Review by Max Dunbar
There’s a common British anecdote that goes: ‘We had some American friends here on holiday, and on the third day they drove to Stonehenge!’ The idea behind it is that because the UK is a small island, even driving to the next village seems like an epic poem. But Americans grow up on an enormous continental landmass, so travelling long distances comes naturally. If they come to England, they want to see Stonehenge.
Is there truth in the joke? Writer Jean Hannah Edelstein lived in Paris as a young woman, fell in love, followed the man to London, and begins her memoir when she is moving to New York via Berlin. Edelstein’s story is full of odd switchbacks and doublings. Her mother grew up in Scotland, married an American, moved to the US, took citizenship after twenty years, but returned to Glasgow after her husband died. Edelstein grew up with dual citizenship and only returned to the States when her father developed terminal cancer. Her father had something called ‘Lynch syndrome’, which is hereditary – and soon after his death Edelstein discovered she had it too. This Really Isn’t About You is a book about separation. And how love and family thrive despite separation. Maybe even because of it.
Edelstein sees things with the seasoned traveller’s clear eyes, and writes with crisp brevity about people and places. Moving to New York in her early thirties feels like going to some legendary houseparty that is just beginning to hinge:
Behind the people at the door of the party, behind the people who are getting their coats, are the people who are determined to stay until the bitter end. Some of them are the life of the thing, absolutely. You can tell by the way they’re dressed that they have money. The party has gone well for them so far. They’re sticking around to enjoy what else it has to offer. But some of the people who are still at the party are unravelling around the edges. They’ve overdone the drugs and booze, or they’re feeling pretty bad because at their age it is no longer fun or interesting to be the footloose and fancy-free life of the party.
It’s always interesting to read foreign writers talk about your own country. Edelstein’s London chapters are a delight of observational humour. I never lived in London and the difficulty of living full time in that city still shocks me. ‘By now the water pressure in the flat on Cephas Street was so bad that in the colder months there were many hours a day when we had no water at all… my friends expressed regret but never suggested that we move.’ Edelstein lived on two bowls of oatmeal a day, and worked for a literary agent well known in the business for her overbearing attitude towards staff. ‘Here are some things that my boss shouted at me about in her distinctive voice:’ begins one passage. Edelstein was clearly going through a nightmare at this company, but no one did anything to help: ‘For the most part the extent of the powerful people’s acknowledgement of my existence was to leave Jewish-themed books and magazines on my desk’.
And this was in the mid 2000s: god knows what the housing and job market is like now, and worse for young women, I think, because on top of everything else they have to fend off battalions of gropey middle aged married guys. Edelstein never complains. Again, she’s the seasoned traveller who takes nothing for granted. Her epigraph is from Nora Ephron: ‘Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.’
She only tires of London when watching the royal flotilla in 2012, and has coalesced her disillusionment into one elegiac para:
Inside the living room, there was indeed little enthusiasm. There were sandwiches and Victoria sponge and several of the cheeriest people I knew, but there was also a devastating spectacle, the pride of a nation represented by a joyless and troubling procession of boats listing to and fro in the storm. I was transfixed: the sheets of rain were coating the television cameras just as they had my glasses, making it difficult to see. The boats drifted down the river, manned by soaked skippers. On a special barge, the Royal Family watched with gritted teeth.
It’s when Edelstein returns to her family, and comes to terms with her father’s death and her own diagnosis, that the prose gains a new burnish and intensity. It’s the simplicity of these lines that hits you:
My father was not crying, but I looked at him and he looked at me and at that moment I felt that I knew very clearly that even if your parents are very old and have had rich and well-loved life, if you love them there is never a time in your life when you will feel that you don’t want them any more. It was not something that I had ever considered, but at that moment I looked at my father and he looked at me and I knew that there would never be a time in my life when I would regard my parents and think: Yes, I’m ready.
It’s amazing to think that no matter how well equipped you are and how much you’ve endured, there are some life experiences that you just won’t be prepared for. In Edelstein’s book there’s none of the tweeness and sentimentality that makes many family memoirs unreadable, just a subtle and economic demonstration of family love – that most subtle and undemonstrative kind of love, that you take for granted because it always seems to be in the background, like the brisk hum of air conditioning: until, finally, that too flickers out.
Max blogs at Max Dunbar, and can be found on Twitter as @MaxDunbar1
Jean Hannah Edelstein, This Really Isn’t About You (Picador, 2019) ISBN 9781509863815, Paperback, 257 pages.
BUY at Blackwell’s via our affiliate link (free UK P&P)
