Jackie Danicki

I go to the cinema about once every two years. But I will be first in line for Capote, that’s for sure. It has going for it: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener (as Harper Lee!), being about one of my favourite writers, dealing with his writing of one of my favourite books, and - by all accounts - being generally excellent. My mate Anne Thompson interviewed the filmmakers and “Phil” at the Telluride Film Festival, and the result makes me want to see this film even more. I did get a chill when I read this comment from screenwriter Dan Futterman on why the movie focuses on the period in Capote’s life when he was investigating the Clutter murders and writing In Cold Blood:

This was the turning point, when he achieves everything he ever wanted, and it was the beginning of his end.

The older I get, the more I think it’s true that the happiest people are the ones who can learn to love what they’ve got in life, and who are very open to experiencing the unforeseen. I really can’t relate to people whose vision of what they want out of life never changes. I don’t even have an “everything I’ve ever wanted”. Sure, there are constants - health, family, and choices - but how boring would life be if new opportunities and unexpected paths didn’t hold any allure?

I was talking to my friend (and co-editor of Jack & Hill) Hillary Johnson the other day, about work and isolation and fulfilment. At one point, Hillary said something along the lines of, “I’m like you: I can’t just leave work at the office. I live, breathe, and eat my work. There’s no such thing as a detached approach, no such thing as ‘just a job’.” I was relieved that someone besides Antoine understands this.

Certain friends and family members have made comments to me of late about how “Work will always be there” and “All of my friends who used to be obsessed with their jobs are now bitterly regretful about it” (thanks, guys, for being so subtle!). It sometimes strikes me that they would rather I hated my work and was only suffering through it to pay the bills; such misery would be more acceptable to them than being imbued with a sense of purpose that relates to my job.

The big news over the last couple of days has been that women find it difficult to get pregnant after age 35. Seriously, is there anyone for whom this is a shock? Antoine said to me last night when we were laughing about it, “Imagine if this news had come out during a Tory government. All the headlines would be about how the woman-hating Conservatives are pulling strings at the British Medical Journal to push their morality on women who work.” Maybe so.

But something in the BMJ’s report has been bothering me like a persistent poke in the shoulder. It claims that women are being lulled into infertility because they think that, if they choose to wait until their late 30s to start a family, IVF can sort out any problems for them. While some women do seem to think this way, there are plenty of us who don’t. When the subject of children comes up (that is to say, women - never men - ask us when we are going to have them), I always say that it doesn’t matter how much we may want children, it is entirely possible that we won’t be able to have them. But proving that there are plenty of women who do prefer to fool themselves, the reaction to this is nearly always fierce and negative: “Don’t say that!” Well, not saying it will not make it any less true, and if I am to start pinning all of my hopes and dreams on the uncertain, then I am surely setting myself up for discontent. Similarly violent is the reaction when I say that I do not think that I would really hit my stride with motherhood until my children are adolescents, and that the toddler years would be especially tough. “You can’t say that!” For some reason, a realistic outlook on life makes some people - all female, funnily enough - incredibly uncomfortable. For them, it’s better to pretend that everything’s going to be just peachy. For them, if you hold on to the belief hard enough, it’s bound to come true. (I have explored this before, with regard to women’s devotion to expensive anti-ageing products.)

My friend Amy Alkon has commented:

[I]n my work as an advice columnist, I find women, generally speaking, to be disturbingly irrational. It is our evolutionary biology, that we have more emotional facility than men, but there’s no reason we should be less rational. It’s simple intellectual laziness. Not by all of us…But by far too many. I’d say that irrationality by women and lack of self-esteem are, again, generally speaking, the greatest causes of relationship problems in the US.

And I cannot help but wonder if it’s that same irrationality that keeps so many women from being content. I know quite a few perpetually mardy, ‘depressed’ females, and almost all of them seem to suffer from an inability to adjust to the fact that life is difficult and throws the unexpected our way all the time. For such people - like Truman Capote, perhaps - even getting everything they’ve ever wanted is a hardship, because hoping and wishing is what made them feel better than anything. Being able to find happiness in the everyday, to get satisfaction from the stuff we do in the moments in which we’re not dreaming, is something at which many women do not excel.

I hope this does not read like a self-congratulatory lecture - “I’ve got it all figured out and I’m 100 per cent happy! Be like me!” - because it is not. I am writing this during a break from slaving over my departmental budget for the next year, so living in the moment is not exactly gloriously rewarding at this precise time. But I know exactly how good I will feel when I’ve got it done and dusted, and no matter what other work-related thoughts pop into my mind with every toss and turn in the middle of the night, I will remember that I’ve done my budget and feel a little pleased. Motherhood and great riches may make me feel like queen of the world someday, but in the meantime, I’ve got my boyfriend and my family and my friends and my spreadsheets and research papers. And if that makes me happy, I have no idea why it should bother anyone else.

Filed under: Life