‘A Life Discarded’ delves into diaries of a stranger
A book by Alexander Masters is always two books: one a fascinating biography of an ordinary yet extraordinary and damaged person, the other Masters’ meta-chronicle of how he came to understand the subject and write the book.
In the remarkable “Stuart: A Life Backwards” (2006), Masters explored the life of a charming, cheeky, self-destructive, alcoholic homeless man, trying to understand how he became that way. In “Simon: The Genius in My Basement” (2012), Masters probed the life of his landlord, a math genius who did revolutionary work in group theory but went on to spend much of his time riding buses and trains and fighting against public transportation cuts.
In “A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in the Trash,” Masters delves into his most ordinary yet mysterious subject yet: the author of 148 handwritten diaries discovered in a dumpster in Cambridge, England, spanning 50 years of the diarist’s life and amounting to millions of words.
Academic friends who rescued the diaries gave them to Masters, who spends several years reading them semi-randomly while trying to piece together the biography of the diarist. From dreamy teen years, with a strong desire to create great art, the diarist struggles through adulthood, emotionally preoccupied with a mocking, critical person:
“E said I have no common sense.
“E said I must overcome my allergy to people.
“E said I don’t learn by my mistakes like others, because I always return to them, like my posture.”
In later years, the diarist feels trapped, occasionally contemplating suicide, but is manic enough to crank out torrents of words about ordinary daily activities and television programs.
Masters bumps into several opportunities to uncover the diarist’s identity more quickly, such as a private detective’s suggestion to check the electoral register. But Masters backs away from these potential shortcuts. He clearly doesn’t want to solve this mystery too soon.
He prefers to guess as he goes along, and nearly every guess is wrong. He thinks the diarist a man until he reads about her spells of painful menstruation. E, the diarist’s piano teacher and critical crush, also turns out to be a woman.
For the longest time, Masters resists organizing the diaries chronologically, until his girlfriend insists on it. Doing so leads to his biggest discovery and reversal: The woman behind the diaries is alive. He arranges to meet her, and seeks her permission to publish his biography. That meeting confirms his early guess that the woman, nearly 5 feet 11 inches, was tall. But it makes him rethink other assumptions.
“A Life Discarded” also serves as Masters’ tribute to his friend Dido Davies, who went into the Dumpster to rescue the diaries. A biographer, academic, exotic-animal keeper and pseudonymous sex-manual author, she died during the making of this book. She sounds like a fascinating soul. If we’re lucky, perhaps Masters will write more about her one day.