, a blessing. By dragging your scribbler to a Death Cafe and opening up a little, you’re signaling that you’re not afraid to try to make some sense of death. It affirms that death’s not driving the story—it’s you, steadfast writer-in-residence, who’s driving it. This should give the scribbler a bit of a confidence boost. And what writer, real or metaphorical, couldn’t use a little more of that?

Attending a Death Cafe, I now realize, is one way among many to deprive death of its strangeness. Making a party, a spectacle, or a fool out of death also works. Folks in New Orleans are unusually adept at this: mourners, for example, marching to Dixieland jazz strikes the right chord. Some in the Big Easy go even further. In 2014, the body of a fifty-three-year-old New Orleans woman wasn’t laid out in a coffin, it was propped up at a kitchen table with an ashtray, a can of Busch beer, and a couple of mini–New Orleans Saints helmets. The corpse wore sunglasses and held a cigarette in her hand—a so-called sitting pose. (If you’re into yoga, by the way, consider a final, heroic Warrior III.)

There are people for whom, as Sylvia Plath said, dying is an art. A New York City woman suffering from uterine cancer threw herself a month-long farewell party, hosting a procession of family and friends in her apartment. A local newscaster in Illinois announced matter-of-factly on the air that he had only four to six months to live: “I believe that I’m in God’s hands, I’m at peace. I know that he’s going to take care of the days ahead, and that the goal here is to have the best ones possible.” A fifty-six-year-old father in Cleveland, dying of cancer, fulfilled his pledge to give his daughter away at her wedding. He was driven to the church in an ambulance, wheeled in on a gurney, and walked his daughter down the aisle with the aid of a team of volunteer medics. When his twenty-four-year-old daughter burst into tears, he cautioned her not to streak her makeup. He died three weeks later.

These are the sort of human-interest stories a writer upstairs should take to heart. They will further help deprive death of its strangeness. Some stories will have the opposite effect. I’m thinking of the millennial in Los Angeles who asked a funeral director to text him a photo of his mother’s corpse, saying that it was less upsetting than having to view it in person.

18      A Place in the Shade

One day I returned from a stroll through the graveyard and made a beeline for the kitchen. Linda was about to bite into a mozzarella-and-sun-dried-tomato panini.

“I’ve had a great idea!” I said. “I’m thinking we should be buried right over there in that old cemetery.” It sounded no more solemn than if I’d told her I’d thought of a nice place for dinner that night. “I’m not talking about anything over the top,” I said. “No hulking mausoleum or soaring obelisk, just a double-wide plot with a tastefully designed stone that’s big enough for both our names, dates, and brief, carefully chosen sentiments. I’ll write yours, you write mine. Trust me, this is the way to go.”

She was taken aback. Not because I’d suddenly hurled death into the room the very second that she was about to bite into something warm and savory. Nor was she stunned at the prospect of yet another relocation. By now, she’s perfectly open to trying out new places. We’ve moved around a lot these past few decades, albeit in connection with work, not death—New York City; London; Knoxville; the New York suburbs; Madison, Wisconsin; Chicago; plus short-term stints in southwest Florida, where a company I worked for was based. Linda’s terrific when it comes to settling in and making new friends, gets right in the thick of a new situation. Not that such skills would be necessary were we to put down final roots across the street.

No, what stunned her was how concrete the proposal was. Over the years we’d spoken only vaguely about our disposition preferences. We danced around them. Back when we visited Esalen, while hiking through a redwood forest magnificent beyond words, we chatted cheerfully about where we wanted our ashes dumped. The issue was whether we’d rather be dumped at sea or in the woods, those Big Sur woods being as good as woody dumping grounds get. Linda, who grew up on a small island off the coast of the Bronx, said she’d prefer the water. I opted for a woodland scatter, having never loved sailing, let alone the prospect of being cast adrift. But now, out of the blue, just as she was about to take a bite of the panini, came the all-too-specific prospect that she’ll wind up buried in an actual cemetery, under an actual stone marker, in a specific, actual town where we have a few actual friends but no actual kinfolk and where we’ve spent a grand total of less than two weeks in our entire lives. It all begged for a bit of processing, so we agreed to take a few days to think it over. We sat in silence for a minute. Then she looked up and asked: “Tell me, which part of this is so appealing to you? Is it the burial-in-a-cemetery part? Or is it the having-a-marker part?”

A really, really good question.

I said I’d like to think about that, too, and would get back to her. Meanwhile, I asked if she could please keep an open mind about what I absolutely, positively believed was a truly inspired idea. I was dead certain of it.

Leaving Linda to enjoy her by now cold lunch, I bounded up the stairs and sought refuge in my books about the dead and dying. To be honest, my weeks-long journey into the jowls of death had begun to lose some of its charm. I was getting sick to death of death. Nobody wants to be dead, okay? What’s so hard to understand? Everybody will be dead. Got it? Why do we have to make it so bloody complicated? Which, I’m afraid, brings me back to Freud.

In the early years of his practice (later on he’d soften a bit), Freud ventured that the bony hard grip we feel closing around our neck, the reason we erupt in a cold sweat over what Shakespeare euphemistically called the “untimely frost,” isn’t really the fear of death. How can we fear what we haven’t experienced? (Don’t all answer at once.) What we’re really afraid of is any number of things: fear of castration, a tussle between our ego and superego, etc. We thus look on our own demise as a distant observer might. Here I am at my own funeral, my mind a total blank, powered down in an overpriced box, tucked in with my beloved 5-wood, per the best-ever Larry David episode. Or, see that tombstone over there, with LEE B. EISENBERG carved into it? With the quote from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet: ONLY WHEN YOU DRINK FROM THE RIVER OF SILENCE SHALL YOU INDEED SING? That would be me. And you know the worst part? My superego doesn’t write, never calls.

In trying to explain Freud’s apparent blind spot—it isn’t death we fear, it’s something buried in our childhood—critics argue that Freud himself was so leery of dying he opted to evade it in his formulations. Freud had a history of predicting that he would die at a young age. (He made it to eighty-three.) I ruminated about all of that and more, devoting a good many precious summertime hours to how Freud might have weighed in on many of the issues I was dealing with. I mused on how he would have been sympathetic to the notion that there’s an immortalizing writer-type person inside each of us. Freud, as we all know, was big on the persuasive power of narratives. He was a story man through and though.

But a tiny ghostwriter in denim shirt and mom jeans with unfettered access to our memories? Freud would have ground the theory into frankfurter würstel. Scribbler, shmibbler, it’s our unconscious needs, our sexual drives, that steer our life story. Freud would point out, as every furshlugginer college sophomore knows, that our psyches are “layered.” We have a conscious mind, a preconscious mind, and an unconscious mind. Patronizingly, he’d argue that for the scribbler hypothesis to be valid, there’d have to be a second, possibly even a third, penman hidden in the brain.

Frankly, I find multiple storywriters a fascinating possibility. If Freud were around, I’d shoot him an e-mail to say I’d be open to working with him on a multiple-scribbler theory. I’d suggest that maybe there are two or three writers-in-residence, sort of like a writing team on a TV series. They wear their baseball caps backward and kibitz in a room with pizza boxes, candy wrappers, and Dr Pepper bottles scattered everywhere. The place smells like a stall at Aqueduct. I could sign on to that scenario right now. Would it be a peaceful collaboration? Not a chance. Would the writers inevitably lock horns? Absolutely. Authors are notoriously fratricidal, even when they’re not in their cups. Look at Vidal and Capote. Vidal and Buckley. Vidal and anybody. Or even look at Jane Austen—generally perceived as gentle, polite Jane Austen—who wrote in a letter to her niece: “Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones.—It is not fair.—He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths.”

If the multiple-scribbler compromise managed to put Freud in a more receptive mood (which I doubt it would), he might run with it farther, suggesting that Oedipus himself had somehow broken into the writers’ room, not unlike a Watergate plumber. After all, what does a team of run-of-the-mill ghostwriters who’ve never been out of the writers’ room know from incest, penis envy, suppressed libidinous drives? It would be way out of their depth.

By this point, I’d give up trying to reach any accommodation with Freud. Why did I even care what Freud would have made of the scribbler hypothesis? His life and work have by now been picked clean. Dissenters have asked whether all that talk about the unconscious reflected the “unconscious ideas of patients [or] the conscious theories of the therapist,” as one critic sniped. Freud’s major insights were the result of a determined study of a single, endlessly fascinating life story: his own. Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker and others have speculated that Freud’s boyhood stirrings for his mother, and thus his analytic leap to how mother-lust/father-hate shape our life stories, could have stemmed from a ridiculous case of mistaken identity. We know for a fact that Freud misremembered when he’d spied his mother in the nude, the event that started it all. He wasn’t two years old, he was four. There was also a nurse in the Freud household. It was common for middle-class families in Austria-Hungary to choose comely help in the hope that it would encourage their sons to get off to a healthy, heterosexual start. What if it was the nurse, not his mother, for whom young Freud lusted? In his early work, he consistently pointed to maids, governesses, and other domestics as being associated with the neuroses his patients developed. This all being the case, he had no bloody business dragging your mother and mine into his theories about the so-called night side of the soul. Yes, to be sure, mothers can and sometimes do cast a blanket of guilt across the chapters of a child’s life story. The fact that I’m not a doctor or a lawyer (I’m sitting here in my underwear typing words into a computer) is something that my mother—who loved me and I loved her—never let me forget. Yes, absolutely, how our life stories come to be written is vastly complicated, but not complicated in the way Freud tried to get us to believe. The notion of a traditional nuclear unit—mother, father, and child, all tussling over who wears the penis in the family—feels hopelessly out of sync in an era when babies are now routinely reproduced by third parties or raised from the get-go by same-sex parents, among any number of other modern-family permutations.

Freud’s “tortuous formulations” about death can now be consigned to “the dust bin of history,” Ernest Becker says in The Denial of Death. Becker’s book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1974, the year he died of cancer at age forty-nine. The work has had a major influence on social scientists, psychotherapists, and unlikely others, such as Bill Clinton, who includes it among his all-time favorite titles, along with Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and that masterwork of historical philosophy, Hillary Clinton’s Living History. The Denial of Death even makes a cameo in Annie Hall. Remember the bookstore scene? Right after Woody and Diane Keaton start dating? Woody picks up a copy of The Denial of Death while Keaton leafs through a big picture book about cats. Keaton (glancing over): “Hmm, that’s pretty serious stuff there.” Woody: “I’m, I’m obsessed with death.… A big subject with me. I have a very pessimistic view of life. I think you should know that about me if we’re going to go out.”

I’ve owned a paperback copy of Becker’s signature work—it’s thoroughly defaced with underlining and marginal notes—for I don’t know how many years. I was about to add “and bought it for reasons I don’t remember,” but of course I remember. I bought it because I thought it might be of some use to me now that I was more than halfway between wherever I was and the last chapter of my life story. Even then, I suppose I was looking to deprive death of some of its strangeness.

The Denial of Death lays out the case that our death anxieties stem from a concern more profound than our conflicted ego running off with the UPS driver. Death “is the final destiny of man,” Becker declares. “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death.…” Thus we do our best to deny it.

In his poignant foreword to the book, Sam Keen tells of visiting Becker a few days before Becker succumbed to cancer. This was no chatty Death Cafe encounter about butterflies and interfaith marriage. In the hospital room the two “talked about death in the face of death,” after which they said a quiet good-bye over a paper cup of sherry. In Keen’s view—difficult to top, so I won’t try—Becker weaves his death-denial argument out of multiple strands. The first is that our exalted status in the evolutionary hierarchy notwithstanding, we’re creatures like all the rest, bugs on the windshield of life, varmints skittering across the desert. Like forest-dwelling stoats, we, too, shit in the woods, not often, but if and when necessary. As babies, before the scribbler takes up residence, we root around in our most unsavory cavities. We learn firsthand that we emit foul-smelling substances, no better smelling than your average wild boar’s. Our task as humans “becomes the denial of what the anus represents.” Nature’s values are bodily. Human values are mental. Dimensional conflict!

Becker’s second strand is, yes, we exist as creatures but there’s an asterisk attached. Alone among animals, we’re conscious of self. As the stones in the old country graveyard attest, that self is driven to build strong whaling ships, dance graceful Coppélias, write powerful novels, raise children who are virtuous. We want to express ourselves for as long as possible, thereby inviting in the terror that one day whatever we’ve built, danced, written, or otherwise brought into this world will be no more. A terrifying prospect we need to defuse.

The third strand is how, looking to defuse the terror, we search for ways to demonstrate how much we actually do count. Becker, though unaware of any scribbler upstairs, put his finger on the scribe’s dilemma, especially in midlife: “the heroic seems too big for us, or we too small for it.” How do we convince ourselves we count? By signing on to a variety of “systems” that promise to make us feel bigger, stronger, smarter than death itself—religion being the ultimate such system. We flatter ourselves to death. We tell ourselves we’re created in God’s image and have divined a path to eternal life. The hero system offers, says Becker, “a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning.”

The final strand of his argument is the way our quest for the heroic lures us into all kinds of holy messes. Competing systems clash to disastrous effect. My God’s more powerful and righteous than yours.

In a nutshell, there you have it. We must convince ourselves that we’re not simply here to emit foul-smelling substances, only to wind up the same organic matter as every dead squirrel in the graveyard around the corner. Becker said that for us to concede that that’s all there is, that that’s the point, would represent “a devastating release of truth.”

True to my word, I spent several days reflecting on Linda’s question: Was it the buried-in-a-cemetery part, or the I-want-a-marker part, that had gotten me so hopped up about our coming to rest in the old country graveyard? Truth is, in all these years, aside from that walk through the coastal redwoods, I’d never given a thought to whether I wanted to wind up in a casket, urn, cigar box, or Mason jar. Still, I did draw the line at cryonics. Not only is the procedure expensive and of dubious utility, but I live in Chicago, so believe me, I know what cold feels like. Nor had I ever really thought about a marker or no marker. Had all this obsessing over death and the writer upstairs gotten to me? All I can say is that if I were the writer upstairs, I’d certainly want me to wind up in a place that fit the narrative drift of the story. Ending in the right place makes an overall life story more consistent and well rounded. If, for example, yours is a life story of extreme derring-do, then doesn’t it follow that your remains ought to be finely pulverized, mixed with an explosive powder, packed into an aerial shell, then fired into the sky such that your ashes would burst forth in a giant chrysanthemum over Soldier Field? Wouldn’t that be far more fitting than winding up in a cheap canister from Bed Bath & Beyond, then left to gather mold in your third cousin’s dingy apartment? Some people, in fact, do a nice job of matching their final resting places with the things that mattered in their lives. I’m thinking of the sax player who paid $25,000 for burial plot No. 10836 GR2-5 at the Woodlawn Cemetery in Queens, New York. One day he’ll be just fifty yards away from Duke Ellington, whom he idolized. Sir Miles Davis (by the royal order of his tombstone) and Illinois Jacquet will also be close by.

