Not long ago, I started ruminating about the future of memoir, a literary art that seemed to have stopped evolving, bogged down in copycat subject matter. I’m speaking of the flood of memoirs about illness by mothers and daughters (How Mom Gave Me Her Alopecia), books about identity and ethnicity (Growing Up Anxious and Andorran-American), and stories about toxic boyfriends (I’m Glad I Shot Him). I exaggerate, but you get the idea. These topics sprung from the poor-me ilk, enabled by publishers wanting more of the same, supplied by authors happy to oblige. How long would memoir be stuck in this victimhood wallow, and what would it take to bring the form back to the earlier, more surprising creative nonfiction?
Then I read Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2012) by Adam Phillips and, viola, a lighted path. His therapeutic thesis is that each of us carries a story of the life we should have lived, the life we missed out on, and, according to Phillips, the life we’ve already lived, to a degree, psychically. The boxing contender who had to quit because of his wife’s illness, the songwriter who was snowed-out of her debut at the bitter end.
What was Phillips’s evidence? His patients—he’s a London psychoanalyst—who were haunted by, if not melded to, a so-close or a wished-for existence, each one, in part, a latter-day Walter Mitty. They lived in imaginative fogs, in souring regret, believing fate (God, Devil, father) had robbed them. Who they thought they were—Phillips found under the autobiographical veneer—was half there and half elsewhere. This was a fresh way to push the memoir—contrast the life you should have led, the one that badgers you and may exist as much as the actual one you did have, which also badgers you, perhaps because you didn’t want it. The life you’ve lived was or is someone else’s.
With On Giving Up (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), Phillips extends his oft-visited thesis about our present/absent conflations. He takes on the realm of giving up what “we admire or aspire to” (writing a bestseller) or what “profoundly unsettles us” (an addiction, a vision, a loss). We give up on what we haven’t done, or what we’ve done poorly or extremely well. It’s time to let it go. With the former, we believe we should give up because too much desire stands in the way of “the lives we should want,” typically those we’re stuck with. Before we unload that which we missed out on, we first must recognize the path not taken as a burden that controlled us and will not surrender easily.
In the first chapter (this is Phillips’s twenty-sixth book), the concept crystallizes: “What has always to be given up, in giving up, is the wanting.” Wanting to write with discipline, to drink in moderation, to be a better listener, to be kinder to those with whom we disagree. Wanting stems from self-inadequacy. A dream is not a bad thing unless the dream prevents us from being engaged with present reality. Phillips wonders why not giving up is so deeply ingrained in us. We fear the unknown; we believe in the idea of relentlessness. He says what’s inborn is a holdover from the Enlightenment, the idea that life’s potentiality, its second act, its chance-taking, is always there, relighting us, tempting us.
At first, you think missing out is more of a psychological illness than giving up. But giving up is radically different. It’s a strange phrase, to give up, and Phillips loves building his books on strange phrases, as if they are worth receiving treatment, in prose. A few tropes we live by. Giving up life and its cousin, giving up on life, say, turning off the dialysis machine. Giving up the ghost, a waking-up nostrum that signals we need not remain haunted by career yearnings, unachieved, like my father’s never making vice-president in his paper company. We give up one profession for another and realize this neither turns the clock back nor erases what has been.
What’s fascinating about Phillips, who was trained as a Freudian, is that it appears he treats patients, in part, to write about their collective psychology. His approach is to dig into the dramatic conflicts rendered by novelists and philosophers—Shakespeare, William James, Kafka, Freud, Thomas Mann—whose writing become his analysands. He interrogates the choices their characters or cases make, psychological conditions many of us recognize. Othello’s maniacal jealousy, Mann’s Faustian bargain.
Phillips unpacks the West’s tragic hero, the privileged male, he who never gives up, example, Macbeth. What drives him? Prophecy, cruelty, ambition, a shrewish wife and the horror of failing and losing her respect. But were he to give up—that is, chasten his desire to be king, disinvite the ghost of Banquo, temper his wife’s ruthlessness—he’d face two types of surrender. The first would result in an “enlightening disillusionment,” plus “the possibility. . .of a future,” while the second would result in the “terminal disillusionment that leads to suicide.” Macbeth does nothing of the sort and dies as peculiarly as he lived.
Why do we admire these people or even make them into antiheroes? Such sticktoitiveness is clearly enchanted by faith more than reason or common sense. To believe—the claim and the supporting action—is more important than what you believe. Here is where Phillips does his best work: in the grayness between, say, a Trump and a dead Congressional Medal of Honor recipient.
It takes time to eventually throw in the towel, an act of emotional maturity. To give up seeking an agent for a book project, the writer must have experienced a healthy amount of rejection before she can give up wanting it. In the chapter “On Not Wanting,” Phillips analyses the difficulty of breaking our habituated states—how much we live or return to our unreal expectations, like believing the Detroit Lions will make it to the Super Bowl. Why is it “human nature” to endure such fantasies—the end of fossil fuels, a drop in food prices—when given another year or new leadership or more funds expended, things seldom change. What we should never give up is our ability to adapt to broken ideals, though that doesn’t mean we won’t fall down the wishing well again.
Phillips has a rhetorical method of documenting the certainty of his questioning. His sentences are typically aphoristic and combine in surprising ways a statement’s oppositional condition. “It is one thing to want something in fantasy,” he writes, “but for it to be gratified in reality is dangerous.” Thus, the one-hit wonders of rock ’n’ roll, a lottery-big night at the slots in Las Vegas, the dark-horse politician whose fluffy ghostwritten memoir launches scrutiny and is doomed. It’s trusting such victories that quickly ensure downfall.
Phillips’s way to perform these sleights of compositional magic is via style. It’s a Phillips “trademark”—this ouroboros way of writing—that spring from the common parlance in many of his other books: Missing Out, On Flirtation, Going Sane, One Way and Another, On Getting Better. I’m drawn to this aphoristic disentanglement of idioms in the language as it lets loose the playfulness sentence-making allows us. I can’t help but think that Phillips is nodding to Wittgenstein who taught us that language controls our thinking, not the other way around.
Here’s an instance of Phillips’s method of writing-as-thinking—the going out in search of a new perspective and the coming back recalling some of what he went out with:
For animals, life is the living of it, the surviving of it, for the requisite time. But for us, life is sustained, or not, by words about life; life as something we can live or something we might find we are not actually living, or might turn out not to have lived. As though it may not always be exactly death we fear but the death in life we might find ourselves living or having lived. As though one could live a life that could turn out not to have been one.
The twistiness, not to everyone’s liking, speaks for itself.
I stumbled on this insight from Alice Munro who died in May. She echoes Phillips’s conceit, namely, that our personal lives follow a traumatizing and detraumatizing evolution, based, of course, on wanting and the enervation too much wanting demands, which, in turn, means one day we surrender to the overimagined and cut our losses. Munro says that our lives are “written” like novels (not literally but psychically), a book-like journey for which we chapter-and-verse but fail to reach. “Everybody’s doing their own novel of their own lives,” she writes. “The novel changes—at first, we have a romance, a very satisfying novel that has a rather simple technique, and then we grow out of that, and we end up with a very discontinuous, discordant, very contemporary kind of novel. I think that what happens to a lot of us in middle age is that we can’t really hang on to our fiction anymore.” With such a release, bitter or exhaustive, we enter a better place, less fictionally heroic and rarely worse than what we are left with.
