How do day-to-day changes add up to a life story?
How do day-to-day changes add up to a life story?
Continuity and Change in "Tom Lake" and "How to Be Depressed"
Dear Reader,
This week, I devoured Ann Patchett’s newest novel, Tom Lake, which you should read! Recommending the newest Ann Patchett is like recommending the newest Taylor Swift album; Tom Lake was a Reese’s Book Club pick and it’s probably already sold a bazillion copies. But don’t be suspicious of its popularity (as I was); the novel is both lovely to read and worth thinking about after.
I picked it up because the Kirkus review said it captures “the evolving dynamics of a family, and the complex interaction between destiny and choice,” topics I will forever be interested in. But, in addition to those topics, the book was a particularly beautiful and psychologically astute depiction of some of the dynamics of lifespan development: “the dynamic and continuous interplay between growth (gain) and decline (loss)”, the importance of “historical embeddedness and other structural contextual factors,” and “the range of plasticity in development.” The question of range and plasticity, on multiple different timescales, is especially central: How do you change, from week to week, from season to season, from setting to setting, from decade to decade; how do you remain the same? How do you construct a coherent sense of self across abrupt transitions?
The book flashes back and forth between two timelines. The first is set in circa-2020 Michigan. A woman’s three daughters have been driven home to the family cherry farm because of the Covid pandemic. One daughter would be there anywhere; she is going to take over the family farm and marry the boy next door. One is an aspiring vet and rapidly finds herself useful. And one is an aspiring actress, chafing at the lost months spent away from the city, away from the stage, away from all the things she thinks she wants. The four women spend their days picking cherries, as the mother, Lara, recounts how she spent her 20s: her own brief career as an actress, her summer romance with a man who became a movie star, and the events leading up to her long and contented marriage. How I Met Your Father.
By flashing back and forth between Lara’s current life and her youth, the book layers multiple timescales. “I am fifty-seven. I am twenty-four.” She is both radically different than her younger self and recognizably the same, and we are asked to consider: How do the multiplicity of changes in our lives somehow add up to a life story? How do the daily monotonies somehow add up to growth? Sometimes, the changes in Lara’s life happen in an instant: she injures herself; she runs into a man she hasn’t seen in years. But how much do those dramatic “turning points” really matter, or would she have ended up in the same, or a highly similar, place nonetheless? Other times, change seems impossible: Lara is in one place, doing one job, and no exit ramps are visible. But how much do the periods of seeming stability, even stasis, make subsequent changes possible, and potentially more enduring? Adam Phillips made this point in On Wanting to Change: we don’t think a person has really changed unless the change sticks, that is, unless they then stop changing. Plasticity requires stability.
The personality psychologist Ted Schwaba and his colleagues did a study where they tracked people’s personalities over 12 years and compared their actual trajectories of personality change to their subjective sense of whether their personalities changed in response to a life event. What they found is that people who perceived themselves as changing did change their personality, but often they had already started changing before the life event happened. They were already getting more emotionally stable, even before they had a kid, got married, or moved. They were already getting less conscientious and more neurotic, months or even years before that breakup, relapse, or injury. And, their initial personality traits were related to whether their personalities changed and whether they perceived them to have changed. The long-term patterns of our lives are difficult, if not impossible, to see from close up; the things that actually made a difference are hard to pinpoint in retrospect; and change can result in more of the same.
The juxtaposition of timescales in Tom Lake reminded me of a very different, much darker book: How to Be Depressed by George Scialabba, which I have been recommending to all my graduate students. I think it should be required reading in every Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program. How to be Depressed is a strange sort of memoir, in that it features very little of Scialabba’s own voice. He wrote the introductory chapter and conclusion, but the meat of the book is an edited selection of therapy notes written by his psychiatrists and psychologists. The notes span decades, from his first serious depressive episode as a young man graduating college, all the way up to his retirement. The reader sees psychoanalysis pass out of fashion and the rise of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Tricylics give way to SSRIs. Electroconvulsive therapy protocols become easier to bear.
Therapies change, but they also stay the same. Scialabba’s treatment options are always constrained by economics. (Will his insurance cover more sessions? What is the co-pay? Can he take time off of work?) And, despite the innovations in treatment, it is painfully clear to the reader how much depression remains a mystery, how much guesswork goes into clinical care, and how often the treatments hurt instead of help.
And, Scialabba changes, and stays the same, with dramatic short-term changes obscuring the longer-term continuities and patterns that unfold over years and decades. By the end, when he has gotten into yet another new relationship with another new girlfriend, and suggests to his treater that he try stopping his latest antidepressant medication, I found myself silently screaming at the page, “No! Don’t do it!” But you can’t see the bigger picture when you’re living the day-to-day. He stops taking his medication. Becomes disenchanted with the girlfriend. Relapses. Again.
How to Be Depressed is a memoir of suffering through what David Foster Wallace called “the Great White Shark of pain,” but I found the ending to be surprisingly tender. Among the advice that Scialabba gives in his closing chapter is a list of foods to keep in the fridge, like good yogurt: tiny pleasures might sustain you, even for just a few moments, when your capacity to perceive a different future has been obliterated. The fictional narrator of Tom Lake recounts a much happier life, but there is a similar tender domesticity in its conclusion:
“The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.”
Wishing you whatever your version of good yogurt and a Gator is,
Paige