So, yes, I’m inclined to think that our final resting place ought to matter to us, which is what I said to Linda when we finally sat down to try to resolve the issue of the graveyard. I ticked off the many reasons I liked the place. It’s peaceful and quiet. It’s steeped in history. It boasts a wonderfully diverse population—Christians and Jews, gays and straights, sea captains and ballerinas, war heroes and manufacturing moguls, honest working folk and a handful of VIPs who were always assured of a good table at Elaine’s (may she rest in peace).

The graveyard was light-years more appealing, I told Linda, than where my parents are now: a sprawling, soulless “memorial park” in the northeastern suburbs of Philadelphia, hard by a roaring interstate. I can remember—this was back when I was ten or so—when my parents purchased four plots there: for themselves, my sister, Barbara, and me. I’m assuming they got a nice deal, as the plots were located in a newly opened and as yet entirely barren section of the cemetery. One Sunday we got into our two-tone green Buick Roadmaster and drove up there to take a look. The already decrepit Langhorne Speedway was practically next door, home to the notorious stretch of asphalt that race drivers referred to as “Puke Hollow.” “The most dangerous, treacherous, murderous track there ever was,” Indy champion Bobby Unser called it.

Bury me at Puke Hollow? It was not an appealing prospect, even to a ten-year-old. I remember how bitingly cold it was that day. But I also remember being warm in the glow of how nice it’d be that we’d all be together no matter what happened between then and whenever. It wasn’t to be. In time, my sister and I had our own families and our reserved plots were resold. But for decades my mother talked about how one day she’d be reunited with my father, not in heaven but side by side in the memorial park that, as memorial parks will, filled up nicely over the years. If my mother had a purpose in life, it was to join my father there, to be reunited with the myth she’d created of him. And in the end she was. Hers was a long life but a love story all too brief, I thought as I stood shivering on still another frigid day in late December 2007.

Cormac McCarthy, in All the Pretty Horses: “They’d put an awning up over the gravesite but the weather was all sideways and it did no good.”

Robert Penn Warren, in an exquisite passage near the end of A Place to Come To: “As long as you have a parent alive, you are a child; and mystically, the child is protected, the parent is the umbrella against the rain of fate. But when the umbrella is folded and laid away, all is different, you watch the weather with a different and more cunning eye, your bones ache when the wind shifts, all joy acquires a tinge of irony (even the joy of love for a child, for you feel yourself as the umbrella or lightning rod, if you will, and know the frailty of such devices). Furthermore, with the death of your parent you begin to see in each death the weight of a ‘tale told’… and you begin to feel the fleeting impulse to verbally sum it up for yourself, or for some common acquaintance.”

19      Is There Ever a Right Time?

Like most writers’ day-to-day lives, the scribbler’s day is stressful. There’s the constant fear of making a mistake, such as twisting memories the wrong way, or forgetting or misinterpreting a particularly important memory. Imagine spending days, months, years putting up with your adolescent mood swings, then your midlife travails, then your anxieties about the end, while trying to remain reasonably upbeat through it all. The harried storywriter wants to write you a story that builds to a meaningful conclusion but doesn’t know how many pages she’s been given to complete the job. One day a stranger in a cowl, holding a scythe (see Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life), pounds on the door of your scribbler’s writing cottage: “Time’s up. Hand it over,” the phantasm snarls. But it’s not finished yet! the scribbler retorts. My leading character’s unresolved! Supporting characters will be left in the lurch! They both want to go first! If it ends here, there’ll be loose ends all over the place!

Indeed. Too few pages presents a problem for a writer-in-residence. But so does too many. Thanks to new drugs and procedures, life stories run longer than they used to. Is that good or bad? It’s good! A surfeit of pages can be a boon—many more pages in which to paint, enjoy nature, follow our bliss, be generative, seek symbolic immortality. And it’s also bad! More pages can mean more pages in which little or nothing happens, or horrible things happen. Real writers will tell you that the more pages they try to fill, the more likely meaningless fluff will creep in, self-indulgent detours, blind alleys leading nowhere. A leading character can wear out her welcome in a story that’s too long for what little happens in it. Characters with time on their hands grow tedious and self-pitying. While friends and family can tune out a leading character’s complaints, the writer upstairs needs to hang in there and listen to the whining. There’s no escape.

Writers, artists, composers, they all wrestle with the dilemma: How do you decide when something’s finished? When is it good enough? A writer can tinker with a story forever, sometimes making it better, oftentimes worse. When is a life story good enough to be over? Is there a right time to die?

One evening in the graveyard—it had been an unusually long day of trying and failing to decipher a word of Martin Heidegger—I found myself thinking about a chilly afternoon in March a few years ago. Along with former colleagues at Esquire, I attended a memorial service in Manhattan to celebrate the life and work of Richard Ben Cramer, an uncommonly talented, chain-smoking reporter who died at sixty-two. Complications of lung cancer. An outsized character, Cramer won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the Middle East and later wrote what many regard as the finest piece of sports journalism of the past fifty years, a monumental profile of Ted Williams. He was also the author of a 1,072-page book, What It Takes, that chronicled the 1988 presidential election, when George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis. Cramer sweated over the reporting and writing with such fanatic detail that the book didn’t make it out until five years after the polls closed on a race that was forgettable to begin with. Joe Biden, who got to know Cramer on the campaign trail, came to New York to speak at the service.

“It is a powerful thing,” the vice president said, “to read a book someone has written about you, and to find both the observations and criticisms so sharp and insightful that you learn something new and meaningful about yourself.” In other words, Cramer’s take influenced how Biden “read” his own life story. A meaningful experience for Biden, a meaningful accomplishment for Cramer.

At the reception, a few of us traded memories about how singularly eccentric and skilled Cramer was. There wasn’t a soul present who didn’t lament that Richard had died way too soon. By most reckonings, he had. Robert Nozick, the Harvard philosopher who gave us the halfway-between-this-and-that trick, observed that “Deaths are called ‘untimely’ when they end lives where much still was possible that went unfulfilled.”

But why were we so sure that Cramer had died too soon? A lifetime of unfiltered cigarettes would have caught up with him anyway; he could well have suffered even longer and more painfully than he did. It’s also fair to assume that he’d have been intensely crabby had he lived longer. Cramer could be very crabby under the best of circumstances. Imagine him having to operate in today’s beleaguered newspaper and book businesses. It’s also hard to imagine Richard ever topping the extraordinary work he’d already accomplished. He’d induced Joe Biden to look deeply into the meaning of his own life. Given his pace and the level of care Richard invested in his projects, another book could well have taken him into his eighties, if it ever got finished. So, did he die too soon? It’s not the length of life that matters, it’s the depth, Ralph Waldo Emerson said. On one of her albums Laurie Anderson says we can think about time as being long or wide. Cramer’s time on earth was gloriously wide. So given what Emerson and Anderson are saying, did Cramer die too soon? In any event, it’s not an appropriate issue to debate over drinks following a memorial service. For now, let’s just leave it that Cramer was deeply admired and will be very much missed, which would have been the case had he died at ninety-five.

When word reaches us that a scribbler has dotted the final “i” on the life story of someone like Richard Ben Cramer, we reflexively ask about two things: “How?” and “How old?” Then we silently conduct a rapid three-step exercise. We swiftly scroll through the departed’s mental and physical condition. We assess the departed’s accomplishments or lack of same. We consider the prospects of his or her survivors. Then we render a verdict. We conclude whether the life story was difficult, or tragic, or charmed, or dull, or exciting, or happy, or sad, or a waste, or one of a kind, and so forth, and we render judgment on whether the end came “too early,” “too late,” or more or less “at the right time.”

Again, what is the right time?

For some, there’s no time like the present. They throw open the door and invite the Reaper in. Why put it off? Albert Camus wasn’t advocating that we kill ourselves when he said suicide was the fundamental philosophical question. He was saying that if you believe that life is absurd, then suicide is a perfectly rational option. Some are remarkably cool-headed about reaching that decision. George Eastman, founder of Kodak, left an unambiguous note: “My work is done, why wait?”

In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky’s narrator declares that age forty is precisely the right time to die. To live longer than forty, he says, is bad manners and vulgar. The character obviously isn’t in high spirits. He’s bitter, aggressive, insufferable. It just so happens he’s forty years old.

Jump cut to Ezekiel Emanuel, bioethicist and law professor, older brother of the mayor of Chicago (Rahm) and a powerful Hollywood agent (Ari), who generated a little buzz with a 2014 Atlantic magazine article titled “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” Emanuel’s reasoning went as follows: Even though he was a hale fifty-seven, Emanuel assumed that by seventy-five his faculties would have deteriorated, his ability to be “creative” would be significantly diminished, and he’d be an emotional and financial burden to his loved ones. So he was resolved to do everyone a favor by checking out. Nietzsche would applaud Emanuel’s decision. The right time to die, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra declared, is when you know you’ve taken care of your important business, at which point you can “die free.” What counts as important? Valiant performance in battle, spake Zarathustra—which means that most of us will need to define for ourselves what our important-enough business is.

At the very end of his piece, Emanuel backtracks. “My daughters and dear friends will continue to try to convince me that I am wrong and can live a valuable life much longer. And I retain the right to change my mind and offer a vigorous and reasoned defense of living as long as possible.”

The takeaway here is that there’s no magic number of years in a life story, any more than there’s a magic number of pages in a written story. Some lives are brief—they’re short stories. Some are longer—they’re novels. (Some are too long, William Vollmann’s and Donna Tartt’s, for sure.) That we tend to value a longer life over a shorter one is understandable. “Long books… are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time,” said E. M. Forster.

But it’s not how long it is, it’s what you do with it. As Don DeLillo said in one of his rare interviews, “It’s my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length.” The main thing is that a story, long or short, and a life story, long or short, be well resolved by the end. Does the story deliver? And does it satisfy?

That we don’t like looking death in the eye, and kick around theories about the right time to die, none of this would be necessary had we only listened to Epicurus. His soothing proposition is so succinct it can fit on a Post-it: “When death is come, we are not.” Translation: When you’re dead, you’re dead. It’s nothing to lose sleep over. Epicurus believed that life’s purpose was pleasure. We’ll experience no pleasure after we’re dead, but neither will we suffer. This reasoning is so self-evident it’s hard to fathom how the fear of death still ranks high among our most common anxieties, right up there with flying, public speaking, heights, spiders, and intimacy. Had we listened to Epicurus, we wouldn’t despair that “never again will our dear children race for the prize of our kisses and touch our heart with pleasure too profound for words,” as Lucretius wrote so long ago. Had we listened to Epicurus, religion, if we even needed a religion, would be vastly different from the religions we cling to. The promise of an afterlife—a surefire customer-acquisition tool for faiths ancient or newly minted—would be irrelevant. Had we listened to Epicurus, the early Christian church, had it existed at all, would never have floated the idea that earthly riches can be offloaded to allay anxieties about the hereafter, which was “arguably the most successful development campaign for any institution in the Western world,” says historian G. W. Bowersock. Had we listened to Epicurus, we wouldn’t be so befuddled about how resurrection works. The questions surrounding it would be less pressing: What’s the timetable between when we bid adieu to the living and return? Is there a storywriter upstairs the second time around? If so, is it the same writer-in-residence as before? And what about our memories? Are we tricked out with the very same ones? Or does the storywriter, whether she’s the same scribbler or a successor, collect and arrange brand-new memories as she goes about producing The Life and Times of My Enduring Self II?

Had we listened to Epicurus, well, everything would be different. In Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization, philosopher Stephen Cave says our quest for immortality is no less than “the foundation of human achievement… the muse of philosophy… the architect of our cities and the impulse behind the arts.” He outlines four principal immortality narratives that are as old as the hills. The ancient Egyptians are notable because they managed to twist all four into “a single beguiling thread”:

1. The “Staying Alive” narrative. Think Ponce de León, not Bee Gees. The narrative is not to grow old but to stay young. We all but run ourselves into the ground trying to maintain a youthful and healthy glow, remaining firm and fit. We drag our bones off to Swiss sanitaria to be shot through with sheep-placenta extract. We linger at the vitamin and cosmetic shelves at Rite-Aid. Dabbing on anti-aging, under-eye concealing balm won’t make us immortal, but it holds out the promise of keeping us in the game until such time as science rides to the ultimate rescue. Now that we have genetically modified corn down to a science, Craig Venter, among the first to sequence the human genome, is working on genetically extending the human expiration date.

2. The “Resurrection” narrative. Cave calls this humankind’s “best backup plan.” The mummies at the Met are by now old news. The new news, Cave says, is computational resurrection. To be computationally resurrected is to have your brain’s current assembly of neurons and associated molecules digitally scanned, burned or ripped, or otherwise preserved in an electronic medium to be announced, then uploaded into bodies real or robotic, therein to live on forever.

3. The “Soul” narrative. Cave cites statistics indicating that seven out of ten Americans believe they have something called a soul; that nearly everyone in Africa believes they have a soul; billions upon billions worldwide are certain of it. Not long ago, a comment by Pope Francis set off a round of feverish discussion over whether he was making a veiled declaration that even dogs have souls. The news story prompted thousands of reader comments, including several that wondered whether mosquitoes go to heaven. On the very same day there was a confrontation at an ashram in India. Facing off were government forces and followers of “the frozen baba,” a religious leader who’d been kept on ice for nearly twelve months after dying of cardiac arrest. “His soul is very clean,” said a follower. “He is in Samadhi, and he will come out of it.”

4. The “Legacy” narrative. Simply stated, this is the urge to extend ourselves somehow into the future. The poster boy has always been Achilles, who, rather than settle pragmatically for a humdrum retirement, opted for a prize of greater value: eternal glory, his good name remembered. “No one,” philosopher Blaise Pascal said, “dies so poor that he does not leave something behind.” Nor, one might add, dies so rich that he does not leave his name (or those of his parents) on a building at NYU. I happen to be sitting in one right now.

