Being Pretentious

I just finished this book by Julie Buxbaum called The Opposite of Love. It’s been sitting in my bookshelf for I don’t know how long and I only started reading it because I couldn’t think clearly enough to understand any of the books in the pile by my bed.

The author is a woman in her late twenties or maybe she just had her 30^th birthday. She is a lawyer, born in New York. The book is about a woman in her late twenties, working in a law firm, in New York. The story revolves around her finding herself and thereby winning back a love that she threw away from fear of her own feelings. It’s about life and death, explained through what happens with the people this woman has close; her dad, her grandfather, her girl friends etc. This book first became my bath tub book and then, surprisingly, took over the place as my “thinking about something else than my life before I go to sleep” book. And this is troubling me. I find it most disturbing. Can you guess why?

Yes, I believe it is because I am pretentious, an aspiring writer, who also has a way of complicating things. “Write about what you know.” You hear it in movies, in classes, from encouraging friends. It’s a good idea; it seems like a good place to start. I appreciate reading about other people’s lives; I can assure you my curiosity is immeasurable when it comes to human beings and how they use the time they have on their hands. Thus, I find pleasure in reading Bodil Malmsten for instance. The way she is describing her life as a child, the environment in which she was brought up, it’s all giving me new information. She is writing about what she knows, in a pretty simple language, but still makes it interesting for someone who does not know her personally.

In The Opposite of Love, however, the author is using external factors that she knows well, like what it is like to work at a law firm, but she is also attempting to say something about life within us. The story isn’t bland enough to make me throw the book away, but is, none the less, not very interesting. The insights doesn’t offer any novelties, but the story is still engaging enough for me to relax for a minute, lost in the world of an author I do not respect, because I am pretentious. Is this what they call a Feel Good Novel, I wonder?

In any case, I’ve saved the last couple of pages for some days now, because I don’t want to be left without the security of knowing I can pick that book up at night and forget myself for a couple of minutes. Just for once.