‘The Quotidian Montaigne’

A Phenomenon Concept

My mother left behind a full drawer of scribbled manifestos and very little else besides. She was seventy-seven, draped in silver pajamas, dead in her sleep on the toilet, a few words away from finishing her magnum opus ‘Towards a Democracy of Condiments.’ That’s how the nurses found her: the writing-pad still in her lap, 2H pencil on the floor and her face caught in an endless yawn as if she’d expired of tiredness. Her third husband had died twelve years ago, and she’d told me, whenever I’d got up the fortitude to visit the Home, that the sexless boredom of the meantime had come more than close to killing her already. I didn’t want to hear that. Of course I didn’t. But I was her only daughter left in the city, and Victor had just walked out on me and our son, and so, for the first few years at least, I found I could somewhat sympathize.

I eventually realized being a single parent was not any kind of curse, but I never guessed what had similarly placated my mother, until the Home’s receptionist presented me with the sum total of her affects – a suitcase of clothes, a red crate of books and pictures, and the aforementioned packed drawer of writings. I call them manifestos because that’s the closest approximate term I could think of for their content but, in truth, she had perhaps invented her own original genre. They were attempts to get the world in order. Not the World as such, but just her uneventful corner of it. She didn’t presume to know what would be right for anyone outside her room. But for herself she wrote dozens of pages on such topics as ‘The Preferability of Liquid Soaps to the Bar Variety’, ‘Recommendation for the Institution of a Weekly Early-Morning Walk’ and ‘Lessons Taken from the Success of ‘Allo ‘Allo for an Improved Future for Television Comedy’. As you can imagine, they were brilliant texts, more readable than most novels. Her handwriting was of a partly illegible old- style cursive, but what I could read so encouraged me to translate the rest that I gradually set about typing up and editing the entire stash. This took eight months by itself, grabbing odd hours on weekends and after dinner, helped along by consulting my Dad and uncles, but when I was finished I realized I had what amounted to a publishable book of Practical Advice for the Aged collected on my hard-drive. I titled it The Ordinary Agonies and sent a copy each to Penguin and Doubleday. My mother had been a stage manager for a daytime game-show, had never written more than the ritual memos and letters entailed by her job and her family, and two years after she died she was on the Bestseller lists in 27 countries.

When interviewers or chat-show hosts would later inquire after the secret to my mother’s success, I’d usually quote one of her few self-conscious passages, from undoubtedly her most popular piece, ‘On the Similarities Between Routine and Escape’:

“I guess I’ve chosen everything, within my power, about the way I live. Or at least I would have berated myself for putting up with anything too arbitrary. How I notice my days’ details is the skeleton-key to how everything passes. I don’t care if I’m going slightly round the bend, I think everyone does sooner or later. We all natter to ourselves, I just don’t get too easily bored. And everything can be interesting if you treat it as being somehow mightily important.”

So I suppose if my mother was advocating anything abstract, it was just a kind of domestic mindfulness unattainable through Adult Colouring Books. There was no sense of irony evident in any of her writings; as far as I can tell she really did take things like the relative durations of meal-times or the feng-shui of bookshelves as seriously as most of us seem to take our careers or sex-lives. I admired how universal her ‘little’ concerns proved but slowly I realized too how lonely she must’ve been to produce such an oeuvre of sheer reflection. Now she had almost a million people who would’ve paid to listen to her commentary but the story of her death had already partly contributed to her sensational posthumous sales.

A few months after publication, I received a handwritten letter from a group that signed itself ‘The Seinfeldian Trotskyists’. They had taken my mother’s book as a potential revolutionary doctrine and wanted to know if I had excised any overtly political pieces from the finished manuscript. At first I thought they were a joke. But it turned out my mother’s sincerity had a way of inspiring unlikely followers.