"Isn't Its Pointlessness Its Point?"
On Sylvia Smith's "Misadventures"
Hello, Dames Nation! Sophie and Margaret are both traveling this week and so I am writing this alone, which in and of itself feels like a massive accomplishment. As is often my way, I have been having a bit of a hard time with a lot of things, particularly writing. When Sophie and I started discussing writing the August 23rd TBD [Sophie did a wonderful job writing about her feelings regarding her kid going away to college and if you haven’t read it, you really should], I responded that I didn’t have anything to say about any of her original suggestions. When we mulled over possibilities involving writing about ourselves, I told her, “I don’t think anything that’s happening with me is going to make good #content, unfortunately — it’s all very boring.” When she asked if I would discuss and co-write with her, “What is the bar for interesting/boring,” I started crying. At that point, she offered to write about the “pretty intense but not debilitating What If Feelings, But Too Much?” place she’d found herself in re: Seb leaving for school and I wondered what the hell was wrong with me.
I’m still not sure, but while feeling bad about and sorry for myself, I started going through my bookshelves for inspiration, knowing I’d have to write this week. At the same time, I forced myself to start running once again and am slowly working my way back to the very slow, mediocre 5K at which I always top out. It’s been almost two years since I started Couch to 5K and once again I’m working to just get to the 5K — I keep kicking myself back to where I started. It’s all just a little too on the nose.
I also started yet another part-time job this week, nearly five years to the day after leaving my last full-time job. It’s going well, and everyone is really kind and helpful, but it’s also a reminder to me that I have not succeeded in doing what I set out to do, which was to be a full-time writer. I know most full-time writers, particularly those of us who don’t share a household, bills, insurance, etc., with someone(s) else, are In The Shit at this point, but it smarts nevertheless. I’m so happy to have this job, and I think I will continue to enjoy it, but it is very much not where I thought I’d be at this juncture in my life.
The book I pulled from my bookshelf is a very apropos one for this moment, and I’m glad I refound it, as it’s an old fav I hadn’t considered for a long time. Sylvia Smith’s Misadventures was published in Great Britain in 2001. I found my copy a few years later in the used/remainders basement section of the Harvard Book Store and took it home with me after reading the About The Author:
Born in East London to working-class parents as the Second World War was drawing to a close, Sylvia Smith ducked out of a career in hairdressing at the last minute to begin a life of office work. She slowly and completely accidentally worked her way up to the position of private secretary. She is unmarried with no children. A driving licence and a school swimming certificate are her only qualifications, although she is also quite good at dressmaking. Misadventures is her first book.
I gobbled it up and have reread it many times, although my last reread before my current one was probably over a decade ago. Each short chapter is a small slice of life and nothing much happens but the nothingness, the ordinariness, and the dull yet personally memorable recollections delighted me and continue to do so. Smith was way ahead of her time in terms of writing about herself in a straightforward, guileless way that right around the time of Misadventures’ publication was taking off online. Some favorite passages, almost chosen at random:
Childhood:
Once at the bungalows one of my aunts would supply a glass of orange juice and I would wander into the back gardens and look across the golden carpet of the cornfield. Sadly my aunts are now dead. Their homes have been sold to outsiders and are lost to the family forever.
Gloria, 1963:
Gloria and I shared an office and we would chat to each other as we worked. She told me, “At my last job the accommodation wasn’t up to very much and we had single toilets in the passageways. One day one of the male clerks went to the loo. The door was unlocked so he opened it and saw one of the Directors sitting on the toilet with his underpants and trousers around his ankles. He said he was sorry and closed the door but he told half the office and the story spread like wildfire. It must have been very embarrassing for the Director but we all had a good laugh.”
Sam, 1979:
As I entered the showroom I heard Sam talking to the Sales Director. He was explaining why he’d been late for an appointment with a client the previous evening. He said “I broke down in my car last night.” I interrupted and asked, “Didn’t you have a hankie?” which brought some humour to the situation.
