Toward the end of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, the unnamed narrator eats a custard-drizzled dessert and reflects on the way childhood felt:
I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I found joy in the things that made me happy. The custard was sweet and creamy in my mouth, the dark swollen currants in the spotted dick were tangy in the cake-thick chewy blandness of the pudding, and perhaps I was going to die that night and perhaps I would never go home again, but it was a good dinner, and I had faith in Lettie Hempstock.
The narrator’s perch is middle age. He’s returned to his childhood village for a funeral, and becomes enraptured by telling himself the story of fantastical things he experienced as a child of seven. The narrator sits by a pond that a magical all-female family of farmers called the ocean. This paragraph distills the essence of what he does there, which is draw us into what you might call a joyful sense of loss.
Childhood is one thing that I can say for certain that you, the person reading this, have lost. (Unless you’re a child, in which case, don’t look at my Twitter.) It’s not for me to tell you how you feel about your childhood, but you probably misremember it. I know I do. Is the misremembering also a loss?
In that paragraph, Gaiman’s narrator separates joy from happiness. He puts joy on a higher plane than “the things that made me happy,” as if the ability to experience joy simply from things he likes is now a revived revelation, something he once understood and has now forgotten. Joy itself is the province of his fey childhood.
The narrator’s re-epiphany about joy is nestled in among not only the bad things about childhood—lack of power or control—but also a synopsis of the narrative arc of the entire novel. Bad things could happen, bad things did happen, but what we’re left with is a memory of a currant-dotted dessert and friendship. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is a story in which “perhaps I was going to die that night” is always imminent in the narration, but in which we also know that the end point is a wistful middle-aged man sitting by a pond, fondly remembering all that menace.
And at the end, the narrator isn’t sure how bad or good to feel about what he lost, or even to what extent it was lost.
This all struck home for me, and not just because Rona chaos means I’m still at my childhood home. I’m writing a novel in which both first-person narrators are fixated on the loss of their mothers. As they grow increasingly isolated, and as things fall apart around them, they cling ever more desperately to what they remember. And of course, to be that invested in a memory is almost always to misremember. The memory gets clutched tight until it’s twisted into narrative. From narrative they get meaning, and from that action, until they’re both impossibly far from what they believed they had and exactly where they’ve narrated themselves into being.
All of which is to say, I’m not sure that to misremember childhood is to lose anything. Childhood is mostly a shitty mess, ideally mitigated by the fact that you’re a child, and thus capable of making the best of things with a serene creativity that’s harder for adults. But you always have to make the best of things, because you never get to make any choices—even though the people making choices for you are often fools and sometimes monsters.
What you gain by repurposing the reality of childhood is a story. For Ocean’s narrator, this is a story about literal magic. For many of the rest of us, it’s a story about a magical glow that we could never detect when it was supposed to exist. And that’s OK, it may even be for the best. If you haven’t been able to guess from reading other iterations of this newsletter, I’ll always come down on the side of a fun story.
Calvin and Hobbes Corner
Calvin’s school bully, Moe, is a good reminder of all the ways in which childhood fails to be magical:
One of Calvin’s most charismatic traits is his insistence on asserting himself. He often stands up for himself even when it’s clear to us—and should be to him—that he’s about to get steamrolled. Here the steamrolling is close to literal, as a much bigger boy sends him flying with a single punch. Calvin pays for his panel-one hubris in the very next panel, and spends the final panel cracking wise about the injustice. We may not love it when the real six-year-olds in our lives stand their ground, but you always have to love a wry tragicomic hero.
It’ll shock you to learn that I was a cerebral, dreamy kid who sometimes had trouble with bullies. Calvin’s travails and his resiliency in the face of them helped me get some perspective—a rare thing when you’re in elementary school. I could push through it if he could.
I hadn’t thought about it much as an adult, but like Neil Gaiman’s narrator, I’m remembering things as I write this. I wonder how much of my sometimes overdone self-assertion grows out of watching Calvin’s ever-thwarted, often-punished elan. Maybe this is where I first got the sense that you can at least try to punctuate the bad things that happen to you with wit.
Other fun things
— Katie Jane Fernelius has a fantastic, heavily reported, richly informed longread about capitalism and the future in Nigeria in Current Affairs
— If you only read one review of “Rodham,” the heavily marketed alternate history novel about exactly the person you’re guessing, make it this one from Laura Marsh
— I already plugged The New Gothic Review in general terms, but here’s my favorite story—it has a vampire. Also, to plug even more shamelessly, my podcast just did an episode with Ian McMahon, one of the journal’s co-editors
A poem
Seamus Heaney gets real about growing up