TO MY CRITIC

I am always grateful for those kind enough to take the time to follow my meanderings online, whether here, on Facebook, or elsewhere. I ‘m especially fond of those who enjoy what they read—I am as susceptible to praise as any other human being and certainly it pleases me to know that I have written something that resonates with other people. It’s why I write, to communicate with my fellows.

I also have my critics, and I’d be a fool not to welcome them as much as those who praise me. They teach me to pay more careful attention to my words, and often to have second—or third!—thoughts. I am grateful to them, too, for their response. Among them is one who happens to have been born across the Channel from my own native land, and who appears to share his countrymen’s traditional intellectual disdain for their delusional cousins across the sea. If I don’t misrepresent him, he takes the view that the sciences, particularly the biological and evolutionary sciences, are sufficient explanation for all human behavior and scoffs at me when I see it otherwise.

Most recently—other readers may have notice—he takes me to task for writing so much about myself. He even attributes that to an inability to leave my childhood behind and instructs me to “leave myself at the door.”

Well, I guess I must plead guilty. I do write a lot about myself. What may have escaped my friend’s attention, though, is that I not only have a reason for it, I have distinguished precedents among his own compatriots. I will not presume to compare myself to literary giants like Montaigne and Rousseau (say what you like about the latter, and I admit my preferred hero is Montaigne), but both of these were insistent that they were writing about… themselves!

Precedents aside there is, as I say, a reason for what my friend identifies as a grievous fault. I look in the mirror not, I hope, out of pure narcissism or because I have failed to grow up, but our of curiosity. I have always wanted to know more about what it means to be a human being, and how to be a better one, and the one closest to me, the one that I know best, the one most available tor study is… myself! I believe that the closer I can get to the truth about myself, my own heart and mind, the more I will know about the humanity I share with every other human being on this planet.

Thus my latest book, the one that is not in production—I will soon, I hope be trying shamelessly to persuade you to buy a copy!—is called “Dear Harry: Letters to My Father.” It is—with apologies to my French friend—of course about myself. But mention the title to anyone—well, anyone who is not actually French—and their eyes light up in recognition. Yes, those eyes tell me, I too wish I had known my father better. I too wish to have felt his love in a way I never did. Yes, there are many things I’d wish to tell him if he were still alive…

See what I mean? Come right down to it, it’s not really about “myself” at all. I holding the mirror up I’m looking at the reflection of a man like other men—and not too different from other women. That’s the point.