I Miss You When I Blink

 

I Miss You When I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott

Nonfiction - Essays

2020 Atria (first published in 2019)

Finished on December 11, 2021

Rating: 3/5 (Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

Acclaimed essayist and bookseller Mary Laura Philpott presents a charmingly relatable and wise memoir-in-essays about what happened after she checked off all the boxes on her successful life's to-do list and realized she might need to reinvent the list--and herself.

Mary Laura Philpott thought she'd cracked the code: Always be right, and you'll always be happy.

But once she'd completed her life's to-do list (job, spouse, house, babies--check!), she found that instead of feeling content and successful, she felt anxious. Lost. Stuck in a daily grind of overflowing calendars, grueling small talk, and sprawling traffic. She'd done everything "right," but she felt all wrong. What's the worse failure, she wondered: smiling and staying the course, or blowing it all up and running away? And are those the only options?

In this memoir-in-essays full of spot-on observations about home, work, and creative life, Philpott takes on the conflicting pressures of modern adulthood with wit and heart. She offers up her own stories to show that identity crises don't happen just once or only at midlife; reassures us that small, recurring personal re-inventions are both normal and necessary; and advises that if you're going to faint, you should get low to the ground first. Most of all, Philpott shows that when you stop feeling satisfied with your life, you don't have to burn it all down and set off on a transcontinental hike (unless you want to, of course). You can call upon your many selves to figure out who you are, who you're not, and where you belong. Who among us isn't trying to do that?

Like a pep talk from a sister, I Miss You When I Blink is the funny, poignant, and deeply affecting book you'll want to share with all your friends, as you learn what Philpott has figured out along the way: that multiple things can be true of us at once--and that sometimes doing things wrong is the way to do life right.

I can't remember where I first read about this book, but you know me--I love memoirs! The reviews must have been pretty good for me to buy rather than check it out from the library. I imagined it might be similar to something by Kelly Corrigan (Tell Me More) or Norah Ephron (I Feel Bad About My Neck) since the blurb claims it's funny, poignant, and deeply affecting. Well... it is a little bit, but unlike with Corrigan and Ephron's books, I only marked one or two passages.

On Motherhood:

I did not know, in those first days, that once you have children, the passage of time feels different than it did before. Everyone says this, and it's true: Days with young children feel four hundred hours long, but years flash by in seconds. I had no idea I'd become one of those parents who posts pictures along with cliched captions like "And just like that... he's ten!" or "Wasn't she a baby just yesterday?" I know, barf. But it was just yesterday that my baby boy got so excited about a jar of creamed spinach that he knocked it out of my hands and sent it clattering across his high-chair tray and onto the kitchen floor. I did just give birth to my daughter last week. How can they be looking back at me with such grown-up faces right now?

On Small Talk:

People who are good at small talk have a handy knack for greasing the gears of social interaction among strangers, and that's useful. I wish I were better at it, truthfully. But when small talk starts replacing real talk, you start to feel like you're among strangers even when you're among friends. I was in a phase in life that required a certain amount of socializing, floating around in blobs of people waving and smiling courteously. I needed my other interactions to balance those out. To offer some real connection, some meaning.  

I Miss You When I Blink might have been better on audio, but I also wonder if I'm not the target audience. I didn't come away with any profound revelations and most, if not all, of the essays are already forgotten after a mere week. I may have found it more relatable twenty years ago when I was working and in the middle of raising a teenager rather than as a sixty-something-year-old retiree.