Our Lives

There is, or used to be, a popular soap opera called 'Days of Our Lives.' I might have been on it. Small role. In The Young and the Restless (CBS on Fairfax just down the street from Canter's restaurant) I played a chaufeur, also a small role. It'd have been bigger but the actress with whom I appeared, and who in the story paid my salary, died, so that was the end of that gig. The days of our lives pass and often, at least for me, I can't make head or tail out of what happened. I can't be alone in that, surely.

My fiction is based on what happened to me in life, so I think a lot about what happened in life. Yet, the more I dwell on what little I can remember, the more I realize I do not know, not really, what happened. The good part of that phenomena is that fiction can then logically be what you remember, or choose to remember, and not on what actually happened; how could it be what happened if one can't remember what happened? I think we remember selectively out of self defense.  On that basis I have sworn on the Good Book(s) to never, ever, allow anyone to say I write autobiographical fiction. In fantasy I'm being interviewed about my novel on TV and cut down the interviewer when she asks me (well of course it's a 'She'!) if the book is "autobiographical."

Here's an example. Riding on the back of my Uncle's motorcycle, hanging on to my Uncle, I wondered about his scent. I was about 14. In my distressed state - my mother had died - I feverishly imagined that he smelled good because rich and privileged people had a better smell. Now, to that, I say 'balderdash,' he was wearing cologne.

Who on earth was it who said, or wrote, "The unexamined life is not worth living"? That's a famous saying but heck that too is a crock. Even the examination, in real life, ends up being a fiction. For example, my Uncle, a notorious swordsman, might simply have spent the afternoon (the illicit happens in the afternoon quite often) with one of his many conquests, and it was she, mingled with him, that I was smelling.

Today's soap operas, daytime variety, are cranked so high I can't see 'em anymore. They used to pretend to be about 'Our Lives.' I like that better even though it is a pretense. The people who played those roles, the same roles for years, were, and might still be, lovely people. A famous director, German I think, once said that audiences make an unconscious appraisal of the actor's real life character. In the case of much loved soap opera actors I can say with some certainty they are, were, lovely people. I know because I was married to one.

Barry