Remember last week when I was writing about my cravings for a Gary Shteyngart novel?! Also, remember how I was going to reread Jane Eyre?! Well, I am actually reading The Book of Snobs by William Makepeace Thackeray. It is through the preface of Jane Eyre that I discovered Thackeray.  He is so witty and so funny. I MIGHT will review the book when I am done. Certain weird and unexpected emotions have slowed down my reading progress.

Finally to the topic! I found Shteyngart’s memoir “From the Diaries of Pussy-Cake” via The New Yorker (incidentally my home page, though I always manage to never read anything there!) It felt like a nice breeze on a hot day when I recognized the author’s name, then I was happily hooked from the very first paragraph: 

I love Pamela.  She is what I’ve been waiting for all my life.  A chance to lower myself into complete abasement, a chance to beg for someone’s love over and over again, knowing I will never get it.  After our first date, when I find out she has a boyfriend (or, as she explains, an ex-boyfriend who is not yet completely out of the picture), I sign off gallantly in an email, ‘I am at your disposal.’  Except what I’ve written is ‘I am your disposal.’

This first paragraph is in a sense the whole narration. After you read the memoir, you can put all of it into the above quote.  This is so relatable in that it is that kind of nonsense that we often experience or can’t wait to experience.  To meet that cool person that we think we’ve forever been waiting for, only to find out that we can’t actually have been waiting for them because they are that which disposes us into a deeper hole that we are unable to clim out of without help. We become their “disposals!”

What made this read even more exciting was that right before I found the memoir, I was thinking of something similar. The cycles we put ourselves through though we know that it won’t lead anywhere, we hope that it would lead somewhere and this hope keeps us locked in unhappy little cells we’ve created for ourselves.  Enough of my ramblings. You should read the memoir for yourself. If you’re yet to read a Shteyngart, consider yourself in for a treat! See it at the New Yorker.

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