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New York Times

2 Books for Birthday Introspection

By Joumana Khatib Dear readers, The approach of my birthday always leaves me a little blue; the occasion is a sour cherry on top of my usual two scoops of critical scrutiny and second-guessing about my life. This year is no different. But I find myself leaning more toward introspection than self-loathing. I can't account for how I've used the past 30-odd years, to say nothing of the previous 12 months, but I'd like to better understand how exactly I got to where I am. These books, each in its own way, model the type of precise self-dissection I strive for. (I can practically feel the snap of the rubber gloves on my hands.) And I like to think they chime with the indelible literary project the Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux set out to accomplish: 'I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself.' Ready to begin? —Joumana 'Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?,' by Lorrie Moore Fiction, 1994 I'm nakedly pandering to myself here, because reading Moore blisses me out as predictably as Xanax. But this is, word for word and paragraph for paragraph, one of the most enjoyable novels about what-ifs I have on my shelves. Plus, it opens with a delectable bit of food writing — about brains: My husband likes the vaporous, fishy mousse of them. They are a kind of seafood, he thinks, locked tightly in the skull, like shelled creatures in the dark caves of the ocean, sprung suddenly free and killed by light; they've grown clammy with shelter, fortressed vulnerability, dreamy nights. Me, I'm eating for a flashback. We can taste those flashbacks ourselves. The ensuing story is a romp through the counterfactual realm. The narrator, Berie, realizes she no longer loves her husband, and begins to imagine alternative lives: What if she were in Paris, but attached to someone else? Perhaps someone who wouldn't confuse 'arrondisement' with 'aggrandizement'? Want all of The Times? Subscribe.