“Try to remember. When did you have it last?” we say to that exasperating friend who opens her pocketbook and finds something missing, something ordinary and indispensable, glasses, a coin purse, a driver’s license. If we are patient, we go over her day with her—“I know I had it on the bus because . . . I’m sure I saw it when I paid my lunch check . . .” If we are energetic, we accompany her while she retraces her steps, back to the stocking counter, the phone booth, the doctor’s office: we watch her day unroll before us, like a movie film that is run off backwards, where the diver floats up from the water and lands on the springboard.
“When did you have it last?” the author adjures the distracted heroine, who is fumbling in her spiritual pocketbook for a missing object, for the ordinary, indispensable self that has somehow got mislaid. It is a case of lost identity. The author and the reader together accompany the heroine back over her life’s itinerary, pausing occasionally to ask: “Was it here? Did you still have it at this point?” and suspecting, in spite of her protests, that perhaps she never took it with her at all when she started off in the morning.
It is not only scenes and persons but points of view that are revisited—the intimate “she,” the affectionate, diminutive “you,” the thin, abstract, autobiographical “I.” If the reader is moved to ask: “Can all this be the same person?” why, that is the question that both the heroine and the author are up against. For the search is not conclusive: there is no deciding which of these personalities is the “real” one; the home address of the self, like that of the soul, is not to be found in the book.
MARY MCCARTHY