Brian has been writing personal growth titles for 20 years. Stop Waiting, Start Living was the big publishing phenomenon of the Nineties. He'd noticed a common trait among his patients, even the ones who weren’t on Prozac. All of them were waiting: for the weekend, payday, for their lives to begin… it was all about the future, never the now. It seemed a pretty simple premise for a book. What if today was all you had? How would you live it? The royalties came rolling in and the hacks dubbed him The Happiness Doctor. He started dining out more. Gained 57lb. Drank too much and slept with his publicist. His wife left him, his kids disowned him and he had to sell his house as part of the divorce settlement.
All he has now are his books. The publishers can’t get
enough, commissioning ever more colourful titles. He was pleasantly
surprised when Hills Not Pills: Hike Your Way To Happiness made the bestsellers
list, and even more so when The Veggie Soul Cure: Ditch Sausages, Start Smiling
was a hit. He has now become the go-to guy for snappy soundbites on
self-improvement. Magazine journalists will call him up and ask ‘What’s the
secret to true happiness?’ and he’ll always say the same thing: ‘If you were
given a year to live, what changes would you make to your life? Well don’t wait
for death to force the issue – make them now.’
Not that he ever has. Brian lives by himself in a small flat
in Dunstable. He’s also on a cocktail of pills that would make a pharmacologist
stammer: Citalopram hydrochloride to stabilise his moods, Zopiclone to help him
sleep, Propranolol to stop the shakes... He knows he’s a fraud, but according to
the sales figures, his books boost the serotonin levels of the masses, so who
is he to argue?
Then one day Brian throws up. The scarlet splashes form a
sickening contrast against the white porcelain bowl. He tries to ignore the
increasingly frequent occurrence, until the problem becomes as apparent as his
jutting hip bones. His GP refers him to a gastroenterologist, who refers him to an
oncologist, who delivers the news. ‘It’s cancer, I’m afraid’; then when pressed
further: ‘You’re unlikely to see your 60th birthday’. Brian is 59.
Afterwards, he’s so distracted he takes a wrong turn and
ends up at the graveyard. He finds himself taking a stroll among the
lichen-encrusted headstones, appraising the who’s who of people who may as well
never existed.
BG
You seem to have terminated this all of a sudden, in the last paragraph, as though you became bored with it, which is a shame because I was enjoying it. I was expecting some sort of moral or philosophical observation or something. I'm sure there's lots of mileage in it, although I suppose you'd need to know what point it is that you're making. I enjoyed it. Too short though. More, more....
ReplyDeleteDidn't get bored, just felt that the conclusion had been reached. It's a kind of Catch-22, I guess. The irony being that writing books about happiness never brought him happiness, then when he finally follows his own advice – albeit because he actually does only have a year to live – he finds true happiness! The moral is that the self-help industry is a cynical marketing machine, so called 'experts' rarely are, and people never follow their own advice! That do you? BG
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed this Beth. Loved the irony and the book titles. Also I throroughly agree with the feet up and steak, hope he had lovely bottle of red with that too! Sally
ReplyDeleteYou have a powerfully creative mind, and the ideas you throw out make a mark, they always register quite violently, and the poet in me wants to see you lay hold of one of these punches - or more of them- and set it in a prose piece where the power of the idea punctures the rhythm and imagery within the piece - if u see what I mean... So the shock of the idea contrasts with its setting like the blood on the white porcelain .... Does that make sense?
ReplyDeleteI loved the book titles and am disappointed that Amazon can't supply a single copy of 'Hills not Pills'. No doubt you've read them all. I would have preferred it if Brian believed that StopWaitingHillsPills would genuinely change people and lacked the insight to see that he wasn't practicing what he was preaching. There is always clarity in what you write, in the character you are trying to describe, the story you are telling and the point you wish to make.
ReplyDelete