B its of Me Are Falling Apart put me to sleep last night. At my age, 63, that's not easy to do.
British journalist William Leith, whose previous book was The Hungry Years: Confessions of a Food Addict, mentions his age, 47, many times in his new book. So, feeling "forty-seven physically, and also mentally," he attends a conference on aging and then wakes up to the realization that the conference was all about him.
Leith has quit smoking and has Gary Null's Power Aging by his bed. He's sleeping in his office on a creaky old mattress because his relationship with the mother of his two-year-old son, like bits of him, has fallen apart. He does Pilates and drinks herbal tea (he's turned teetotal). And he walks "an average 15,000 steps a day." Sounds a mite OCD-ish to me.
He can't afford a house because housing prices have tripled — another good reason for sleeping in his office.
I can recommend Bits of Me are Falling Apart as a sleep aid — non-addictive, unlike those advertised on TV. After all, as Leith says, "sleep is good." But, he adds, "At my age sleep is also bad in many cases including my own." Good, bad, who cares?
Undergoing a midlife crisis, Leith invokes psychologist Elliott Jacques, who coined the term "midlife crisis … back in the Sixties." It's all downhill from 47. There's nothing to look forward to but death.
Tragic.
What a past Leith has, though. (A man can always double the number of his days by dredging up his past.) It's "a bad past — a past full of poor decisions, dreaminess, procrastination, and every type of over-consumption and profligacy."
Leith had difficulty growing up. "I didn't want my twenties to end," he writes, as self-obsessed then as he is now. "I wanted to stay in the limbo of my twenties, which made my thirties difficult." Tut. "In my thirties, I entered a period of denial, drink- and drug-induced denial." God, spare me the bio-pharmacology. Leith doesn't. Cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy. The younger Leith had an epic battle with crab lice. He drank so much that he shat blood. Now he has only death to look forward to. Did I mention death already? Leith does, far too often. As if death isn't enough, there's always: Disease.
Failure.
Humiliation.
Loss.
That's how Leith lists them, one-liners. Death's at the top of his list, of course. Although he's in better shape than he should be, especially after such a bad past, he's stepping out with the Grim Reaper. Maybe that's why he counts the steps.
Reeling off his neuroses, Leith writes like an auctioneer might sound on speed. He has a huge reputation as a comic writer. The Sunday Times found Bits of Me are Falling Apart "brilliant." I thought it was one of the dullest and most repetitious books I've read. Oh well, chacun à son goût. A generational thing, must be. Maybe I'd find the emperor's clothes boring too.
Deepak Chopra speaks at the anti-aging conference. Now he is funny because he's serious, desperately trying to console the likes of Leith with unctuous babble about the non-physical nature of the physical world. Aubrey de Grey, the AI (artificial intelligence, not artificial insemination) expert turned gerontologist, is at the conference too. He's described as "an Old Harrovian with a big beard" (that is kind of funny); and Nicholas Perricone, the anti-aging doctor is there too — all Leith's allies in the war against terminal decline along with the wrinkle-filling creams, lotions and supplements.
There's a guy called Eric Braverman, who Leith "really liked. … He talked about 'the pauses' — not just the menopause, or its male equivalent, the andropause, but the electropause, the biopause, the pineal pause, the pituitary pause, the sensory pause, the psychopause, the cardiopause, the gastropause.
"That's me," Leith thinks. "I'm pausing. In a big way."
Someone is having us on.
Leith has a mole. It must be cancer. But he can't go to see his doctor because he has given the insurance company permission to ask his doctor for his medical records, and if the mole is really cancerous the doctor would mention this in his report, and the insurance would be delayed and the premiums would be huge, and this might affect his chances of getting a mortgage… And so on and so interminably forth.
Leith worries about all the cigarettes he has smoked: "200,000 inhaled mouthfuls of smoke, over two periods lasting half a decade each." He obsesses about low-density lipids and cholesterol clogging his arteries. He frets about Alzheimer's. He fusses about his DNA mutating, comparing his immune system to the German defenders of Omaha Beach in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. A classic hypochondriac, Leith can turn a headache into a brain tumour, indigestion into gut cancer. As well as his lungs, he panics about his heart, bowels, liver, prostate, bones, eyes, teeth, gums, and — as a gone-to-seed gourmand and former fat man — his diet.
You would not want to ask after this man's health at a party. Why the thousand unnatural shocks to which his flesh is heir should be of interest to anyone other than William Leith, I do not know. But if readers find such Eeyorish materia medica fascinating, they will be left with a nickel's change from $30.
Novelist Chris Scott — no Eeyore he — writes from St. Joseph Island, Ont.