It ends with this, labeled 1995:
I have now completed this book and I am taking it to an agent for him to decide whether or not it’s worth publishing, and I wonder if this is yet another misadventure. I will just have to wait and see.
I didn’t know this until I started preparing to write this, but Misadventures and Sylvia Smith herself caused a stir upon the book’s publication. She was 55 in 2001, which means she was about the age I am now when she finished it in 1995. In a 2002 article for The Guardian, she wrote that Misadventures was the second book she wrote, as the first, Appleby House, which she wrote at 43, was roundly rejected. An agent liked Misadventures and sold it to Canongate. In 2016, former Canongate managing director David Graham wrote in Literary Activism: A Symposium, “Where our competition might have seen something dull and unremarkable, we saw a curious and powerfully moving memoir…On a personal level, I love this book and think it makes a real and original contribution to existential thinking.”
Reviews at the time varied; Michael Emery called it “A sorry hypnotic tale of unremitting banality” in The Birmingham Post, writing “The unremitting banality does become strangely hypnotic and no doubt Americans, clever people and even some academics will point to this and say it is evidence of the author's narrative drive.”
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Deborah Ross interviewed her for The Independent in March 2001 and after quoting some passages wrote, “Yes, I know. Very, very boring or what? But, oddly, taken together, the cumulative effect goes right through boring, coming out the other side as compulsively and hypnotically readable. OK, Sylvia really doesn't have anything to say. The incidents she describes may not even be particularly worth remembering. But isn't its pointlessness its point? Aren't most of our lives like this?” My life is very much like Smith’s as described in the interviews that ran during her brief celebrity. I, too, live in a small apartment alone and my furniture is “the sort you get from those shops that keep most of their stock on the pavement and do "house clearances" — and her knick-knacks. Stuffed, rather shabby toys, on the whole, plus the odd ornament.” I watch TV, go out with friends, go to work, and when I’m not crying over my lack of achievement and purpose, I get a lot of joy and amusement out of my life. I didn’t think I’d be where I am now when I first read Misadventures but lo, I have grown up to be a middle-aged woman have my own misadventures, which I’m sure many people find boring but others enjoy reading about! (Thank you!) Most inspiring is when asked why she kept submitting her manuscript after so much rejection, the response, per Ross, was “why not? She didn’t have anything else to do.” Neither do I! I guess I’ll keep on keeping on too, why not?
Smith died in 2013; per her Telegraph obituary, Misadventures so flummoxed some people that “The book provoked debate about whether Sylvia Smith was a real person or whether the book was a clever prank. There were suggestions that it had been written by Doris Lessing [?!] as a trick to expose the industry; others thought that it was an ingenious postmodern joke by the publishers, Canongate — an ironic take on the celebrity memoir or an exercise in uncooked existentialism.” Her NYT obituary features a very cool picture of her with the caption “Sylvia Smith, whose badly written, boring memoirs of her life as a secretary became huge hits in Britain and elsewhere,” and notes that the book sold about 15,000 copies and led to the publication of two more memoirs, including the original, much rejected Appleby House. As for her brief fame, “Her literary celebrity was short-lived, and not very lucrative. After a round of television appearances and interviews, the public gradually accepted that she was neither a publisher’s gimmick nor a literary hoaxer but rather exactly who she said she was — a former office temp who wanted to be a writer — and the debate over her work died down.” Smith said she wrote because she thought her stories were “hysterically funny” and noted “I just liked writing books and wanted to get published.” I’m going to keep reading her books (it turns out there’s more than one! I’m so happy!) and keep thinking about her.
Note: the articles that aren’t linked aren’t freely available online; I found them via my beloved Gale Power Search as accessed via the Boston Public Library.
Writing goes well with making money in other ways, as you have demonstrated. Keep up your wonderful, heartfelt writing and keep sharing it. I'm so happy that you like your new job. This could be the start of something wonderful.
Who could have predicted 20 years ago that that Homestar Runner bit would be so apt?? It's basically my theme song!