The me I used to know

February 3, 2025

Photo by Vince Fleming via Unsplash

No aspect of this post is created using any type of AI. All mistakes are mine, a real human.

THINKING ABOUT:
Who am I on any given day? Am I the same person I was yesterday? How about 15, 20, 30 years ago? Our cells are in a constant process of regeneration, plus we move about in time and space. We’re with different people, at different jobs, we make fork-in-the-road decisions that impact everything about our lives moving forward. So, do we have a core self that remains throughout? Or are we constantly changing, evolving, and growing?

I’ve been thinking about this since watching A Little White Lie—starring Michael Shannon, Kate Hudson, Don Johnson, and Da’Vine Randolph. It follows Shannon’s character as he travels to a down-on-its-luck literary festival as a reclusive writer who disappeared after one hit book decades earlier. If you loved Stranger Than Fiction, American Fiction, and You Hurt My Feelings, you’ll love this one. It’s a send-up of writers and writing festivals, hits at the prestige and budget challenges small colleges are facing (the bags of quarters!), and questions the reality of who we are on any given day. Am I the same person who wrote that book 25 years ago? Decidedly not. But what if I got invited to share about and celebrate that book when I am now a different person? When the real writer shows up to claim his prize, everything we thought was happening is flipped on its head. Or is it?

If you’re looking for a movie about writers that’s absurd but gorgeous, try Lonely Planet, a look at an exclusive invite-only writer’s conference in Morocco (where they are invited to attend but somehow don’t have to pay, speak, or otherwise earn their keep and only Laura Dern’s character is there to write). There’s a May-December romance with Dern and Liam Hemsworth, but the real star is the stunning Moroccan locations.

Other movies about writers that are semi-realistic about the writing life:
You Hurt My Feelings, reviewed here
Room 1408 (opening only, the rest is unwatchable supernatural horror), Secret Window, The Shining (Hey wait, these are all written by Stephen King! Coincidence? Probably not.)

And ones that are NOT:
Let Them All Talk, where a literary agency (NOT the publisher) commits to sending their star writer to a festival in Europe to accept a prestigious award. But she won’t fly, so they COMP HER AND THREE FRIENDS on the QE2 for a luxury trip across the Atlantic. There’s so much about this that’s bonkers.

Any scene in Sex and the City featuring Carrie’s book events.

READING:
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, a fable about a woman who decides to die by suicide and instead finds herself in a between-space, a library full of books about possible lives she could have led. She has to choose a book and try out a series of lives. A thoughtful look at deep depression, reframing our choices, and all the versions of self that might exist in the multiverse.

“Nora had always had a problem accepting herself. From as far back as she could remember, she’d had the sense that she wasn’t enough. Her parents, who both had their own insecurities, had encouraged that idea. She imagined now what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn’t reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed. She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale. She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying their best. And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.”

You'll find all of my book recommendations at my Bookshop. If you buy from this link the author makes more, an indie bookstore gets the sale, and I make a small commission. Win/Win/Win!

Amazon link here

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