It’s difficult, isn’t it, accepting the idea that nothing whatsoever comes after this? That our brief time on earth is, per Alan Watts in The Wisdom of Insecurity, but a flicker of light between one eternal darkness and another? That after our life story rattles to a close, taps sound, piper plays, fat lady sings, curtain drops, screen goes to black, nothing else happens save for whatever our designated “legacy contact” on Facebook posts in our memory, assuming she doesn’t delete our account altogether? It rankles us, said Jorge Luis Borges, that we’re the only creatures on earth who know they aren’t immortal. The others—mammals, reptiles, fish, mollusks—don’t know that they’re going to die. It’s unfair, isn’t it? So rather than be outfoxed by ferrets and jellyfish, we try to convince ourselves that we might live on. Might is our life raft. My beloved Linda clings to the might. François Rabelais, Renaissance man, doctor/scholar/monk, and composer of bawdy tales, also clung to the might, famously declaring on his deathbed: “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”

But had we listened to Epicurus? For one thing, we’d be indifferent to how long we lived. With nothing to worry about, why even wait around to be dead? Bring it on. Why bother to accomplish anything? The conundrum prompted a philosopher named Steven Luper to propose a “neo-Epicurean” view of things: set meaningful, short-term goals that we can achieve within our lifetime.

Since we didn’t listen to Epicurus, it’s all academic. We’re as afraid of death as we ever were. Some say it’s actually a good thing, that death makes us all the more appreciative of life. Knowing that there’s an end keeps poets and philosophers gainfully employed. Emily Dickinson wrote: “That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.” Death gives us something to measure everything else against. My friend Becky Okrent reminded me of a line in Junot Díaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: “Dude, you don’t want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.”

20      Chiseled and Engraved

Linda was spot-on about the marker part, I finally decided on one of my last visits to the old country graveyard. Thanks to all the time I’d spent there, the idea of leaving behind some tangible evidence of my existence had grown on me. A simple stone, unveiled at a brief good-bye ceremony. Call me a schmo, but it’s never occurred to me to leave behind production notes for my own memorial service, as Nora Ephron did prior to her death in 2012. Having worked with Nora for years at Esquire, I was fully expecting the Lincoln Center affair to be classy, witty, and moving. It was all of that and more, owing to Nora’s attention to detail. The playlist was impeccable (Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante’s “As Time Goes By”). Nora had cast the eulogizers. Meryl Streep gave a bravura impersonation of how Nora moved her hands when she spoke. Brilliant. Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson were stellar in their reenactment of how Nora and husband Nick Pileggi kibitzed at their East Hampton barbecues. “I believe that when people pass, they zoom into the people that love them the most,” said Martin Short, who was first in order of appearance. “So, if that’s the case,” he went on, “then all of us here have a piece of Nora. If she’s a part of us, we must be more like her: read everything, savor everything, talk to the person on your left, embrace laughter like it’s a drug, drink more pink champagne, and yes, brush up your style.”

Personally, I’d always thought it a touch vainglorious that someone would have the chutzpah to sit down with a pencil and scratch out their own tombstone copy before it was too late, tucking the paper into a sealed envelope, then placing it in a desk drawer with explicit instructions that those exact words be carved into a granite slab to keep the record straight for all eternity. Risky business, that. You’re going to have to live with those words for a very long time. Holden Caulfield, in The Catcher in the Rye: “If I ever die… and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say ‘Holden Caulfield’ on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say ‘Fuck you.’” (Tell me, how would you like to be his surviving kinfolk?)

If you’re going to do it, then you need to do it right. Rule one: Wait until you’re at least a grown-up and have some vague idea of who you really are. Rule two: Even then, don’t be hasty. Just as a master carpenter measures twice and cuts once, you need to be super careful before deciding what becomes a tombstone most. John Updike said he was inclined to go with this: “Here lies a small-town boy who tried to make the most out of what he had, who made up with diligence what he might have lacked in brilliance.” Thankfully, Updike never followed through, and he wound up with something much niftier, thanks to a bright idea that one of his kids had. Inscribed on the back of Updike’s black slate marker is the first piece of writing he ever submitted to the New Yorker, a poem he wrote when he was sixteen. (It was rejected.)

Some do get it right. Screenwriter and director Billy Wilder led an irrepressible life, escaping the Nazis when he was in his late twenties. He arrived in Hollywood speaking little English, with only eleven dollars to his name. Wilder persevered, leaving behind a treasury of classic American movies (including Some Like It Hot and Sunset Boulevard). Wilder lies in a cemetery on the west side of L.A., along with a good many movie stars and a portion of Truman Capote’s ashes, the rest of the tiny terror having been scattered on a Long Island pond.

BILLY WILDER

I’M A WRITER BUT THEN NOBODY’S PERFECT

(The “nobody’s perfect,” of course, echoes the immortal last line of Some Like It Hot.)

Robert Frost, flinty and nomadic, moved from farmhouse to farmhouse throughout his long life, looking for a place where he felt truly settled. It wasn’t easy. After his wife, Elinor, died, Frost revisited Derry, New Hampshire, to select a burial site. Decades before, the couple had lived on a farm in the town, and Elinor had always expressed a desire to be buried there. Over the years, however, much had changed (“a house that is no more a house / Upon a farm that is no more a farm,” is how Frost dismissed the place in a later poem). For a couple of years, he kept Elinor’s ashes on a cupboard shelf, eventually deciding on a country graveyard in Bennington, Vermont. Locals say he chose it because of its mountain view and the old white church that overlooks it. Two decades later, he would be lying there as well, his epitaph the final line from a well-known poem about death he’d written decades before:

ROBERT LEE FROST

MAR. 26, 1874–JAN. 29, 1963

I HAD A LOVER’S QUARREL WITH THE WORLD

Of all the last words I collected for possible use in this book, none rival the courage and eloquence of the two words Irish poet Seamus Heaney sent to his wife, Marie, shortly before he died in 2013. The words weren’t engraved in metal or inscribed in stone. They were transmitted in a text message, of all things. And they were in Latin: Nolle Timere—“Don’t be afraid.” How much better than Holden Caulfield’s “Fuck you” is that?

Getting the words right, I decided as I walked through the graveyard, was too important to be left to a whim or dictated by whatever foul mood you happened to be in on a given day. Which was why, I told Linda, I want her to write mine and I’ll write hers—to keep us from going overboard. And yet we kept putting off making the larger decision. Our burial plans still under advisement, I paid daily visits to the cemetery right up to the day we left for home. I nevertheless kept an eye out for the perfect plot, wide enough for two, with just the right drainage and mix of sun and shade, as if scouting for a good spot to build a dream house.

Returning to Chicago, I felt a little out of sorts now that I was no longer a hop, skip, and jump from an arcadian cemetery. I did what I could under the circumstances. I began taking long walks in nearby Lincoln Park, where there’s a zoo, conservatory, playing fields, the usual recreational diversions. It occurs to me now that I was drawn there out of some ineffable need to commune with the city cousins of the country ghosts I’d left behind back east. Stretches of Lincoln Park were once Chicago’s municipal burial grounds (pop. 15,000). There was a vast potter’s field for the poor. The remains of 4,000 Confederate soldiers were also buried here; they’d died as prisoners of war at Camp Davis, a few miles to the south. Adjacent to the main city cemetery were members-only graveyards for Catholics and Jews, the latter area having given way to a baseball diamond. Grave robbing was a significant enough scourge that Pinkerton guards were hired to protect the dead of all persuasions, the thefts perpetrated by cadaver-seeking med students heedless of Shakespeare’s warning “Curst be he that moves my bones.” The bygone city cemetery was no bucolic country graveyard. It was rank. An 1867 newspaper story reported a “putrid and sickening smell” after wastewater from a nearby distillery seeped into the ground. Two recently interred children had to be exhumed; thankfully, their buds had already bloomed in heaven.

Then, in 1871, the Great Fire swept through and laid waste to many grave markers, which led to the mass relocation of the thousands of mortal remains otherwise unperturbed by the inferno. Now, every so often, when new pathways are paved or the underground infrastructure calls for repair, a shard or two of some left-behind Jew, Catholic, Reb, or pauper turns up for a quiet look-around before it’s gently relocated elsewhere in Chicagoland.

Without headstones to muse over, the scribbler and I made do with the many memorial plaques found on benches throughout the park. In fact, we’d started keeping notes on these things when we were still on Long Island, gradually honing our aesthetic preferences. Some plaques we thought could use a little something extra:

GOOD WITH KIDS AND DOGS

Others we liked, not knowing whether to question the copyediting or loosen up and accept it as a koan:

HUSBAND, FATHER,

DOG LOVER

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER,

TRI ATHLETE

COME. SIT BESIDE ME

Some we outright didn’t approve of, such as the salute we ran across not far from the graveyard: “IN MEMORY OF __________” stamped on a street sign mounted on a stake, directly below another sign that reads “ADOPT A ROAD. KEEP OUR TOWN CLEAN.”

Really, if you truly loved and now miss someone who’s no longer, fight the urge to memorialize her on a rusted metal stake. A park bench is all it takes, or the base of a tree. Keep in mind, though, nothing’s forever. Benches rot, trees fall victim to storms, bugs, and blight. Even granite stones are subject to recall. In 2013, nearly two thousand inscribed stones that had been cemented into a bankrupt megachurch’s Walk of Faith were ripped out when the property was taken over by the Roman Catholic diocese, which commenced a major renovation.

Ideally, in my opinion, a memorial plaque or stone belongs in a place that figured meaningfully in the departed’s narrative. Someone walked her dog there, or was good to kids, or read good books, or watched the tide roll in, or fell in love there. As for production values, keep the commemoration brief, graceful, and sincere, never mawkish. Choose a traditional, tasteful typeface. Avoid abbreviations wherever possible. Check spelling and punctuation with the ruthless eye of a New Yorker copyeditor. The more minimal, the better. I saw a nice example of this at a beach near Naples, Florida, a simple recognition of the bond between man and place:

WILLIAM NORTH

SEPT. 6, 1927–OCT. 13, 2011

“A PAINTER’S PARADISE”

Now and then you come across a head-scratcher. One afternoon, in Washington Square Park in New York City, I plopped down on a bench with a brass plate screwed into the backrest. There were no dates engraved on the plate but the brass was spiffy and shiny, so it couldn’t have been there for more than a few years. Or maybe someone regularly takes the Brasso to it, a heartwarming, effortful commitment to the departed. The plate was affixed with four screws, neither slotted nor Phillips. Some sort of special two-pronged tool is called for. A security measure. Why anyone would want to pilfer a memorial plaque—symbolic grave robbery—is a mystery. Where would a lowlife in Manhattan even go to fence a memorial plaque? Would a smelter, even a Big Apple smelter, stoop so low?

There were three lines of copy on the plaque in question, nicely designed. Uppermost, engraved in the largest font, is the name of the woman whose family, friends, or neighbors thought to remember her on this bench in a shady corner of a downtown park. Beneath her name and in smaller type: SHE WAS MOST HAPPY WHEN HELPING OTHERS. Underneath that, in midsized type: IT WAS, FOR HIM, AS THOUGH THE ROCK WERE A GIANT HARD DOOR INTO ANOTHER WORLD. The line was unfamiliar. There was no source citation. The words lacked the elegiac elegance one expects on a memorial plaque—a carefully chosen snippet from a sonnet by Shakespeare or Wordsworth, a poem by Whitman or Frost, an essay by Thoreau or Emerson, or even a calming thought culled from an Alan Watts guided-meditation tape. There was a self-published quality to the words. Curious, I Googled the sentence on my phone and the answer popped up instantly. “It was, for him, as though the rock were a giant hard door…” is a line lifted from Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Remember that book? The bestselling parable published in the early seventies, later made into a truly terrible movie? (“This has got to be the biggest pseudocultural, would-be metaphysical ripoff of the year,” said Roger Ebert, who walked out after forty-five minutes.)

I Googled the book’s jacket copy: “This is a story for people who follow their hearts and make their own rules… people who get special pleasure out of doing something well, even if only for themselves… people who know there’s more to this living than meets the eye: they’ll be right there with Jonathan, flying higher and faster than ever they dreamed.”

There it is, the meaning of life, the point, for one woman, anyway, in the estimation of someone who knew her. She followed her heart, drew special pleasure from doing things well, believed there was more to life than meets the eye. That was her story. Or maybe she tried to be that kind of person but wasn’t quite able to take wing. Either way, the story lives on in the memories of those who survive her. And who’ve so testified to it on a brass plaque screwed into a park bench so that countless others, the scribbler and I that day, and now you, would be kept in the loop.

21      Precious Find

One morning when the weather was too foul to hunt for brass plaques or do anything else outdoors, I walked over to the Newberry Library, just a few blocks from our apartment. The Newberry is a hulking Italian Renaissance pile that opened in 1887. It was endowed by the estate of Walter L. Newberry, a taciturn railway baron and banker who in 1868 died at sea while on a European journey. According to a curious account in the New York Times, a fellow passenger had recognized Newberry and prevailed on the ship’s captain not to dispose of Newberry’s corpse the easy way. The man reportedly assured the captain that the deceased’s family would spare no expense in getting the patriarch’s body safely back to America. The captain obliged, ordering that the corpse be preserved in a cask of rum until the vessel landed in New York. Newberry’s marinated remains were then sent via freight train to Chicago, where, at least according to the Times, the cask was interred in a North Side cemetery. While that makes for a fabulous story, it’s not altogether true. Newberry was only temporarily preserved in the barrel. He was subsequently properly embalmed and conventionally casketed before burial. His grave, by the way—I know this because I treated Linda to a Sunday afternoon pilgrimage there—is marked by a so-called fancy obelisk, a gigantic one at that, a design highly favored by the upper crust in the mid-nineteenth century. Its inscription reads IN THE HOPE OF A BLESSED IMMORTALITY.

I very much hope Walter Newberry found a blessed immortality, as I now feel deeply indebted to him. A good portion of this book was written at the Newberry Library. Not only was the rummy urban legend morbidly appropriate to the project, the library is almost always deserted—a clean, well-lighted, cavernous place, a perfect setting in which to think and write. On the day in question, I settled down in my usual spot at a table on the third floor and laid out my index cards and fired up my laptop. The only other regular was already at his usual spot, a gray-haired gent who toiled diligently, surrounded by what appeared to be rare books, some of them illustrated, a few in Latin. We never spoke, nor could I make out from a distance what he was working on. A treatise on some aspect of Roman art was my best guess. Something abstruse, anyway. His monkish demeanor—expressionless, intensely focused on his work—suggested a scholarly calling.

