The Things that Must Be Said

Preferably Out Loud. To One's Self.

So there's this movie about a guy whose life is being narrated by Emma Thompson and it annoys the crap out of him. He keeps looking up, trying to figure out where she is, and even tries to persuade Dustin Hoffman to get rid of her. Personally I'd adore it if my life were narrated by Emma Thompson. But in the absence of Emma, my life is narrated by me.

It wasn't always this way. In younger decades when I was busy doing all the stuff I had to do and had no time to reflect, there was no narration. My life was the poorer for it.

You know that saying about writers: that we don't know what we are thinking until we write it down. Well, you can't write down everything. If you walk into a darkened room in a new hotel you can't stop to write, "Now, where is that light switch? Should be about here." But you can say it to yourself out loud (which I do now, perhaps more often than I know).

When you narrate the light switch, as satisfying as it may be to the writer in you who needs words to process the universe, those around you may find it disconcerting. Or even annoying, like the guy in the movie who didn't want his life narrated by Emma Thompson. Imagine if that guy were in a crowd of writers-turned-narrators and every one of them was narrating her life out loud. He'd be walking down a busy street to a chorus of "What time did John say he'd be home?" and "Is it this corner or the next one?" and "Why didn't I wear a warmer jacket?" Much worse than anything he encountered in Stranger than Fiction (Yes, that's the name of the movie. It was on the tip of my tongue. Yes, I just said that bit out loud).

Even so, imagine my surprise when one day last month in a Paris hotel, as I was narrating my annoyance at the massively fluctuating water temperature in the shower ("Why does it do this? Scalding hot! Ouch! What??? Now it's freezing!"), my partner actually said this behavior annoyed him. I was shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

So we must confront the obvious question: Is narrating our lives something that old ladies do? My partner says that my mother did the same thing when she was alive. He didn't know my mother when she was young, and I don't remember her talking to herself at all, so who knows? And assuming this is something old ladies do, is that such a terrible thing?

If old ladies do talk ourselves through our days, why is that? Is it an attempt to connect more fully with the world, or to take a step back and gain perspective? Is it to grab hold of this particular moment in the ever-lengthening stream of moments in our lives? Or is it because eventually we all become stories, first that we tell ourselves, and later that others tell about us?

The guy in the movie is an IRS agent who falls in love with a woman he is auditing. Emma Thompson keeps casually mentioning that he will to die soon, which may explain why the guy is so desperate to stop the narration. No coincidence, then, that I'm writing this in April 2025, while the narration in every real IRS agent's brain must be going, "Enjoy this audit, buddy, because your head is on the chopping block." Career-wise, that is, not literally.

I do not mean at all to make light of what is happening in the United States. A lot of terrible things are going on. But if I were narrating what was happening in France just one month ago, we left Paris, drove out into the countryside, and checked into a hotel that only had one room. It was dark outside and the chickens had stopped squawking. It was dark inside the room too; the only light was my computer screen. Next to me in bed, my partner was snoring, and just then as I was writing, he began to narrate his dreams out loud.

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Do you believe, with poet Muriel Rukeyser, that the universe is made of stories, not of atoms? Check out my guide to create, edit, publish and market your own tale of late-life love. Because there are simply not enough books out there about sexy old women.

Write & Sell a Well-Seasoned Romance is available on order from your local bookstore, or from a variety of online stores, including some you don’t hate.