On Being Perfectly Imperfect

Title: Let Me Be Frank with You
Author: Richard Ford
Host: Faith

A Prelude to Our Discussion About This Month's Book

Last month, we read and discussed Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, a book so engaging to the group that we spent the first hour of this month's meeting in continued conversation. To refresh, Gawande, a practicing surgeon, lays out the "ultimate limitation" of his profession -- the ability of medicine to make a person's last weeks or months of life rich and dignified. Our assignment was to bring to this month's meeting our personal list of the three things each of us would require as a minimum in order to prolong our lives.

The Question: What are the three things you would need to want to prolong your life? At what point would you want no further medical intervention?

+ Joanne:  No chemotherapy, to be able to read, and to be healthy.

+ Steve: To be able to recall memories, to be able to express love to the people I care about, and to be able to eat and breathe without tubes.

+ Liz: Daily exposure to nature -- to be able to get outside, something to care about and be engaged with, and one friend.

Since I forgot to take a picture of the food, I submit this,
which seems relevant.

+ Linda: To be alive when I die (curious and alert), to hang on until my kids come, and to be able to love and have memories. (Linda also contributed a relevant quote without attribution: "Age resistance is a futile kind of life resistance. We can't live outside of time."

+ Faith: To have family and friends and to interact with them, to have books and writing, and painkillers, including Scotch.  "If you are 85, you really have to think about these things. If I were 45, well then yes, hook me up."

+ Lois: To be able to breathe and eat without assistance, to be able to see or hear so I can have books and stories, and to be able to visit with people. (Painkillers also are on Lois' list, but that's a fourth item, so it's here in parentheses).

+ Chris: (from afar): To have her curiosity intact and list of interests growing -- not just "taking up air," as her dad would say; able to motor on her own with no forced support, and able to give, receive and be aware of love.

In Which We Become Even More Frank with One Another

Our consideration of these final wishes made for a good lead-in to discussion of this month's book selection, Let Me Be Frank with You by Richard Ford. In four nearly free-standing stories, Ford's Bascombe openly and frankly admits his post-retirement process of closing down, his jettisoning of what he considers to be unimportant in this later chapter of this life -- friends, unnecessary niceties, striving; in fact, most things he considered critical to a good life early on.

All taking place in the recent aftermath of Hurricane Sandy on the east coast, Let Me Be Frank with You overlays the physical wreckage of Bascombe's community with the unsettled pieces of his personal life. Hilarious and irreverent, Bascombe thinks and does the things we are all too embarrassed to admit to think and do. He is, as the title suggests, entirely frank with us.

+ Ford is a masterful writer whose skill, in Steve's view, makes up for the main character's "jaded point of view." His keen insights into human nature are both truthful and a little painful.

+ Lois, on the other hand, feels that the character's innate cynicism lends a wonderful sharpness to his observations. Bascombe feels entirely free to offer his cynical point of view.

+ Liz felt that each of the four stories was a study in Bascombe's inadequacy as well as profound disconnection from other humans in his life. "In every story, I expected him to become a better person, but he never does."

+ Joanne and Faith both disagreed entirely.  Both connected to Bascombe, recognizing that as one's energy diminishes, what you care about shifts. "He's not that wonderful, and I'm not either."

+ None of us really understand Frank Bascombe's concept of his "default self," which is a face he adopts in his interaction with others. But is it the real face? Or protective coloration? We weren't sure. Steve felt it meant making himself invisible and staying out of trouble. Joanne and Faith both felt he was too young to have a default self.

+ Linda pointed out that the end of each story contains the title of the next story, something others of us hadn't noticed. She notes that the Bascombe character is not unhappy with himself, nor is he unhappy. In his own words "We are how we are because we like it that way."

+ While she enjoyed the reading, Liz disliked the main character, feeling that reading him was reading a continuous interior monologue of superiority. Joanne and Faith disagreed. Joanne: "He is empathetic to himself." And, Faith: "He understands his own shortcomings." And, finally Steve: "Isn't that the challenge for all of us? To accept the weird creatures that we are?"

Next Up

For our February meeting, we will read A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, and we promise to table the conversation about death and dying, at least for the moment.