A calling, be it academic, divine, patriotic, creative, or nefarious—Pol Pot believed he had a calling—is a mission that chooses you as much as you choose it. Callings are central to mythology. Joseph Campbell made it his calling to explain how classic callings play out. The hero goes forth on a dreamlike adventure. It’s unrefusable. Decline the call and you’re consigned to a life of tedium and powerlessness—as may have tragically befallen me had not I panicked and entered the Esquire contest. Answer the call, however, and you set off on a journey that leads deep into a forest, or high onto a mountaintop, or marooned on a distant island, or, for that matter, cloistered in a library working on a book about ancient art. Depending on the circumstances, nonhumans often lie in wait to torment, delight, or enlighten he who is called, though I never encountered any of those at the Newberry. (On the other hand, I never went above the third floor.) But callings needn’t be otherworldly. A strong commitment to a church, social program, ethical cause, neighborhood, school, or Planet Earth, for example, offers the opportunity for a calling, full time or on weekends. Viktor Frankl talked a good deal about how invaluable a calling is. A calling fills the existential void. A calling “endows one’s life with a sense of meaning, responsibility and dignity,” says psychologist Paul T. P. Wong.

While callings are deeply gratifying, they’re not always fun. Joan of Arc, Nathan Hale, and Amelia Earhart all perished in pursuit of their respective callings. Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison before his calling liberated a nation. Callings can also be unfair or cruel to those who are dependent on the callee. In early midlife, Gauguin famously abandoned his wife and five children because, he said, his calling was to paint—adieu, ma chérie! Off he went to Tahiti, leaving the family to fend for itself. A sympathetic psychologist will tell you that Gauguin should be admired for not allowing social conventions to blunt his drive to self-actualize, which is the apogee of a meaningful existence. Others see Gauguin as a self-indulgent bully and, worse yet, a rumored wife batterer, a gifted painter who had his values up his ass.

In any event, there I was at the Newberry that morning, working on the chapter about Richard Ben Cramer’s memorial service, if I remember correctly. Needing to stretch, I got up and walked over to a window that looked out on Bughouse Square across the street, so nicknamed because it was once Chicago’s answer to London’s Hyde Park Corner. In the thirties and forties, characters on soap boxes railed against the evils of capitalism, the most fervent of them in the grip of a calling deemed subversive by the powers that be.

While I stood at that window, a memory materialized out of the blue. It could have been sparked by a spot of decay in one of my reverberating neural circuits. Or maybe the writer upstairs was refiling a few moldy memories when one of them happened to go live. Accidents happen. Whatever caused it, the bolt from the blue turned out to be exceedingly helpful to how I came to think about the point: I remembered that once and only once in my life did I keep a journal. No one’s ever read it. I don’t believe I even mentioned it to anyone until now.

When I returned home that afternoon, I discovered that the Word document (“Diary.doc,” created August 29, 1989) was intact, tucked away in an ancient folder on my current hard drive. The file had traveled through time and space, nesting unbeknown to me in seven or eight successive computers, transferred from desktop to laptop to desktop to laptop, surviving at least a dozen Apple operating system upgrades. It survived Steve Jobs himself.

The journal dates from the day after Ned was born and runs until shortly after Katherine’s arrival on the scene. Why I stopped writing it I don’t remember, nor am I entirely sure why I started. Nobody ever said, Hey, having kids is a life-changing event, a turning point, and if you’re smart you’ll keep a journal. I just started typing entries into the Word document, usually in the evening, not daily but frequently. “Some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about,” Charles Bukowski wrote in a poem. That’s precisely what I was doing: writing down moments that seemed worth writing about at the time. The first entry is a basic who, what, where, and when account of the morning Ned was born:

Arrived at New York Hospital around 10 p.m., spent a few hours in the labor room, walked the halls, got used to the fetal monitor, etc. Linda transferred upstairs, where we hung out for ten hours or more. Dr. S., just back from vacation, prowled impatiently, finally joined by longtime partner Dr. M. Everyone finally had enough. Docs wanted to go home. Linda was ready. I was ready. Dr. S. stood at the foot of the table, Dr. M. leaned over Linda’s abdomen and pushed down with his forearm. Nada. Pushed down again. Nothing. Jumping out of my skin by now. S. reached for the forceps (gleaming, oversized salad tongs, terrifying), gave a strong pull or two and out comes slowly a red, squirming, slippery little human. A boy!! A nurse weighed him and wiped him down, asked if I wanted to cut the cord, holding out a surgical scissor. Unprepared, I shook my head. First fatherly test and I wimp out. Not knowing what else to do, I did the manly thing and took some Polaroids.

From there on, the document’s mostly a fanatically detailed series of notes on one infant’s entirely unnewsworthy developmental progress as observed in gaping wonderment by someone who apparently never before laid eyes on a nascent human life form. No emergent facial or vocal expression, no subtle change in hair or eye color, went undetected, unappreciated, or unremarked upon. Now and then, there’s a fleeting confession or a flash of introspection. Three months in, for instance, I note how it’s difficult to remember what life was like in the four-plus decades before Ned came along. A few pages later, I whine about the prospect of an upcoming business trip, fearful I’ll miss out on some extraordinary feat of developmental progress. What if he lifts his head while I’m away? Turns over on his stomach? Some pages after that, I again cogitate on how conscious of time you become when you have a child late in life. (I was forty-three, taking my first steps through the elbow.) And there’s an entry about what happened the day I was on an unavoidable business trip to Milan. Back at Esquire I was obliged to attend the men’s fashion shows in Europe—fly the magazine’s flag, schmooze the advertisers, etc. If you think that attending men’s runway shows is enviable and glam, don’t, not unless you enjoy sitting in a non-air-conditioned tent in extreme heat and humidity as bare-chested Zoolanders in fake-fur vests and tailored shorts pound the catwalk in sockless Timberland boots to an ear-shattering loop of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence.” It’s enough to make you feel shorter, chubbier, and more adrift in a world gone purposeless than you already do.

Anyway, there I was in Milan the day before the shows were to start. Ned was by now approaching his first birthday. I had a day to kill, so I wandered alone through the city, fighting off existential dread:

Lonely guy afternoon. Sat under a tree on a bench in a big park near the hotel. Watch a husband/wife organ-grinder act. The woman pumps a foot pedal that activates a mechanical accordion player sitting on a metal folding chair. Her husband is wearing an ascot and fedora, he’s the vocalist, sings Italian folk songs. Something out of a goofy old Italian cartoon. A man comes up on a bike. In a seat on the crossbar is his son. Around 2 yrs, built like Ned. The father sets him on the ground and the boy just stands there, completely transfixed by the music, stares in amazement at the mechanical accordion player. The father hands him a bill, urges the boy to take a couple of steps and drop the money into the pail which is right next to the clanking accordion thing. Boy freezes. Won’t dare move an inch closer. Father gently urges him again. The boy takes a tiny step or two, then flings the bill into the air in the direction of the pail. It seems to hang forever in midair then flutters directly into the little bucket. Fucking incredible. Boy scuttles back into his father’s arms. I tear up. Can’t put into words how much I miss Ned at that moment.

Just as I’d never force you to sit through our home movies, I won’t foist much more of the long-lost journal on you. As I said, it winds on for a couple more years, the entries getting sparser over time. There’s a flurry of activity when Katherine’s born (July 27, 1991, 2:23 a.m., for the record). By now we were living in London, where I’d been sent to help launch a British edition of Esquire. The account of Katherine’s birth serves as a nice bookend to Ned’s. Whereas Ned arrived to a fanfare of blaring trumpets weeks after his due date, Katherine arrives weeks ahead of schedule, no muss, no fuss, her entrance accompanied by soft guitar chords. She’s delivered effortlessly. No tag team of highly ranked New York City obstetricians. No forearm pushing her out of Linda’s belly. No giant salad tongs. All it takes is a midwife from Singapore named Lily Fernandez. Lily’s calm, gentle proficiency that morning, her name and presence that day, had gone entirely missing from my memory until she turned up again in the pages of the journal the afternoon I returned from the Newberry Library.

22       Diaries Dearest

Rediscovering the long-lost diary got me thinking about diaries and their relationship to life stories. Why do some people keep a journal in the first place? Do you? Did you ever? If not, or if so, why? I added those questions to my interview list.

Some people who’ve never kept a diary can be pigheaded about it. Who do they think they are, Rudyard Kipling, who boasted that if something wasn’t worth remembering, it wasn’t worth writing down? Others told me that they’d like to keep a diary but don’t have the time. I’m sure that’s true; it’s tough enough dealing with the demands of work and family. Still others said they had nothing much to say to a diary; their day-to-day life was ordinary, and besides, there were plenty of other places—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—where they could dump mundane, half-baked thoughts at the drop of a hat. Keeping a journal and posting on social media, however, are two different things, I tried to point out. With a journal, your comments don’t scroll out of existence. They’re linked one to the next, resulting in an open-ended, running account uninterrupted by commercial messages or the quotidian bleats of others. There’s also plenty of stuff that occurs to us that we’d rather not share with others—not on Facebook or Twitter, not anywhere—but they’re worth keeping a record of. And there’s stuff we don’t fully understand and can’t easily put into words. A diary doesn’t care how you say something. A diary’s not judgmental. Nothing’s not important enough. Everything’s not unimportant until time proves it fatuous or incomprehensible.

One person said she never kept a journal because writing doesn’t come easily for her. As if that matters. Virginia Woolf, whose lifelong diary stretches across thirty-eight handwritten volumes, said that how a diary’s written “doesn’t count.” Reading through one of her own journals, she confided that she was “much struck by the rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along, sometimes indeed jerking almost intolerably over the cobbles.” My modest seventy-page diary jerks intolerably over the cobbles as if yanked along in a little red Radio Flyer. Literary quality? I’d say it falls somewhere between prosaic and cringe-worthy, no big deal since I never imagined the writing would ever see the light of day.

There are many out there who think diaries are only for people who’ve led an epic life such as Anne Frank’s. Or a train wreck of a life like Bridget Jones’s. Balderdash! There’s no correlation between how singular a life is and how interesting the diary. A boring life can make for a fascinating diary, and a fascinating life can make for a boring diary. George Orwell, whose writing I admire tremendously, kept one of the most mundane diaries imaginable: shopping lists, daily weather summaries, vegetable-growing reports, speculation on what may have caused his goat’s loose bowels.

And then there are people who think that only the lonely keep diaries. Joan Didion predicted that her daughter would never need to keep one because the little girl was “delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up.” Those who maintain private notebooks, Didion said, “are a different breed altogether… anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.” Didion was reaching for effect. She herself kept a journal because she couldn’t bear the thought of wasting so much as “a single observation.” A “thrifty virtue,” she called it. “See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write—on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hat-check counter in Pavillon (one middle-aged man shows his hat check to another and says, ‘That’s my old football number’).”

Here, though, is the best reason to keep a diary: it is a way to create who you are. So remarked Susan Sontag, whose posthumously published diaries recount in intimate detail her life as a public intellectual. “In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself,” Sontag wrote in her diary.

That’s exactly it, I now realize. I started the short-lived journal to create myself. Create myself as a father. Or re-create whatever self I’d been into a substantially revised self, this one having one, and then another, young soul who depended on me.

I now realize something else. When I said that the sudden remembrance of the long-lost journal might not have been an accident, here’s what I was thinking: What if, as I stood at the window looking out at Bughouse Square, the writer-in-residence was trying to tell me something by setting loose that memory? Such as? Such as we would be doing our scribblers one hell of a favor if, instead of letting them do all the work of figuring out which events and relationships are worth keeping, we did some of the heavy lifting. What if the writer-in-residence wanted me to understand that a journal that is routinely updated, no matter whether it’s maintained in a moleskin notebook or a crummy spiral-bound Office Max notebook, is of immense value to him?

Here’s what I mean. Let’s say you’re jogging through an old country graveyard. Something catches your eye. No, it’s not the ghost of George Balanchine hoisting the ghost of Alexandra Danilova in a macabre new production of Don Quixote. You simply spy a mighty oak tree. Big deal. A tree’s a tree. Except that this time, for some inexplicable reason, you see a tree and you think to yourself, A tree is strong. A tree is stalwart. You’re hit with the blinding insight that a tree speaks to the meaning of life—whereupon you’re filled with rapturous joy that you are alive at that very moment.

Granted, it’s the kind of borderline-deranged insight a poet might have. In fact, Hermann Hesse had that exact borderline-deranged insight, and even went to the trouble of writing it down: “A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.”

But let’s say that you’d had that insight. You can do one of two things with it. You can write a note about how strong and stalwart trees are, or you can make a mental note of it, betting that the mental note will be stored in your memory archive, to be retrieved one day by the writer upstairs—for what reason you have no bloody idea. Why, then, go to all the trouble of hauling down your journal from inside the dropped ceiling tile or typing the tree thought into your iPad? Because the journal serves as a backup vault. Much as we assume we’ll remember things that strike us as interesting or inspiring, we don’t. We’re busy and easily distracted. Most things that strike us as interesting or inspiring go in one ear and out the other, never making it into our memory archive and therefore irretrievable by the writer-in-residence at a later date. But when jotted down in a journal, the insight about the tree is locked and loaded for future use. In time it may connect to another insight about, I don’t know, gnats. Not how annoying gnats can be, but how joyfully gnats seem to take to the air on a gentle summer night. Now you’ve got a theme going, don’t you see? How meaningful the world is on a quiet evening when there’s nothing going on, except everything is going on. The whole damn world’s swarming under the watchful security of stalwart trees. (Or something like that, I’m not a poet.) The point is, you’re seeing things in nature you hadn’t before, keeping tabs on them. Upon reflection, you may come to discern a pattern. You start connecting dots. The dots may add up to how there’s meaning, purpose, and beauty in nature, which is not only comforting, it may even add up to the reason you’re here in the first place.

The bottom line: were it not for your diary notes, your thoughts about trees and gnats would have dissipated. Noting them in a journal is like marking an important e-mail with a star or circling a date on a calendar. The real-time notation serves as a heads-up, a flag. It says to the storywriter upstairs, this memory’s worth hanging onto.

