Mindful Memoir

Staring at Lakes: A memoir of Love, Melancholy and Magical Thinking (Hachette Books, Ireland, 2013) by Michael Harding.

My copy of Harding's book

Harding is an outstanding Irish author, playwright, novelist and actor who writes a column in The Irish Times.  It is not surprising at all that this memoir won the non-fiction book of the year at the Irish Book Awards, 2013. If I were asked for a comparable book in the memoir line here in Ireland, I should have to point to Nuala O'Faolain's equally moving  Are You Somebody? : The accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1996).

Both books are written with such a white-hot honesty that the searing truth burns into the page and keeps the reader gripped in such an intensity that one simply does not want to put the book down until one is finished.  I read Harding's book in one sitting, just like I did O'Faolain's book.  In existential terms, one is caught by the sheer authenticity of the author who has literally captured in words his own life project.

In the field of counselling, they say that the "wounded healer" is often the best counsellor. Without a shadow of a doubt, Harding (like O'Faolain) is a wounded healer (of himself, and, of course, vicariously of the reader) or perhaps more correctly a wounded artist or writer. There is not a single redundant word in this text.  Famously, Samuel Taylor Coleridge described poetry as "the best words in the best order," and I quite like re-working this to say that style is the "right words in the right place."  Indeed, there is not a word astray in Harding's text.  To return to Coleridge, this book possesses the intensity of poetry, and indeed it grips one like a good poem. Or again, taking our lead from Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the renowned French philosophe, who equally famously said "le style, c'est l'homme meme" or as it is put equally felicitously in English "style is the man," we can truly say that we meet Harding the man in his well-crafted style.  Just to give some few interesting examples of his style:  "Yes, I think I love you," I said like an idiot.  She looked at me warily, sipped her drink and said, "That's bollocks." (p. 44).  One feels the honesty here immediately. The second example is far more poetic and intense and I shall quote it more fully as it recounts one of his experiences of physical and emotional love that took place in the town of Frascati outside Rome:

When other people chatted on the two balconies above us or when the children played in the garden, we stole away from the world and closed the shutters and the door.  We were unlocking some frozen core in our souls, healing each other from previous lives, from past mistakes and from childhood sorrow.  We were growing younger, or at least understanding that even for the broken it is possible to play at being children again.  And then we returned to the table and finished the fruit and the cream and strawberry sponge and experimented with the coffee maker.  I watched her dress in the mornings.  I lay as a child might lie, content with a loving mother.  In the heat of Italy, her body merged with all the women on the street and her scent mingled with a hundred other perfumes in the air. (p. 74)

One is carried along with the sheer passion and simplicity of this writing that ably captures that passion.  There are many other such passages that equally well capture the passion of human love.  However, this reviewer feels that there are far more passages that capture the writer's melancholy, or indeed his depression, which he admits to somewhat later in the book.  Like most Irishmen, or perhaps men in general, he could not bring himself to admit that he suffered from a profound melancholy or depression that the scientist Lewis Walport calls so disturbingly and yet so aptly "malignant sadness."  In this book, Harding expresses that awful blackness of spirit as well as the love and the magic that are all so seamlessly interwoven in his text.  And yet, and yet, as one who suffers from clinical depression myself, I feel instinctively that the melancholy colours the text with a deeper hue that either of the other themes in his story can.  However, that may be just this writer's bias, given my stated background.  Of his sadness, he states: "Inside me there was a hidden grief.  It had no form or shape or cause.  Yet it permeated everything I did.  And I felt shame... about being a man. Feelings of kinship and sonship and belonging in the universe were withered.  And when all that collapsed there was a price to pay.  For me, the world became the empty existential wilderness I had read about in Eliot, Camus and Nietzsche.  And I wasn't alone in this grief.  I could see the same despair all around me, in the faces of other men at every street corner, those without jobs or meaning..." (p. 80)

I called this review a "Mindful Memoir," and indeed it is mindful.  Harding spent some few years as a priest but left it shortly after being ordained, then he married and had a child, and spent many years writing and meditating along Buddhist lines.  Anyone who engages in any form of Buddhist practices will be mindful practitioners.  As regards self-healing, mindfulness is 50 per cent of the battle to get there.  Therefore, I feel instinctively that our author is on his way to some peace of mind.  I'll leave each reader to judge whether he agrees with me or not. However, that is really beside the point as this book is simply a good read. One thing is sure, though, he is a writer who can metaphorically "cut to the quick of life."  He writes with a profundity, honesty and authenticity one notes in all great writers.  

If this book is somewhat melancholy in places, it certainly does not detract from its being a riveting read.  There is an honesty, a wry self-deprecating humour, a touching story of one man's search for identity and self-acceptance and love as a way out of his native depression that saves it from ultimate bleakness.  Kevin Barry, in the blurb on the back-cover gets it right by calling the book "hilarious, and tender, and mad, and harrowing, and wistful, and always beautifully written."

If you like being moved and gripped by your books, laughing out loud at times, crying at other times, going up and down on the roller-coaster of the author's feelings, then this is the book for you.  It is metaphorically the soul song of a wonderful writer, so well sung that it will move you by the page.