Why I like: Brideshead Revisited.

I got married young; a wildfire meeting a stone cliff. My former spouse spent a lot of time waxing poetic about the benefits of marrying young. Apparently- and I believe this is still true- the age of marriage has no bearing on the likelihood of divorce. I think my former spouse and I would have divorced if I had married them at eighteen or fifty-eight. There was some horrible way we used to talk past each other- facets of our personality that were too immense to speak of.

Evelyn Waugh was not terribly young when he entered into his own ill advised marriage. While Twenty-Five might seem a childish age to marry in modern times, in 1926 it was a more than respectable age to wed. He married a woman named Evelyn Gardner. I often think about the charming way their friends spoke about them; He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn.

I was with my spouse for three years, and then a further two years waiting for the divorce to come through. After an attempt at reconciliation which failed, the last time I saw them was during the process for our divorce.

Evelyn and Evelyn were together for a year and a half, and then a further seven years while waiting for the annulment to come through. After an attempt at reconciliation failed, the last time Evelyn saw Evelyn was during the process for their annulment.

I believe there are reflections of ourselves that we see in the stories of the lives of others that make us sympathetic to parts of them. I didn't learn this story about Evelyn until after my divorce, but I had fallen in love with Brideshead Revisited long before that.

There is beauty in a narrative that unfolds in layers.

Brideshead skirts well clear of the heart of its story for many pages, showing us the first the face of England during the second world war, followed by the shadow of it's face during the 1920s and 30s. At the same time, it tells you exactly what it is about; in what seems like a hastily tossed metaphor.


"I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. I knew it all, the whole drab compass of marital disillusion; we had been through it together, the Army and I, from the first importunate courtship until now, when nothing remained to us except the chill bonds of law and duty and custom."

Sometimes people tell you exactly who they are, and you refuse to believe them. Sometimes, a book tells you it is about a failed marriage, and you refuse to believe it, until it is revealed; not through some direct line, but through subtext; through taking a new lover, through lamenting children will be bought up by another man, through focusing on anyone who is not a spouse. Though, I admit: "Brideshead Revisited" does sound as though it is about a failed marriage. The word bride is in the title in a very literal way.

There is something deadly in nostalgia. A line from Mad Men; another of my many inspiriations, on nostalgia meaning 'pain from an old wound.' I think I was born with the wound that causes pain. I like Brideshead Revisited because each read of it gives me the worst kind of nostalgia, and each subsequent read builds on that wound. I adore Brideshead Revisited because it teaches and re-teaches me nostalgia.

My first copy of Brideshead Revisited was given to me by my Nana. She passed away a few years ago, and I realized that she had gifted me the ability to learn this pain, to practice on it, and to use that experience to help me through organic wounds.

Evelyn Waugh taught me how to use literature to experience pain in a safe way, to use it to teach myself how to deal with the real pain of life. This is why I enjoy it, and why I have referenced it in at least one of my manuscripts.