Finally—and this is important—studies show that we routinely and predictably underappreciate certain events when they happen. And that events, when recalled in a different mood or another context, mean something entirely unexpected. Such as the evening you had this weird thought about how a tree is trustworthy. The studies show that the more ordinary an event seems at the time, the greater the likelihood that we’ll make an error in judgment about how meaningful it can turn out to be.

To bring this all back home: my coming upon the mechanical accordion player who mesmerized the little boy in Milan was, at the time, ludicrous if touching. I was absolutely captivated by the event—at the time. But I probably would have forgotten about it. Thanks to the long-lost journal, however, the event’s not only been preserved, it’s understood in a way that holds great meaning for me. It reminds me of how captivating and magical the world is to a young child. As our kids grow up, as we ourselves get old, it’s easy to forget what that magic feels like. The journal entry also brings back the ache I felt being away from my own young son; how intensely I experienced those early years of fatherhood; and how committed I was to re-creating myself as a father.

The same goes for Lily Fernandez, the midwife. She was a stranger who one night materialized and then disappeared just as quickly. I’d completely forgotten about her. But now, thanks to diary dearest, Lily lives on in my life story. She personifies the hundreds of characters who play seemingly minor roles in our stories, yet bear witness to events of special importance. Characters who, because we’re distracted by whatever’s happening on center stage at the time, we wind up overlooking on our acknowledgments page.

23      Writing a Beautiful Sentence

Finally, we come to a subject I swore to myself I wouldn’t mention at all in this book: Sisyphus, founder and king of Corinth. I swore I wouldn’t mention Sisyphus because his name pops up in nearly every book about the meaning of life. You can’t avoid him. Enough already, I said to myself. Then, after thinking about it some more, I swore to myself I wouldn’t end the book with Sisyphus. And I won’t. I’ll almost end it with him.

The reason everyone invokes Sisyphus when they’re writing about the point is because Sisyphus rules as the undisputed rock star of pointlessness. Were philosophers ever to stage a gala black-tie awards ceremony up in the stacks, the Lifetime Achievement Owlie for tireless efforts in promoting awareness of life’s meaninglessness would go hands-down to Sisyphus. He’d retire the prize.

It must have been in the sixth grade that I first learned of Sisyphus. The view was shallow: here was an unlucky loser who received the cruelest, most unusual punishment imaginable. No takeaway beyond “See, kids, crime doesn’t pay.” I hope, but seriously doubt, that we’re now encouraging a sharper reading of the Sisyphus myth. There are few better ways to get a tender mind focused on the meaning of life in general, and in particular on the hours, years, and decades they’ll spend bemoaning their jobs and significant others.

I’d gotten a much deeper appreciation of Sisyphus when I was up in the stacks. He was far from a junior offender. “The craftiest of men,” Homer called him, though this was before Bernie Madoff came along. Sisyphus’s rap sheet, I discovered, was more troubling than I’d known. It extended far beyond keeping the god of the underworld in chains, thus effecting a temporary hold on all earthly deaths, a breakthrough that today would earn him simultaneous Nobel Prizes in physiology, chemistry, and medicine. Sisyphus, I learned, wantonly executed innocent tourists traveling through Corinth. His incorrigible scheming led him to marry the daughter of a rival, who bore him two sons, both of whom she slew when she discovered that Sisyphus was about to exploit them as part of a scheme to overthrow her father. The Julian Assange of his day, Sisyphus notoriously revealed celestial secrets.

Over these many centuries, Sisyphus’s name has been thrown around with wild abandon by those who make it their business to decide what’s tedious and meaningless in everyday life. Dusting and ironing? In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir equates housekeeping with pushing a block of stone uphill. Mowing the lawn? In Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, Michael Pollan decries the “hot monotonous hours” we spend cutting the grass, then dumping on fertilizer and lime to induce the same grass to grow back as quickly as possible, thereby restarting “the whole doomed process.”

This is not the place to argue with de Beauvoir or Pollan, other than to say that neither housework nor tending a lawn strikes me as inherently meaningless—not that I find deep personal satisfaction in doing either. But some people do, and good for them. There are women who believe that the meticulous maintenance of a home rises to a religious calling. Martha Stewart’s net worth attests to it. While I’m not aware of any research studies that probe the fulfillment inherent in mowing a lawn, I can appreciate how, for some people, a manicured lawn is aesthetically pleasing and adds to a feeling of self-worth. If repeated buffing and pruning yield satisfaction, provide a sense of order in a world of chaos, who are we to deny them?

Moreover, repetition unto itself is no sin. Consider poet Philip Larkin’s daily grind: “My life is as simple as I can make it. Work all day, cook, eat, wash up, telephone, hack writing, drink, television in the evenings. I almost never go out. I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passage of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there’s my way—making every day and every year exactly the same.”

Live and let live, I say. Boring is in the eye of the beholder.

What I certainly didn’t know back in the sixth grade is how many ways there are to interpret the myth of Sisyphus. Camus, in his classic essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” argued that if you don’t try to make life into something more than it is, you can wind up a reasonably satisfied human being. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart,” he wrote.

Sixty years after Camus, philosopher Richard Taylor took the mythical boulder and dragged it a bit farther. Author of a widely assigned book on metaphysics, Taylor was something of a renegade in his field. He considered modern philosophy vapid and self-absorbed, citing one philosophy department’s practice of not allowing the public to sit in on events, even barring philosophers from other universities. “Academic philosophers cook up what seem to me to be artificial problems and then just kick them around among themselves,” Taylor said. One of his former students recalled that Taylor marveled over how his colleagues would debate “whether earthworms have souls but scoffed at an examination of love and marriage.”

Best of all, Taylor was clearly one of those rare teachers who, through force of spirit and intellect, was himself a source of meaningfulness for those fortunate enough to take one of his classes. We’re lucky to have a teacher like that in our school careers. Novelist Rick Riordan had Mrs. Pabst. When Riordan was a struggling thirteen-year-old, Mrs. Pabst introduced him to Norse and Greek myths, which ignited Riordan’s interest in mythology, which eventually led to the writing of the phenomenally successful Percy Jackson & The Olympians series and other books that have sold in the millions. Mrs. Pabst was, Riordan says, “my Chiron,” the centaur the gods called on to mentor their offspring.

I didn’t have a centaur, never had the pleasure of knowing a teacher with the body of any animal, though I’m tempted to say I came close. But I did have Mr. Quinn, who back in the fifth grade suggested that I think about becoming a writer when I grew up. In the eighth grade there was Miss Lippard, who, some fifteen years after we last laid eyes on each other, sent me a charming note after I’d gotten a bit of recognition from the high school I went to. A handful of others have stayed with me, too. Sometimes, when I catch a whiff of cigarette smoke, I’m transported back to an electrifying college course in political theory. It was taught by C. J. (Smiley) Burnett, an alternately obstreperous and kindly gravel-voiced character who lit up one Chesterfield after another as he managed to bring alive the bone-dry social theories of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim. I practically inhaled that class.

Richard Taylor died three years after publishing what is today regarded as a seminal essay on Sisyphus. Memorials written by his former students describe a humorous and stimulating classroom presence dressed in khakis, flannel shirt, and work boots, perched on a desk, cigar in hand. He and his dog, slumbering beneath the desk, wore matching red bandanas. He was a renowned keeper of honeybees. Taylor was indomitable. Two months after he learned he’d been diagnosed with incurable cancer and had only a year to live, he told an interviewer: “Strangely, this does not disturb me.… My life has been blessed at every turn, with a beautiful late-life marriage and wonderful children, two of which—Aristotle and Xeno—were born in my late sixties, after I had retired. I’m deep into writing a book, on marriage and divorce, and this keeps me too busy to give much thought to my mortality.”

In his widely cited paper on Sisyphus, Taylor observes that the myth enchants us in part because there are so many different ways to read it. It underscores man’s determined tenacity (celebrated as “perseverance,” “grit,” “spunk,” “heart,” “starch,” “resolve,” “stick-to-itiveness”). But however you choose to hear the story of Sisyphus, Taylor writes, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that his labors amount to nothing.

Pointless? On the face of things, yes. But Taylor asks us to consider a what if. What if the sentencing authorities—they were gods, after all, and could do any damn thing they wanted—had secretly injected Sisyphus with a magical, mind-altering substance? A mythological roofie. What if that potion induced in Sisyphus a compulsive desire or need to push a rock uphill? Or at least reconciled him to the seemingly pointless task? What if every time the rock crashed back down, Sisyphus couldn’t wait to push it back up again? The circumstances of the story haven’t changed a whit, Taylor points out. The only difference is how Sisyphus himself views what he’s been tasked to do. He accepts it. He doesn’t feel punished by it. He might even see some value in it. Indeed—stop me if I go too far—what if his otherwise purposeless toil frees up Sisyphus’s mind for more valuable pursuits? What if, instead of getting mired in how tedious the work is, he’s able to reflect on how unspeakably beautiful the mountain is, exulting in how its colors and shadows dance in the sun and moonlight? Not so far-fetched, I don’t think. I just read a profile of a current writer who worked for a time as a bricklayer. She says the experience was more valuable than going to college because it taught her to focus. What if pushing the rock up the hill sharpens Sisyphus’s concentration and perceptions? What if it frees up enough mental bandwidth that he’s now able to compose gorgeous sonnets and bewitching melodies, if only in his head?

The point? Just as Sisyphus was sentenced to pushing a rock uphill, we are sentenced to write a life story—moment to moment, day after day, from the beginning to the end, even as we struggle through inevitable stretches of tedium and suffering.

The point? The story’s the point, don’t you see? What you recorded in the journal’s the point. The point is to keep pounding away at a satisfying story even when conditions on the surface seem as dreary, futile, and exhausting as pushing a rock uphill.

The point is to write the best story we can. The point is to keep the story from obsessing over what’s lacking, inferior, or ugly in life, and instead cast our attention on the good, the true, and the beautiful, never overlooking the pain or injustice but confronting them. As Viktor Frankl said, it isn’t what you expect from life that matters—I’m looking at you, millennials—it’s what life expects from you. Life expects that we give back to it. Frankl was shipped to the death camps and promptly stripped of everything that was important to him. His wife had been imprisoned elsewhere and was probably dead, he could only assume.[*] His nearly complete manuscript on the importance of meaning, his life’s work, was discovered in the lining of his coat, confiscated, and destroyed. His determined attachment to the meaningfulness of both—memories of being at home with his wife in their Vienna apartment, reconstructing his manuscript using a pencil stub to scribble on scraps of discarded leather—gave him the courage and hope to endure the fearfulness and indignity of his unspeakable condition.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing,” Frankl wrote, “the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Our own day-to-day life stories are not remotely as horrifying as Frankl’s, thankfully. The same lessons, however, apply. Despair, disappointment, boredom, conformity, pain, and hate are no match for passion, conviction, courage, curiosity, and love. Each of us is sentenced to write a life story. Writing it as well and as creatively as you can is the point. A story with a beginning, middle, and end that, despite the ups and downs on a Vonnegut graph, moves persistently in the right direction. That’s the point.

So that’s it, then? Well, not entirely. I owe you a little more.

Back at the start, I said I wouldn’t try to undermine your faith in a supreme being—as if I could. I promised not to pass judgment on any spiritual quests du jour. And I assured you I wouldn’t make light of your material values even if I don’t share them. We all have more than enough self-appointed oracles and arbiters of morality telling us whom to worship, where life’s true purpose lies, and what will happen to us if we don’t play by their rules. But I didn’t say that I wouldn’t pass along a few writing tips. Here, then, are some questions and answers that I hope tie up a few loose ends.

Does the beginning of the story matter?

Yes. The beginning sets everything in motion, sometimes in the right direction, sometimes not. This is the part E. M. Forster said you don’t remember, which is no big deal since the beginning mostly depends on the hand you’re dealt. After that, what happens depends on you. And on fate, of course, which a leading character cannot control.

Does the middle of the story matter?

Yes, the middle’s crucially important. There comes a moment in every story, Kafka said, when there’s no turning back. What matters in the middle is that there are more pages filled than pages to go. It’s here that the story must find its focus if it hasn’t already.

As for the end, does it matter?

The tail end of the story counts for a great deal. Nobody likes a letdown, not least the writer upstairs. If memories start to slip in the final chapter or two, the scribbler faces a crisis of the greatest magnitude. I’m not referring to a senior moment now and again. Those happen to the best of us. In fact, recently there’s been speculation that a senior moment is little more than a sign that by now we’ve collected so many memories over so many years that our storage capacity is getting tight. We therefore slide a few memories to the side—senior moments—just to clear a little space for new memories.

Serious memory impairment is something else altogether. “Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling.… Without it, we are nothing,” filmmaker Luis Buñuel wrote in My Last Sigh, his autobiography. Among its other tragic consequences, loss of memory late in the game robs the scribbler of an invaluable storywriting opportunity. Social scientists call it a “life review.” “Probably at no other time in life is there as potent a force toward self-awareness as in old age,” gerontologist Robert Butler said. By mining distant memories and retelling the past, the writer upstairs will often discover fresh insights into bygone events and relationships. It’s when “hidden themes of great vintage may emerge,” Butler explained. In a life review the scribbler will frequently rewrite certain memories into more mythic ones. He does so to clarify our story. At life-review time, the scribbler takes liberties. For example, research indicates that when we reach our seventies and beyond, we often make our parents into far better human beings than we once believed they were. At this stage, the writer-in-residence figures, coherence is more important than truth, though that’s not to say that our parents weren’t better than we once thought.

Finally, what’s a great life story about?

I hope it’s clear by now that a great life story can be about a lot of things—but not chiefly about sex, money, power, or fame, though these all have an appropriate place in a great life story. A great life story also isn’t a story about gazing at your navel. And it’s certainly not about how life did you wrong and owes you. Stories like that are dead on arrival.

A great life story is a story that adds up—that’s what it’s about, adding up. A story that adds up bulges with meaningful memories. Not to harp on the value of keeping notes as you go, but a journal’s a surefire way to keep the scribbler from overlooking meaningful memories. The idea is to tag events and relationships as meaningful at the time; to recognize the good, the true, and the beautiful when they occur, as Viktor Frankl told us. These moments needn’t rise to the heroic experiences or accomplishments that will whoosh you out of your living room into a hall of fame or a history book. Meaningful memories can seem pretty ordinary. You did right by your kids. You achieved a hoped-for goal. You worked your ass off and got your foot in the door. You found something to care deeply about in your off hours. You took an opera appreciation course that opened up a lifetime passion.

