Therapy

I have this habit of overidentifying. Perhaps overidentifying isn't right. Overinvesting? Maybe it's simply obsessing. About seemingly dissimlar things.

Recently it was Lucy Grealy. Author of Autobiography of a Face. I remember when I first read a story of hers, about a summer job she had taking horses to rich peoples' parties. It had that effortless writing I love. Seems so easy and superficial and yet teeming with insight and observations I thought were uniquely mine only expressed better. Anyway, the story always stayed with me but her name did not. Until I heard on the radio that she had died. Lucy's writing (at least that story and her most famous book) is autobiographical and having lost part of lower face to bone cancer when she was a girl makes her stand out. So then I had her name and I went to find her books.

Unfortunately there aren't many. She's a poet too, but I much prefer novels or short stories. For a while she was all I would talk about. My friends found it morbid (her cancer, her disfigurement, her early death), but it wasn't to me. I can't really explain what it was that drew me to her and her story. One thing she wrote that still rings in my mind however. She talks about trying to find love and says that she never really expected it. Knowing how she looked, and how she was treated as a child at school, she just never expected it so it wasn't really something to obsess over. Yes, she obsessed over being found attractive and loved even, but no real expectation of a long, lasting relationship. And it hit me then - wow, me too. And yet, I'd never, ever consciously formed that thought before, but obviously somewhere, somehow, I had.

Is it me, or is good literature like good therapy?