Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
Amy Krouse Rosenthal is a self-proclaimed everywoman, an entirely unremarkable American whose life has seen, thus far, no extraordinary events, of either a positive or a negative variety. One might think that means her authorship of an autobiography would be a bad idea, but these days, unexceptionality is a hook, and significance is passČ. With whom can an average reader more readily identify, after all: an adventurer who has done exciting things, or the woman next door who has the same tastes and concerns as most everyone else? A lot of publishers are willing to bet that familiarity sells just as well as substance, so we get books like Rosenthal’s, pseudo memoirs written by nonentities who fancy themselves clever. Lucky us.
Granted, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life is not a conventional memoir. No one, not even the most Seinfeld-loving publisher in the country, would publish a memoir by a woman who brags that nothing interesting has happened to her. Never fear, though, Rosenthal has a gimmick: she wrote down lots of random stuff about herself - some of it essayish pieces a page or two long, some of it a single sentence at a time - then alphabetized the lot according to each tidbit’s subject matter. She then organized the collection like an encyclopedia, complete with tables, diagrams and pictures drawn by an artist who has illustrated dictionaries.
If you give it a chance - and if it were handled well - it’s an idea that just might work. Sure, the whole encyclopedia conceit is obviously a trick to make nothing seem like something, but it is a potentially fun trick. A life might seem unspectacular when viewed head on, but discover it in bits and pieces, out of context and chronological order - sort of a jigsaw puzzle version of the author gradually materializing out of the ether - and there might be a kind of joy in it. Rosenthal’s book flirts with success in this respect, but not often and never completely. A section filed under “C” for “Childhood Memories,” for example, provides quick glimpses of the author’s life - “1970-75 - Father occasionally comes home from work with box of Jujubees as a special treat” or “1977 - Uses Nair for the first” - that by themselves don’t mean much but which, when read all together, begin to hint at Rosenthal’s development, family relationships, temperament and things like that. Unfortunately, moments like these are scarce and sandwiched between many other less revealing entries.
The majority of the book consists of throwaway comments that are of questionable publishability. Some of these comments are of the personal-revelation-that-make-you-think-”So what?” variety, such as “I blush easily” (filed under “Blush”) or “I am scared of the dark, and of our garage, basement, and any mirrors at night.” Others are so off-kilter that they defy explanation. What, for example, are we to do with an entry like “Cab of Truck”? “Seeing just the short, truncated nubby front part of a semi-truck (the cab), one is always compelled to point and say look. It’s just an image you can’t get used to. It registers in the brain as funny, odd, on the loose.” A thought like that is problematic: first of all, I’m not compelled to react to a truck cab that way; and second, it doesn’t tell me much about Amy Rosenthal to know that she is.
The biggest problem with Rosenthal’s book, though, is that most of it is not really about her at all. Most of the entries are not autobiographical information but rather random observations of the author’s daily environment. They’re not things that really shed much light on who she is; they only tell you what she thinks about this crazy American world in which we live. It’s the material of the most boring of blogs, the kind written by people who thinkthey’ve figured out an extremely funny way to say what everyone else thinks. The problem is, while Rosenthal can be quite funny, many of her observations are not exactly brimming with wit: “When you get back in the car, the loudness of the radio startles you”; “Inserting a Q-Tip deep into your ear is a great, undiscussed pleasure”; “I can think of nothing less necessary than the cereal Froot Loops with marshmallows.”
Perhaps we’d all be better served if Rosenthal admitted that, no matter how she serves it up, her life is boring. She’s a fortyish urban-dwelling mother who, it seems, spends a good deal of her time in coffee shops trading quips with her best friend. Good for her, but there’s nothing there for most of us to want to read about. For goodness sake, we’re all doing exactly the same thing, and we can’t all write books about it, can we? Those good writers among us should, by all means, write, but they should also think of something to say before they put pen to paper.
Copyright 2005 Ad Media Inc.