To wind up with a sufficient number of meaningful memories, two things have to happen. The first is that you need to pay attention, be a sharp-eyed observer. You need to recognize beauty or truth when you see it. You need to notice how the colors and shadows dance on the mountain, or what a tree might stand for. These are the kinds of moments that will define you and how others will come to see you. They might even earn you a little plaque on a park bench or at the base of a maple tree.

You also have to believe in your writer-in-residence. He or she starts out as gifted as any other scribbler, but many of us doubt our ability to “write” a great life story. “A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within,” said Emerson. And yet, he continued, he “dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

A year or so after I first jogged through the iron gates of the country graveyard, Linda and I returned to the village and I went back over to the cemetery. For old time’s sake. By then I’d done more than enough thinking about the end and was working on the diary chapters. Having rediscovered my long-lost journal, I’d brought east with me a tote bag full of other people’s journals. Anaïs Nin’s started with a letter she wrote in 1914, when she was eleven. She would eventually fill up two hundred notebooks over the course of the next sixty-three years. In one of her diaries—by now she was in her thirties—Nin responds to the age-old question of why some people are compelled to write:

We… write to heighten our own awareness of life, we write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment, and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth, we write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write.

Now, please read that one more time. But this time, substitute the word “live” for the word “write” and there you have it—the point that’s always been right there in front of our nose.

Afterword

That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones.

—Raymond Carver, “A Storyteller’s Shoptalk”

A few months into this project, I was briefly tempted to go all in on the notion that however our life stories come to be, each is fundamentally and unavoidably a mystery story. A life story, like a mystery story, is built on a complex plot, full of novel twists and unexpected turns. Why we’re here in the first place is murky. Shady characters turn out to be good guys. It’s the ones who are too good to be true we need to watch out for.

For a while I played around with pushing this high concept as far as I could. I looked into whether those who’d mastered the mystery genre might offer lessons to us on how we might go about “writing” the mystery called you or me. P. D. James—there’ve been few more accomplished practitioners—extended a promising checklist. Her first and most adamant piece of advice was that we make certain we know how, where, and when the mystery ends before we start. That’s when I knew I was barking up the wrong tree. The end? The only thing we know for sure is that a life story will.

There were, though, a few tips on James’s checklist that struck me as useful in thinking about our life stories. A good mystery writer, she said, keeps her senses open to experiences good and bad, an admonition right out of Viktor Frankl’s playbook. Noticing and appreciating small, everyday details—being “mindful”—makes for a more surprising and enriched story, be it a good mystery or a satisfying life story. To live in the moment, to allow free-flowing thoughts, feelings, and sensations to be experienced while keeping a lid on snap judgments, is to invite a deeper appreciation of the day-to-day.

James also reminded us that characters in a mystery story must rise to the level of “real human beings”—not “pasteboard characters to be knocked down in the final chapter.” Frankl basically said that as well. The meaningfulness of human existence, he wrote, lies in “the uniqueness of the human person.” It’s up to us to go looking for those qualities in the characters we meet.

When writing her mystery stories, James spent a lot of time hanging out with police and forensics teams. Granted, these may not be the best sources for unraveling clues to the meaning of life, but there are other experts out there to be consulted, among them philosophers, poets, inspired teachers, spiritual guides, and yes, even kids (see below).

Finally, James said she never suffered from writer’s block, though sometimes she had to wait out a long dry spell before nailing down the idea for a new novel. While biding her time, she made it her habit to do some writing no matter what—little stuff, anything, if only to keep the gears greased. Even better for our purposes, she explained how she started keeping a diary—her one and only—when she was well into her seventies. Eventually published in book form, Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography came out a few years before James died in 2004. In the prologue she wrote: “My motive now is to record just one year that otherwise might be lost, not only to children and grandchildren who might have an interest but, with the advance of age and perhaps the onset of the dreaded Alzheimer’s, lost also to me.” Then, a couple of pages later: “There is much that I remember but which is painful to dwell upon. I see no need to write about these things. They are over and must be accepted, made sense of and forgiven, afforded no more than their proper place in a long life in which I have always known that happiness is a gift, not a right.”

There were a few times during this project when I was tempted to let a thousand metaphors bloom. Reading writers on how they write will do that to you. Metaphors have a way of running amok, however, so I drew the line and resolved to stick with one abiding metaphor, the you-know-what upstairs. But now that we’re finished, I thought I’d mention a couple more metaphorical writer types in the hope that they might present other ways to think about how your life story’s composed.

Game of Thrones author George R. R. Martin says that there are two kinds of writers: “Architects” and “Gardeners.” They lay out their plots in completely different ways. Architects create “blueprints before they drive the first nail,” Martin explained in a newspaper interview. “They design the entire house, where the pipes are running, and how many rooms there are going to be, how high the roof will be.” Gardeners, on the other hand, “just dig a hole and plant the seed and see what comes up.”

Which better describes how your life story is getting drafted? Do you make your decisions and choices with forethought and care, according to some overall life plan? Do you do your level best to anticipate challenges and avoid unpleasant surprises? Or do you just let the chips fall where they may? Do you drive the plot or does the plot drive you?

Julian Barnes had the same idea, though he gussied it up a bit in a piece he wrote in the London Review of Books. Barnes maintained that some of us are in control of how the plot unfolds, while for others it’s a case of que sera sera. If you think you’re driving the action, then you’ve got what Barnes calls a “narrativist” up there banging out your life story. You see constant connectivity in whatever befalls you. You take responsibility for your actions and feel guilty about your failures. You are what moves the story from point A to point B.

If, on the other hand, you’re someone who’s buffeted by external events, Barnes would say there’s an “episodicist” toiling in the rafters. You perceive little connection between the various parts of your life—work, family, play. They are what they are. You don’t try to sync everything up. You think of your life story as a stream of events that flow seamlessly one to the next, carrying you along for the ride.

Which is it better to be—a narrativist or an episodicist? Neither is better than the other, Barnes says. Narrativists think episodicists are irresponsible; episodicists think narrativists are boring and bourgeois. We all harbor elements of both. I’m a narrativist with episodicist rising; Linda, the reverse. Yet we still manage to coexist, and even complete each other’s sentences now and then.

One day when I needed some editorial counsel, I had a long phone conversation with a friend of mine, also a writer. Right after she hung up, her fifteen-year-old son walked into the room. Without any lead-in, she asked him what the meaning of life was. She then sent me this account:

He didn’t blink. He said he had been asking himself lately what made being alive special. It couldn’t be just its beauty, he said, because there are so many things you can look at that are beautiful but not alive. A rock can be stunning in its striations and shape. But it doesn’t have meaning in the same way. He said the reason anything living has meaning is that it can, is supposed to, replicate itself, to go on creating life, even on the level of a cell. He put his hand on his chest and reminded me that the Romans thought there was actually a little candle in every person, and that death snuffed it out. He said: “The reason things that are alive are more meaningful is that they have something to lose.”

After I’d gotten over the “that’s-my-boy” moment, I said, Yes, but what’s the point?

“Really pretty close to the same thing,” he said. “It’s to make connections to other living things.”

Maybe it is that simple?

When I was interviewing various folks about what they wanted out of life, I heard time and again how important it was to figure out some way to “do what I love.” Midlifers and millennials alike invoked the phrase repeatedly. Millennials, however, were relentless on the topic. Most of them were well educated and were holding jobs, which is more than you could say for millions of their less fortunate peers.

A woman two years out of college, living in the Mid-Atlantic region, started out proofreading food labels. That didn’t last long. She then took a job as a researcher in a marketing operation. It’s better but isn’t great, she says. Her day consists of interviewing customers over the phone, getting those who’ll talk to her to provide product feedback. The work’s stressful, she says, because she’s naturally shy and hates the rejection that comes with the territory.

A medical student, twenty-seven, is feeling highly disillusioned. He says he had dreamed of becoming a doctor since childhood. Now that he understands “the business aspects” of medicine, he regrets the decision. He’s bothered by how little time doctors get to spend with patients; he’s overwhelmed by the debt he’s taken on; he says he’s physically exhausted. The demands of school are so overwhelming, he says, that he feels guilty devoting what little spare time he has to anything recreational. He’s neither happy nor fulfilled, he reports.

When asked what they would do if they could do what they loved, most people replied that whatever it was, it would be more “creative” and “fulfilling” than what they’re doing now. But few could tell me what “whatever it was” was. Many or most of us simply don’t know, or can’t decide. It’s a case of, We’ll know it and love it when it falls into our lap. That’s one reason more people aren’t doing what they love. Another reason is that getting to do what you love, assuming you know what that is, takes effort. It’s usually a royal pain in the ass to get to do what you love.

The best example of someone I know who both knew what he’d love and worked like a possessed millennial to get there, is the son of a good friend—Oscar’s son, in fact. He’s just completed his third year of residency at a New York City hospital. In a few months he’ll become, in his father’s words, “the worst-paid physician in America.” Oscar couldn’t be prouder. His son couldn’t be more excited. Come this fall, he’ll be working in a mobile clinic that calls on homeless shelters around the city, providing health services to the uninsured and dispossessed.

The kid has a big heart. And plenty of guts. That he made it into and through medical school, and now on to a career that’ll be a truly meaningful life experience by anyone’s standards, is testament to his flat-out perseverance. A decade ago it was inconceivable that he’d wind up a doctor. He went to St. John’s College, where the curriculum consists of the Great Books, heavy on the Greeks and Romans. None of his courses met the requirements of a med-school application. Even his undergraduate lab work was based on experiments conducted at the time of Galileo. After graduation, he banged around, harvesting berries in the Pacific Northwest, working at a day care center. Aspiring to be the kind of family physician who’s lucky enough to be the worst-paid doctor in America, he enrolled in a post-bac program to take the necessary chemistry, physics, and biology classes, none of which came easily.

In short, he pushed himself, with absolutely no spiritual guidance or encouragement from his godfather—for the record, that would be me. I, too, am deeply proud of him. Everyone is. So, too, would Aristotle be, in light of the kid’s tenacious drive to acquire the scientific knowledge needed to fulfill his ambition. He’s now earned every right to kick back and enjoy the ride, doing what he loves on the most disadvantaged streets of the city.

Finally, I’m sure it’s apparent by now that face-to-face contact with the writer-in-residence isn’t physiologically possible. Even if it were, it would be perceived as a sign of grave emotional distress if you were observed sitting on a park bench having a heart-to-heart with someone you introduce as the little ghost who lives in your crawl space. However, if you could have a sit-down with the writer-in-residence, what would you ask? Talk about an opportunity: Here is someone who knows you inside out, who has instant recall of every single event or relationship stored in your memory. Wouldn’t it be fascinating to compare notes?

So if you could ask just one question of the writer-in-residence, what would it be?

I’d ask mine what was going through his head in those days, weeks, and months after my father died. I’d be curious to know how much pressure he was under, whether he worried that if he were to miswrite that chapter he’d be putting the longer life story at risk. But he didn’t screw things up, not for the long haul, anyway. The scribbler did a nice job rewriting that chapter over time. The pain of the event endures, but the meaning of it has changed. Now there’s consolation in knowing that if Buddha had miraculously shown up at my bedside, he’d have pointed out that inherent in my suffering was a pathway out of suffering. If Jung had been called in to consult, he’d have foreseen a possible silver lining. A parent’s death can be forever damaging to a child, but Jung would have said that my father’s sudden death triggered a step in the direction of individuation, the process of how we wind up distinct from all other humans present or past, a hundred billion strong since the dawn of human history. Suffering, I learned from Viktor Frankl, who learned it from philosopher Baruch Spinoza, “ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”

All things considered, I’m feeling pretty good these days about my life story. Memories are flowing smoothly and new chapters are being added. This book is but the latest. What’s to complain? Of the 161 boys in my high school graduating class, twenty-six are known to be dead, eight can’t be located. If some of the disappeared are also dead (though I hope not), it means that close to 20 percent of my classmates are, sadly, no longer works in progress.

There’s also some reason to think that if I play my lousy genetic hand right, I’ll live for another twenty-plus years. Why so cocky (sort of)? Because not long ago I went online and laboriously filled out a questionnaire that asked after my medical history, family’s medical history, marital status, the degree to which I travel in a car, whether I floss regularly, plus a few pages of other details. With a click of the mouse, I learned that I’ll likely live nearly twice as long as my father and about the same number of years as my mother, who, despite a half century of mourning, survived to a ripe old age. The bad news is—happiness is transitory, don’t forget—nobody might hear of my demise, not right away. Or if they heard about it, they wouldn’t be able to make it to the country graveyard for the burial, assuming that Linda and I ever get around to making a decision about that.

The online calculation, you see, has me checking out in 2038. Just my rotten luck. 2038 is projected to be the Year of the Unix Millennium Bug, a technical programming issue like Y2K. It has something to do with how Unix-based operating systems handle time. Unless addressed, on January 19, 2038, at 3:14:07 (Coordinated Universal Time), we’ll reach the highest number representable by Unix’s “signed 32-bit integer” time format. Unix will think we’re back in the year 1901. Systems that rely on UNIX-based programming with embedded time values will be at risk of crashing. The bug, according to doomsayers, might take down cell phones, routers, air and automotive transportation systems, and a whole lot more, perhaps even my own smart kitchen appliances. So I can see it now, an obit headline I never could have imagined in a hundred lifetimes:

LEE EISENBERG DEAD AT 92,

WORLD STANDS STILL

Acknowledgments

Accepting his Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement, Fred Rogers reduced Radio City Music Hall to tears when he asked everyone in the audience to take ten seconds to acknowledge silently those who cared enough to help them along the way. Then he looked at his watch and timed it. As the seconds ticked off, cameras zoomed in on celebrities who indeed took this brief meditative opportunity to conjure up parents, teachers, friends, spiritual guides, talent agents, producers, and, for all I know, strangers they’d met once at the upstairs piano bar on a flight from New York to L.A. While I can’t quite do it in just ten seconds, I’d like to acknowledge here a few characters—some were flat, some were round, I won’t say who was which—who helped me through this particular chapter of my life story.

