Who among us hasn’t considered what our lives would be like if we had taken alternate paths, made different decisions? Storytellers of every stripe write of the lives we didn’t have, says Andrew H. Miller, author of On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives. As we live through a worldwide pandemic, the ideas of what might have been are even more appealing. Much like the adolescents on the verge of adulthood in Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, Miller tells us, we wait to see what comes next.
Asked to describe yourself, you might say many things. You might mention your habits or your looks, you might point to your work or your family or the town in which you live, or the town from which you came. In any case, you would probably talk about who you are. But sometimes we think about ourselves in a very different way, focusing not on who we are, but on who we’re not. We think about the lives we might have led, the people we might have become, had things gone differently in our past. Each of us no doubt could make a list: if my parents hadn’t moved from Connecticut when I was young; if I had gone to a different college; if I hadn’t taken that one class with that one teacher; if my girlfriend hadn’t broken up with me; if my parents’ hadn’t gotten a divorce; if I had taken another job; if my wife and I hadn’t had children.…What would my life be like? What would I be like? There are so many other paths I might have taken, so many other lives I might have led, and yet I find myself here, on this fresh June day, a middle-aged man in Baltimore, behind this narrow desk, looking out at those two children playing on the shaded sidewalk under the dogwood trees as I write these words for an unknown audience.…A life so unlikely, yet inescapable.
Such unled lives have long preoccupied a diverse set of authors, from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Langston Hughes and Philip Larkin; they’ve preoccupied filmmakers, too, from Frank Capra to Charlie Kaufman and Greta Gerwig. Indeed unled lives have become more and more absorbing to authors, and have become a major theme in recent literature. No doubt that when the wind slackened and the sun stood still Odysseus had some second thoughts, and Job, too, might have found things to regret. But, although it would be hard to take a census, I’m sure the number of people we are not, like the number of people we are, is on the rise. A list of living authors lately absorbed by unled lives could start with the novelist Kate Atkinson and end with the poet Rachel Zucker: Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, Rachel Cusk.…
That list would certainly include Sally Rooney. During these months of enforced seclusion, both her novel Normal People and the series based upon it have been avidly consumed and widely praised. No doubt their popularity has been due in part to the pleasure in having distracting good literature to read and good TV to watch when other satisfactions are denied. But the distinctive resonance of the story is less obvious than this suggests. It doesn’t come from the story itself, which in its broad outlines is familiar enough: two appealing Irish protagonists, Marianne and Connell, occasional lovers and deeply intertwined companions, are perched on the edge of adulthood. They are both bored and full of promise, wondering intensely what the future holds for them: “almost no paths seem definitively closed to her,” Rooney tells us of Marianne, yet “she has no idea what she’s going to do with her life.” So too with Connell, for whom the “ultimate question” is “what to do with himself or what kind of a person he is.” They wait, breath held, for life to start, and we wait with them.
It’s this sense of time idling that I think resonates in our vacant and febrile days, these days of collapse and revolt, of economic stagnation and social upheaval. Time arrested but leaning into a precarious future; it’s the time of early adulthood, but isn’t it our time, too? “Six Weeks Later (April 2011)…Two Days Later (April 2011)”: Rooney organizes her book in time-stamped chapters, each one dated and distanced from the one before it; we drift along and, shaking our head, discover that months have passed. Similarly, she clips off each of her short, declarative sentences from the next, so that gaps yawn between them.
For us, as for Rooney’s characters, this urgent, stilled time presses on us the question of what is to come. “I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for you,” Connell says, as the novel closes. “It’s true,” Marianne thinks, “he wouldn’t be. He would be somewhere else entirely, living a different kind of life.…And Marianne herself, she would be another person completely.” Between these two experiences—of life intensely felt but charged with uncertainty, and of the backward glance that understands life by contrasting it with lives unled—lies the novel itself. Like Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Normal People is set in a time of vibrating possibilities seen from the future, when those many possibilities have become one single past. For us, too, when we look back, what will we see? What will we have become once we emerge, individually and collectively, from this urgent and unsettled moment? And what will we not have become?
