Cake or Death Read Online Free Page B

individuals.
    The great British novelist and playwright John Mortimer was once accused by a reviewer of “covering pain with jokes.” I asked him about this and he was takenaback. Covering pain with jokes is the only possible attitude, he said, and he is of course right. Not everyone manages it, but it is the stance to aim for.
    Durrell never mentioned pain, but he was always making jokes. Burroughs cannot be amusing, although he can describe madness well, choosing just the right detail to send the reader away heaving. But Sedaris is a comic genius. He is Thurber, if not Wodehouse, and he is certainly Perelman. He has no “side,” as the British say. He thinks little of himself and I suspect accepts compliments with mystification.
    The baddies have much to fear now. Before memoirs became popular, child molesters had things very much their own way, for instance. No more. Mary Tyler Moore was a little girl when she was sexually assaulted by a neighbour and her mother either didn’t believe her or didn’t care. The British writer Jill Craigie was raped by the historian Arthur Koestler, a revelation that caused consternation at the university that was about to erect a memorial to the man, plans hastily changing there. Alan Bennett now writes of being cornered as a little boy by a pedophile in a cinema. It is a terrifying story, but he typically insists on making little of it.
    It does appear that a great many people—judging by the stories we read of the prominent—were raped as children, and we have the Pain Memoir to credit for this knowledge. Two—and as of last Friday, let’s make that three—of my closest friends now tell me of having been sexually attacked by male family members when they were children; another friend was raped by a psychopathicdinner date, a professor, who put a pillow over her face. He was perfectly friendly afterwards, which was the terrifying thing, she said, aside from asphyxiation. They tell me this only because the Pain Memoir appeared in my lifetime and began to unwrap the real world for us, making it acceptable for us to tell our own stories.
    And yet people still yearn for the mythical days when children were sent out to play. Nobody worried about molesters then. The truth is, the molesters didn’t worry in those days either. They were home-free.
    Children accept the lives they are given, which is one of the blessings of being a child. You’re like an animal in that you don’t question your own existence, you simply live it. But at some level, all children yearn for a “normal” family, knowing in their hearts that there is something very wrong: drunken parents, a central shared lie that is never articulated, a mystification about how Daddy brings in money, why Mummy sleeps all day, the relatives who are permanently shut out, the pills, the endless hasty moves.
    Good memoirs are based on meticulous observation and no one is better at that than children. The interpretation of what the child saw comes later.
    The odd thing is that there is nothing more fascinating than unperceptive people. In fact I know several people who are utterly incurious. They don’t read. They watch a smattering of bad TV, though I’m guessing here, because they never talk about high and low culture or anything in between. They cannot catch a current reference beyond the year they turned twenty-one. If they’rewomen, they have never worked and they despise women who do. They have never had any achievement or any ambition to achieve. Is it some sick element in me that is drawn to people like this? It mystifies my husband how I chat with them at parties or in stores. It’s like talking to a parrot, whose best effort is to mouth your words back at you perfectly. But they don’t know it. Tell me about your life, I urge them. They do say the most astonishing things, if only they knew it.
    Sometimes I think the greatest loss of all is not the unexamined life (for Socrates was referring to examination of the