Happy birthday

Happy birthday, me. I am 35. Shudder. I've decided to blog another year of reading, only this one will have a theme. My absolute favourite books to read are memoirs by women. Famous women, non-famous women, ones I like, ones I don't, the whole gamut. So, I'm doing a whole year where that's all I read.
I'm going to sneak in two early entrants that I read last week. Firstly, Forever Today by Deborah Wearing. Here is the outline: Deborah, then a young PR employee at London department store John Lewis joins the staff choir and falls in love with the conductor, Clive Wearing, a conductor and music producer for the BBC who is quite a bit older than her. They get married and about a year later he gets a virus that turns out to be herpes simplex which then infects his brain very, very badly. He has encephalitis and huge amounts of brain damage (apparently there are literal holes in his brain tissue) with the resulting effect that he has the worst case of amnesia ever recorded. His memory is about 20 or 30 seconds in total. Every 30 seconds he 'wakes up' confused, convinced that he's been in a coma that has lasted years and years. The only thing he can remember is Deborah, and music. She advocates and cares for him. She divorced and then remarried him some years later and it's all fascinating and horrifying.

I also read Body Lengths by Leisel Jones (and ghostwriter). It was extracted in the weekend Herald a month or so ago, which is why I picked it up. Insanely talented and dedicated swimmer, an Olympian at age 15, wins a million medals but then also gets depressed and tries to kill herself at high altitude training camp. I guess it's just interesting to hear her say that she thought things would be different when she won a gold medal; her friends would like her more, her boyfriend wouldn't cheat on her, she'd finally be happy with her body. Then she wins the gold and everything's the same. I think for some years I also lived my life as if I was waiting for one special thing to happen, and then everything would finally be good and I could actually start living. I try not to do that anymore. Me and Leisel.

I happened to read Body Lengths in the same few days as I read These Things Happen by Greg Fleet. It occurs to me that there are several points in that book where Fleety, a bald junkie with none of this own teeth left, reflects on his looks and decides that he's quite ok. No model, but you know, fine, he's good enough, never had a problem with the ladies. Meanwhile Leisel, tall, blonde, athletic, with 8 Olympic gold medals tried to kill herself because her coaches thought she was fat. Men, what's your self esteem secret? Oh yeah. Patriarchy.

Onwards to a years of other women's lives.