The first tranche of silent acknowledgment goes to a passel of characters who had no idea that the simple fact of their company came as blessed relief after a long hard day at the cemetery. With an eye on Mr. Rogers’s wristwatch, I’ll just mention four representative supporting players in Chicago, Judy and David Fardon and Anna and Steven Soltes; and four back east, Betsy Carter and Gary Hoenig, and Becky and Dan Okrent. The latter four indulged me even as I hijacked an important birthday dinner (not mine) by going on and on about the travails I was muddling through at the time.

Silent acknowledgment and deep gratitude also go out to two fine people at the University of Pennsylvania who helped me unlock doors that enabled me to move the plot along: Mingo Reynolds at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, and Al Filreis, Kelly Professor of English. Thanks to their interventions, I was granted the run of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library at Penn and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at NYU. I also enjoyed many hours of blessed sanctuary in a cubicle in the quiet-as-a-tomb Frederick Lewis Allen Room at the New York Public Library. Odd, isn’t it, how the suffocating confines of a tiny Dilbert cube, typically derided by writer types as soulless and oppressive, the very space they’ve been running away from their entire lives, suddenly becomes a lifesaving refuge in a noisy, crazy city? As I mentioned earlier, I also found peaceful asylum in the third-floor reading room at the Walter L. Newberry Library in Chicago. I’d silently like to thank the staffs at all of these irreplaceable institutions for their assistance and courtesies.

I am grateful to Dan P. McAdams at Northwestern for helping me get started; and to John Kotre, an early exponent of narrative psychology, for spending some quality time with me. I’d like to thank psychology researchers Paul T. P. Wong and Gary T. Reker for granting permission to reprint the DAP-R scale; and Michael F. Steger for allowing me to share the Meaning in Life questionnaire.

The interviews that appear throughout the book were conducted with the determined help of Kathleen Brady and Amaris Cuchanski. Drawing on an equal measure of grace and determination, these persevering researchers had no qualms about striking up intimate conversations with dozens of complete strangers; asking them whether their day-to-day lives really mattered; and, oh, by the way, just how terrified are you that when you’re dead, you’re dead, and your story won’t live on? I’d also like to thank the estimable Rochelle Udell, who, with an able assist from Jonathan Caplan, conceived the idea for the cover.

Even though my acknowledgments are itching to go vocal, I’ll stick to the rules and give silent praise to those without whom this book wouldn’t so much as exist: Deb Futter, my editor at Twelve, who was from day one staunch in her support and enthusiasm; her able and multitalented assistant, Elizabeth Kulhanek; and my agent, Esther Newberg, who was, as she always is, indomitable and a great friend to boot.

By now, my silent acknowledgments are straining not only to go vocal, they’re begging to be set to music. Chris Jerome and Lisa Grunwald offered hours of invaluable suggestions on matters ranging from the structure and shape of the narrative to whether anyone really wants to know that Martin Heidegger believed that “the less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become.” Make this book as personable as you can, Grunwald and Jerome told me time and again; this isn’t a textbook, buster. That said, if I haven’t been personable enough, or if you really did want to know what Heidegger meant by the hammer-thing, you should absolutely blame me and not Lisa or Chris.

As for Linda, I’m already on record as saying that I want to share a tombstone with her. What else is there to say? Only that this intelligent, funny, patient, and highly spiritual human being provided warmth, wisdom, and encouragement throughout. Her editorial insights unraveled knots in the story from the beginning to the end. I simply wouldn’t have made it through the cursed elbow without her astute reading. And another thing: one day as I was cruising the shelves in the stacks, I happened to pick up a volume of Bertrand Russell’s autobiography. I spent the rest of the day with it, jotting down this and that, only a little of which found its way into this book. Before I returned the book to the shelf, I opened it to the front and noticed that Russell had dedicated the story of his long and remarkable life to his wife Edith. The publisher had chosen (wisely) to reproduce the dedication exactly as Russell had scribbled it in his own hand:

I’d like to close by silently acknowledging that one day, when I’m really, really old, I’ll feel exactly the same way about Linda.

Appendix

Throughout this book I’ve mentioned many studies that social scientists have conducted over the past fifty years. Such research is typically not undertaken in the hope that it will lead to therapeutic cures for loneliness, boredom, or passivity. (For those we have a generous assortment of compounds with bizarre names: Cymbalta, Pristiq, Viibrid. They add up to a mighty mountain of pills, a twelve-billion-dollar business.) No, the studies I’ve mentioned here have nothing to do with chemicals. Nor are findings generated by testing on animals or via molecular analysis. The lab monkeys are us. We fill out survey sheets or share our personal histories with graduate students assigned to harvest them for further study. The objective is to draw a bead on the most subjective of all questions: What makes for a meaningful life?

While the question itself is an ancient one, research into the answer is ever young. One of the very first meaning-in-life surveys—the Frankl Questionnaire—was developed in the late 1950s. The intent was to provide some quantitative underpinning to Viktor Frankl’s philosophy and therapeutic approach to patients suffering from emotional distress. There was but one key question: “Do you feel your life is without purpose?” The results solidly confirmed what Frankl knew going in: 20 percent of those seeking psychological counseling admitted to a severe lack of purpose in their lives. Over half the general public was found to be unmoored to some degree.

In the five decades since, there have been scores and scores of surveys that attempt to nibble away at what “meaning” means to us and the relationship of meaningfulness to our happiness. Examples include the Life Attitude Profile, the Life Engagement Test, the Psychological Well-Being Scale, and the Sense of Coherence Survey. Now and then I ran off a hard copy of this or that survey and sharpened a pencil, if only to take my existential pulse. Curiosity about who we really are is yet one more variable that makes us human. Besides, self-referential quizzes are fun and diverting, which is why there are so many online. Who can resist knowing what percentage of us is male and female? How our behavioral pattern matches up with our pet’s?

To give you a sense of what these surveys are like, I’ve included three of the more prominent ones on the pages that follow. The first will take a quick, three-minute reading of whether or not you think you’ve found meaning and value in your life. The second, a bit more extensive, gets at the same question in a different way. The third is the classic Death Attitude Profile-Revised, which I discussed in Chapter 16. Dig in, as it were.

The fourth exercise is something else altogether. It reflects the other methodology deployed in meaning-in-life research—downloading one’s life story to a trained listener. Chances are slim that you’ll cross paths with a research assistant who’s armed with Dan McAdams’s life-story protocol, so I’ve come up with an alternate occasion.

THE MEANING IN LIFE QUESTIONNAIRE

The MLQ is brief: just ten questions whittled down from an original set of eighty-four. It is not designed to indicate whether you’re happy or depressed. Nor does it discriminate between kinds of meaning: e.g., is attaching yourself to a larger idea more meaningful than attaching yourself to your own success? The survey is chiefly used to determine the degree to which one is experiencing meaning or searching for it. And how that correlates with whatever variable a researcher happens to be looking into: physical health; frequency of prayer; charitable involvement; and so on. A 2010 study, for example, found that same-sex couples who were in a legally recognized relationship (marriage or civil union) reported a higher “presence of meaning” than lesbian, gay, and bisexual couples who were single, dating, or merely in a “committed” relationship.

Instructions

Please take a moment to think about what makes your life feel important to you. On the following page, respond to the ten statements as truthfully and accurately as you can, keeping in mind that these are very subjective questions and that there are no right or wrong answers. Please answer according to the seven-point scale listed at the top.

Scoring

Presence [of meaning] score = subtract the rating for item 9 from 8, then add the ratings for items 1, 4, 5, and 6. Scores range between 5 and 35.

Searching [for meaning] score = add together the ratings for items 2, 3, 7, 8, and 10. Scores range between 5 and 35.

Scoring Interpretations

Those who employ this questionnaire offer these informed “guesses” about what your results may indicate:

If you scored above 24 on Presence and above 24 on Searching, you evidently think your life does have meaning and purpose. Yet you’re looking for more. You’re someone who’s drawn to the question of “What can my life mean?” more than you’re looking for a single specific answer. People who know you probably see you as conscientious, emotionally stable, and open to new experiences.

If you scored above 24 on Presence and below 24 on Searching, you’re likely satisfied that you grasp what makes life meaningful, have an understanding of why you’re here, and have a good idea of what you want to be doing with your life. People who know you probably see you as organized, friendly, and socially outgoing.

If you scored below 24 on Presence and above 24 on Searching, you probably don’t feel your life has much meaning/purpose but you’re actively searching for something or someone who’ll provide it. You may occasionally (or often) feel anxious, nervous, or sad. People who know you would likely describe you as someone who plays things by ear; goes with the flow whenever it comes to making plans; worries a lot; and may not be particularly active socially.

If you scored below 24 on Presence and below 24 on Searching, you evidently don’t feel your life has very much meaning or purpose; you’re not actively seeking to discover them; nor do you believe it’s much worth thinking about. People who know you would likely describe you as disorganized; at times nervous or tense; and not to be counted on as the life of a party.

THE PURPOSE IN LIFE TEST

The development of the PIL Test (1964) is regarded as a milestone in the development of so-called existential psychology. The authors, James C. Crumbaugh and Leonard T. Maholick, set out specifically to give researchers a reliable tool with which to assess Viktor Frankl’s central tenet that the essence of human motivation is “the will to meaning,” and that failure to find meaning leads to “existential frustration” and a variety of emotional and behavioral stresses. The PIL has been used in many hundreds of studies dealing with a wide assortment of questions. For example, is a high Purpose in Life score associated with a lower risk of stroke, heart attack, or other physical afflictions? (It seems to be.) Does it correlate with emotional well-being and happiness? (Directionally, sort of.) Some studies show that women have higher PIL scores than men, some indicate the opposite. It’s inconclusive. One study, now forty years old, found that African Americans scored significantly higher than whites, while other studies have contradicted that. A solid Purpose in Life score depends heavily on the individual, not on his or her demographic set.

Instructions

On the following page, write the number (1 to 5) next to each statement that is most true for you right now.

Scoring

Just add up the items. The higher the score, the more purpose and value you see in your life. Setting a numeric threshold for what’s high, medium, or low is dicey. The higher, the better, one would think. I did come across one source that said that a score of less than 50 may be taken as evidence that one is drifting perilously close to the dreaded “existential void.” It might also be taken with a grain of salt.

THE DEATH ATTITUDE PROFILE-REVISED

The DAP-R, as I described earlier, offers a reading on how accepting you are of an idea that not all of us wish to accept. Although a counselor specializing in “terror management” may use the DAP-R to gain insight into an individual’s feelings about death, it’s widely used to compare attitudes within or between specified sets of individuals: for example, how healthy people’s attitudes toward death differ from those with a serious illness; how a given ethnic or racial group views death; how teenagers in general feel about death, or how their attitudes compare to those of another age group.

Instructions

The questionnaire on the following pages contains a number of statements related to different attitudes toward death. Read each statement carefully, and then decide the extent to which you agree or disagree. For example, an item might read: “Death is a friend.” Indicate how well you agree or disagree by circling one of the following: SA = strongly agree; A = agree; MA = moderately agree; U = undecided; MD = moderately disagree; D = disagree; SD = strongly disagree. Note that the scales run both from strongly agree to strongly disagree and from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

If you strongly agreed with the statement, you would circle SA. If you strongly disagreed, you would circle SD. If you are undecided, circle U. However, try to use the undecided category sparingly.

It is important that you work through the statements and answer each one. Many of the statements will seem alike, but all are necessary to show slight differences in attitudes.

Scoring Key

Dimension: Fear of Death (7 items)

Items: 1, 2, 7, 18, 20, 21, 32

Dimension: Death Avoidance (5 items)

Items: 3, 10, 12, 19, 26

Dimension: Neutral Acceptance (5 items)

Items: 6, 14, 17, 24, 30

Dimension: Approach Acceptance (10 items)

Items: 4, 8, 13, 15, 16, 22, 25, 27, 28, 31

Dimension: Escape Acceptance (5 items)

Items: 5, 9, 11, 23, 29

Scores for all items are from 1 to 7 in the direction of strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7). For each dimension, a mean scale score can be computed by dividing the total scale score by the number of items forming each scale.

What Your Scores May Be Trying to Tell You

Once you’ve calculated your scores, you’ll see where you fall across the five “dimensions” listed above. Two of them reflect negative attitudes toward death:

Fear of Death: You fear death and you admit to it. If you fear it a great deal, your high anxiety can lead to depression.

Death Avoidance: You fear death and avoid thinking or talking about it. Failure to admit to it can cause “psychological discomfort.”

And there are three types of “death acceptance”:

Neutral Acceptance: You accept death as an integral part of life; you neither fear nor welcome it. Neutral acceptance is positively related to psychological and physical well-being.

Approach Acceptance: Your death anxiety is mitigated by a certain belief—typically, you believe that there’s an after-life. As a side note, to believe in an afterlife is more positively associated with a feeling of well-being in older adults than in younger adults who believe in an afterlife.

Escape Acceptance: You view death as a welcome alternative to pain and misery.

AN EXERCISE FOR BOOK GROUPS

How cool would it be if you and the other members of your group, instead of deconstructing some stranger’s published work, exchanged enlightened judgment on each other’s life stories? Here’s one way to go about it: Everyone gets twenty minutes to tell the story of her or his life. At minimum, each account must include the eight “nuclear episodes” a narrative psychologist would like to hear about: a positive and a negative childhood memory; a “wisdom event”; a vivid adult memory; a high point and a low point; a spiritual experience; and a turning point.

Feel free to agree beforehand on a set of questions around which to build discussion. Here are a few to get you started:

How do you think this life story as a whole comes across?

Borrowing from Christopher Booker’s The Seven Basic Plots, which genre does it belong to? Comedy? Tragedy? Rebirth? Voyage and Return? Quest? Rags to Riches? Overcoming the Monster?

Is there a book (or movie) this story brings to mind?

Does the leading character remind you in any way of another character in a book or movie? Who is that, and why?

What’s the takeaway, the moral of this story?

Finally, what words would you carve onto a granite slab (or engrave on a brass plaque) that provide an appropriate coda to the story just told? (These can be original or lifted from any movie, book, play, television series, or ancient sacred text—so long as the words are sincere.)

Further Reading

The following titles, some general, some academic, provide additional information and insight into the main themes of this book.

