Most of us have read hundreds of lives. Novels, biographies, memoirs, the accounts of people who did remarkable things and of people who did nothing much at all. We entered each of them completely. We felt what those characters felt, we understood their choices from inside, and we could have said exactly why each of them became what they became.
And almost nobody has ever sat down and read their own. Not for an hour. Not properly, from the beginning, the way anybody else's would be read, with attention and patience and a genuine wish to understand the person it happens to be about. It does not occur to anybody to do it, in the way that certain obvious things never occur to anybody.
It takes a long time to notice how strange that is. Every one of those other stories required real effort to enter, and several of them had to be worked at. Our own is the only story we have complete access to, the only one where we know exactly what everybody was thinking at the time, and it is the only one never opened.
Why other people's are easier
Other people's stories are safe, and that is the whole of it. Whatever happens in them, nothing at all is being asked of us. Somebody can be moved to tears by another person's ruin, close the book, make tea, and go on with their own arrangements entirely untouched. The feeling was real and it cost nothing.
There is also the pleasure of understanding without cost. From outside, a life has a shape that can be seen. The mistake is visible forty pages before the person makes it. What they are avoiding is visible, and what they should have said, and why the same pattern keeps returning in different clothes. That clarity is enormously satisfying, and it is entirely unavailable about ourselves, because we are inside, and inside there is no shape at all, only the next thing.
And there is a third reason, which is the real one underneath the other two. To read somebody else's story is to visit somewhere. To read our own is to be told something about how we are living now, by somebody who cannot be argued with or dismissed, because it is us and we were there.
What we do instead
It is not simply neglected, which would at least be honest. Something more active happens than neglect. A summary is kept. Almost everybody has a two minute version of their own life which can be produced on request, and which has been polished over the years into something that runs smoothly and explains everything satisfactorily.
The summary is not false exactly. It is simply very selective, and the selection was not made by anybody impartial. Certain events are load-bearing in it and certain others have been quietly removed as irrelevant. And once the summary is fixed, the original stops being consulted, because why would anybody reread a book they can already describe in two minutes?
So a person can go thirty years working entirely from a summary of themselves written at twenty-eight by somebody who was trying very hard to feel better about something. They will produce it in interviews, in conversations, at funerals, word for word the same each time, and nobody including them will notice that it has not been revised since.
What happens if it is opened
It is slow and largely uncomfortable, and anybody who has begun will say so. The first thing that turns up is that many of the events carried as central were not central at all, and that several things never thought about turn out to have decided almost everything that came afterwards.
The second thing is patterns. The same shape, in different clothes, at twenty-two and thirty-five and forty-eight, with different people each time who cannot possibly have coordinated. That is the part which is genuinely hard, because a pattern is not something that happened to somebody and cannot be attributed to anybody else. A pattern is them.
And the third thing, which nobody warns about, is a certain amount of tenderness towards the person in the book. Reading it as a life rather than as a list of failures produces a completely different feeling. What appears is somebody doing their best with what they had at the time, which was not much, and which was all that anybody has at that age. A hundred other lives known in detail, and several decades gone in the only one that was ever theirs.
