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We’ve all been lucky. It’s not only the divine we find necessary if we’re to live in a state of something better than hopeless consternation. To make sense of the world, we need to feel on top of things. We need to think we know what’s going on. We need reliable sources of certified truth. And we’ve had them. The pulpit. Mom and Dad. The daily press.
I’ve just been reading a column by Meghan Daum in the Tuesday Tribune that finds her pondering a new Oprah-certified memoir, Angel at the Fence, by Herman Rosenblat, a Holocaust survivor. It’s the story of how his wife, whom he met on a blind date, turned out to be the Polish girl who’d passed him food when he was a teenage prisoner in a German concentration camp. Daum also cites two other recent books that told amazing stories, James Frey’s Oprah-certified A Million Little Pieces, and Margaret Seltzer’s Love and Consequences.
I think the audience simply demands the Real McCoy. We all require the intake of stories that are what they seem. The books and TV shows that once helped us escape from too much quotidian reality have become the only reality left.