Aging and Memory

Aging and Biography: Explorations in Adult Development, James E. Birren, Gary M. Kenyon, Jan-Erik Ruth, Johannes J. F. Schroots, Torbjorn Svensson, eds. (New York: Springer, 1996)

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, Atul Gawande (New York: Metropolitan, 2014)

The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Antonio Damasio (New York: Mariner, 1999)

How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, Sherwin Nuland (New York: Vintage, 1995)

In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, Eric R. Kandel (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006)

White Gloves: How We Change Ourselves Through Memory, John Kotre (New York: Free Press, 1996)

Why Survive?: Being Old in America, Robert N. Butler (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1985)

Biographies and Memoirs

Erik Erikson and the American Psyche: Ego, Ethics, and Evolution, Daniel Burston (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007)

Freud: A Life for Our Time, Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006)

Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson, Lawrence J. Friedman (New York: Scribner, 1999)

In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson, Sue Erikson Bloland (New York: Viking, 2005)

Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diaries of Anaïs Nin, Paul Herrin, ed. (Athens, OH: Swallow Press/University of Ohio Press, 2013)

Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Julian Barnes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008)

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963, Susan Sontag; David Rieff, ed. (New York: Picador, 2009)

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005)

Meaningfulness

The Doctor and the Soul, Viktor E. Frankl (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968)

The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, Robert Nozick (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990)

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization, Stephen Cave (New York: Crown, 2012)

Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl (Boston: Beacon, 2006)

Meaning in Positive and Existential Psychology, Alexander Batthyany and Pninit Russo-Netzer, eds. (New York: Springer, 2014)

The Meaning of Life, E. D. Klemke (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)

The Meaning of Life: A Very Short Introduction, Terry Eagleton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

The Meaning of Life: Religious, Philosophical, Transhumanist, and Scientific Perspectives, John G. Messerly (Durant and Russell, 2012)

Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study, George E. Vaillant (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012)

What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy, Thomas Nagel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)

What’s It All About?: Philosophy & the Meaning of Life, Julian Baggini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

Philosophy/Mythology/Religion

The American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege, Marion Goldman (New York: New York University Press, 2012)

Buddhism: A Brief Insight, Damien Keown (New York: Sterling,1996)

The Cry for Myth, Rollo May (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992)

The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker (New York: Free Press, 1973)

Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Jeffrey J. Kripal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)

Escape from Evil, Ernest Becker (New York: Free Press, 1975)

Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, Robert Nozick (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989)

Existential America, George Cotkin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003)

Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre, Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1956)

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Fred Turner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008)

The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion, William J. Wainwright, ed. (Oxford, MS: Oxford University Press, 2005)

Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation, Joseph Campbell (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2004)

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011)

The Tao of Te Ching, Brian Browne Walker, trans. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992)

The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts (New York: Vintage, 2011)

Psychology/Narrative Psychology

Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on the Mind, Jerome Bruner (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)

The Essential Jung: Selected Writings, C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983)

Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, Martin E. P. Seligman (New York: Vintage, 2006)

Meanings of Life, Roy F. Baumeister (New York: Guilford, 1991)

Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences, Donald E. Polkinghorne (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988)

Outliving the Self: Generativity and the Interpretation of Lives, John Kotre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)

The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By, Dan P. McAdams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)

Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self, Dan P. McAdams (New York: William Morrow, 1993)

The Undiscovered Self, C. G. Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990)

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meanings and Importance of Fairy Tales, Bruno Bettelheim (New York: Vintage, 2010)

Writing and Writers

The Creative Process, Brewster Ghiselin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952)

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King (New York: Scribner, 2010)

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, Steven Pinker (New York: Viking, 2014)

The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, Christopher Booker (London: Bloomsbury, 2005)

The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing (New York: Picador, 2013)

Why I Write, George Orwell (New York: Penguin, 2005)

The Writing Life, Annie Dillard (New York: Harper Perennial, 1989)

The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Write, Maria Arana, ed. (New York: PublicAffairs, 2003)

Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times, Introduction by John Darnton (New York: Times Books, 2002)

Writing the Self: Diaries, Memoirs, and the History of the Self, Peter Heehs (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013)

Reading Group Guide

The Point Is

Making Sense of Birth, Death, and Everything in Between

by

Lee Eisenberg

Discussion Questions

1. The author suggests that we sometimes select certain memories to be our “earliest,” choosing them above others as a way of helping us define our life story. Do you agree? What is your earliest memory, and what do you think it says about you and your longer life story? Is there a particular memory you draw on when getting to know someone?

2. “What makes old age hard to bear is not a failing of one’s faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of our memories.” What do you think is worse, having too many painful memories or losing memories (good or bad), whether to aging or a cognitive disorder?

3. In Chapter 7, the author paraphrases Tolstoy’s observations on how the writer’s circle of friends dealt with the prospect of their own mortality: purposeful ignorance, hedonism, or ending it all sooner rather than later. Is the same true of people you know? Are some confronting the end in other ways?

4. How do belief systems—from religious to philosophical to personal—affect the value one places on his/her life, and the satisfaction one gets from living life?

5. Is there really such a thing as a predictable and generalizable midlife crisis?

6. Reflect on the relationship between work and meaningfulness in life. Do people need to work to find meaning in life? Does the work itself have to be meaningful? Consider examples from both The Point Is and your own life when discussing.

7. Has the self you consider your “true self” materialized yet? How would you describe your “true self?”

8. Examine the different kinds of immortality the author addresses in the How We Live On chapter. How do they intersect? How do they differ? Can you think of other ways people “live on?”

9. The author discusses how being part of a tribe can give one’s life a context that lends existence greater meaning. Examine how the changes of the twenty-first century (technological, societal, and otherwise) have affected how we identify with larger sets of people and how that has affected our sense of who we are.

10. The author currently identifies with the imagoes (see Chapter 9) of the Kindly Mentor and the Irascible Curmudgeon. What would you say your imago is at this moment? In the past?

11. Susan Sontag wrote that she used her diary to “create herself.” What are other methods of self-creation?

12. Do you think life has a point? If so, what is it?

A Conversation with Lee Eisenberg

Q: In The Point Is, you tell an anecdote about a fifty-year-old man who forces himself to read a few pages of Being Mortal before tossing it aside. You then ask rhetorically, “Who wants to prepare [for death]?” What drove you to prepare?

A: I certainly didn’t set out to prepare. I guess you could say I prepared by default. Researching a book about why we’re here makes it rather inevitable that you’ll find yourself grappling with questions you’d just as soon sweep under the rug. Spending time in that old graveyard certainly provided a daily opportunity to think about what all those buried stories added up to. And going to the Death Café marked the first time I ever had an open discussion about morality with a room full of complete strangers. Very therapeutic, I might add.

Q: A book about the meaning of life—the point of it all—is a hefty undertaking since it is, at least in part, unknowable. Did your answer to this question evolve over time? At the beginning of your writing process, what would you have said if someone had pressed you to succinctly identify life’s purpose?

A: I’d probably have said more or less what Kafka said: “The meaning of life is that it stops.” In time, though, I got hung up on how just because life stops, it doesn’t mean our life story stops. And if we “write” a good story, chances are it’ll live on in the stories of others. I confess that hadn’t dawned on me before.

Q: You cite a study that claims that writing about your life and thoughts for a few pages per day is therapeutic. Has the process of writing this book proved so? Do you find that you have come to terms with some of the intellectual dilemmas you raised in these pages?

A: Yes, I think it was therapeutic. While I’ve always been open about discussing my father’s death, for example, I’d never written about it before. I certainly never wrote about how, while it was extremely painful, the event shaped me in ways that over time proved constructive. While I had a glimmer of that, I never articulated it until I had to wrestle with it on paper.

Q: No matter the subject matter in The Point Is, you engage the reader by jumping from personal experiences to literary quotes to scientific studies and back again. Was it difficult to strike this balance?

A: That was by far the greatest challenge—creating a narrative out of the elements you mention. I didn’t intend to write about my own life when I started the book. And I resisted for a long time. Eventually, I realized that there was no other “glue” that would hold things together. Two friends of mine kept advising me, badgering me, to put myself into the story. When I finally gave in, using my memories and story as examples, I was able to break through. The turning point, if you will.

Q: Your book is full of cumulated wisdom from great writers and thinkers. Was there one piece of advice or observation that especially stood out or fundamentally changed your worldview?

A: When it came to inspiration and wisdom, this project rained cats and dogs. The challenge was to keep it from becoming a book of quotations. That said, I was especially thrilled when I ran across an insight that supported the scribbler theory. For example, my day was made when I reread Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending and discovered the lines that I quote early in the book: “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”

Q: You mention that you don’t have a firm sense of family history to give your life long-term historical context and meaning. Do you feel that you belong to other “tribes” that help give your life this significance?

A: Only in the broadest sense. Yes, my forebears belonged to one of the Hebrew tribes and I relate to that culturally, if not religiously. I’m also a committed member of the Mac-user brand tribe but that doesn’t count, does it?

Q: Is there anything you wanted to include in this book but couldn’t—or decided not to?

A: I’m afraid I don’t know where to start on that one. I could be writing this book for the next two hundred years. It’s a rather large playing field.

Q: “Ancient myths and fairy tales cued us to life’s unpredictability. They instilled courage and imagination in young minds.” What were the most formative myths, fairy tales, or legends for you as a child? Who were your most influential “mythic role models”?

A: I didn’t read a lot of classic fairy tales but I was captivated by an immense number of modern stories that reflect the heroics, challenges, and lessons of classic literature. We all are. I learned a lot about good versus evil from—where do I start?—Davy Crockett. My kids were mesmerized by Star Wars and Harry Potter, each being solidly rooted in the mythological tradition.

Q: You analyze midlife crises at great length, as have many of the philosophers and thinkers who are quoted throughout the book. Have you given any thought to the rising phenomenon of the quarter-life crisis?

A: None whatsoever. As I think you can tell from the book, I’m not a big fan of dividing the human life course into universal ages, stages, passages, etc. We turn to those concepts in order to reassure ourselves that there’s some fundamental order to life, a blueprint, a map. Life isn’t so tidy. It’s up to us as individuals to draw the blueprint, create the map.

Q: In the How We Live On chapter, you suggest many ways in which people strive to live on after death—to achieve immortality, after a fashion. You already have achieved one form as a published writer whose works will live on for years to come. Are there other ways in which you have attained immortality? If you could become truly immortal, would you?

A: I’ll live on—part of me will, anyway—through my kids. Through my genes and how a piece of my life story will somehow get passed along. As for being truly immortal, sure, that would be really great. But it’s stretch to think that my 401K would even begin to cover it.

About the Author

LEE EISENBERG is the bestselling author of The Number and other books. He’s a former editor in chief of Esquire and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, among other stops in a wide-ranging career. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including Fortune, Businessweek, Time, Newsweek, and New York magazine. He divides his time between Chicago and New York City. For news and updates, please visit LeeEisenberg.com.

Also by Lee Eisenberg

Breaking Eighty:

A Journey Through the Nine Fairways of Hell

The Number:

What Do You Need for the Rest of Your Life, and What Will It Cost?

Shoptimism:

Why the American Consumer Will Keep On Buying No Matter What

ABOUT TWELVE

TWELVE was established in August 2005 with the objective of publishing no more than twelve books each year. We strive to publish the singular book, by authors who have a unique perspective and compelling authority. Works that explain our culture; that illuminate, inspire, provoke, and entertain. We seek to establish communities of conversation surrounding our books. Talented authors deserve attention not only from publishers, but from readers as well. To sell the book is only the beginning of our mission. To build avid audiences of readers who are enriched by these works—that is our ultimate purpose.

For more information about forthcoming TWELVE books, please go to www.twelvebooks.com.

* Frankl’s wife, Tilly, who was twenty-four, as well as his mother and brother, were all killed in the camps, though he didn’t find out until after his release.

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Contents

1. Cover

2. Title Page

3. Welcome

4. Dedication

5. Epigraph

6. Introduction

7. PART I

8. The Beginning

9. 1. Meet the Scribbler

10. 2. Inside the Memory Factory

11. 3. Authorized and Unabridged

12. 4. First Jottings

13. 5. A God-Shaped Hole

14. 6. Is the Beginning Important?

15. PART II

16. The Middle

17. 7. Beware the Elbow

18. 8. Interlude: Other Voices

19. 9. Breathing Space

20. 10. Paper and Dust

21. 11. Who Needs Happiness?

22. 12. The James Dean Story

23. 13. How We Live On

24. 14. Snowbirds at Sunset

25. PART III

26. The End

27. 15. Ghost Theory

28. 16. In Search of a Good Ending

29. 17. Butterfly in the Cafe

30. 18. A Place in the Shade

31. 19. Is There Ever a Right Time?

32. 20. Chiseled and Engraved

33. 21. Precious Find

34. 22. Diaries Dearest

35. 23. Writing a Beautiful Sentence

36. Afterword

37. Acknowledgments

38. Appendix

39. Further Reading

40. Reading Group Guide

1. Discussion Questions

2. A Conversation with Lee Eisenberg

41. About the Author

42. Also by Lee Eisenberg

43. Newsletters

44. Copyright

Copyright

Copyright © 2016 by Lee Eisenberg

Cover concept by Rochelle Udell and Jonathan Caplan

Cover design by Flag

Cover illustration by Serge Bloch

Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

Twelve

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First ebook edition: February 2016

Twelve is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing.

The Twelve name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Bertrand Russell’s dedication to his wife Edith originally appeared in The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, Volume 1, published by George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1967. Reprinted with the permission of Taylor and Francis.

The Meaning in Life Questionnaire appeared in the Journal of Counseling Psychology 53, no. 1 (2006), 80–93, and is reprinted with the kind permission of Michael F. Steger.

The Purpose in Life Test was developed by Joseph C. Crumbaugh and Leonard T. Maholick, psychologists at the Bradley Center Inc., Columbus, Georgia. It was introduced in a paper titled “An Experimental Study in Existentialism: The Psychometric Approach to Frankl’s Concept of Noogenic Neurosis,” then published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology 20 (April 1964), 200–207.

The Death Attitude Profile-Revised: A Multidimensional Measure of Attitudes Towards Death was developed by P. T. P. Wong, G. T. Reker, and G. Gesser, and appeared in R. A. Neimeyer (ed.), Death Anxiety Handbook: Research, Instrumentation, and Application (Washington, DC: Taylor and Francis, 1994). Reprinted by permission of the authors.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

ISBN 978-1-4555-5047-0

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