By Vicki Prichard
NKyTribune contributor
In the event that you find yourself unable to reach your best pal when you absolutely must connect with that one person who ‘gets you,’ consider turning to Mary Laura Philpott as a worthy surrogate.
Through a collection of personal essays in her book, I Miss You When I Blink, Philpott is on equal footing with that one friend you can always count on to prompt head-nodding declarations of, “You’ve got that right,” and that special kind of straight-from-the-belly laughter that comes from a shared perspective of life’s madness through a humorous lens.
One might be inclined to think that such a raucous response warrants I Miss You When I Blink as a book best read in the quiet of one’s home – and throughout the pandemic it was the perfect choice to curl up with on the sofa. In truth, this book is just the date you want when your friend can’t meet up for lunch; read it in public and laugh out loud so other women will know to get a copy for themselves.
I Miss You When I Blink is a memoir in essays, its title inspired by Philpott’s son who scribbled the words on a notepad when he was six-years-old. Over time, that phrase, explains Philpott, reminds her to live in the moment:
“When my now-teenage son is doing something very teenage son and I’m having to ask him for the eighth time in one evening to pick up inside-out pants from the bathroom floor, “I miss you when I blink” helps me be more patient. He was six just a second ago. He’ll grow up and leave me in another second. “I miss you when I blink.” It captures the depths of my love. Could he have meant all this when he was little and scribbling, or was he just trying to rhyme with “sink?”
Whatever the case, the words are a fine set up for the series of essays throughout the book which, insightfully, and with Philpott’s keen wit, navigate her life’s chapters in a way that very often feels like she’s navigating ours too. She writes:
“I miss you when I blink. I have felt it so many times in my life, at points where I really didn’t know who I was anymore, where I felt that when I closed my eyes, I could feel myself gone.” And, “Dammit, I will never be fifteen or twenty-five or thirty-five again. Those lives I’ve lived are over…Hey, young-me, it gets better. I swear. Worse sometimes, but also better.”
I came across I Miss You When I Blink on a trip to Nashville last year with my daughter. For all of our many visits to Nashville, we had yet to pay a visit to the bookstore that had long been on our list of places to visit — Parnassus Books — and we were determined to finally cross its threshold. Our long-awaited visit to Parnassus Books, owned by one of our favorite authors, Ann Patchett, wound up introducing us to a new favorite — Philpott. At the time, I Miss You When I Blink was new on the shelves and, after learning that Philpott is the editor of MUSING, the Parnassus Books’ online literary magazine, as well as the bookstore’s social media director, her book seemed the obvious purchase. Suffice it to say, it was money well-spent
Always right, always happy
Philpott is a self-professed addict of “getting things right,” and early on in life made the assumption that to always be right meant one would always be happy. Fair enough assumption, right? She’s had some time to reflect on the veracity of that perspective.
“People like me – people who don’t just enjoy being right, but need to be right – are often described as ballbusters, as if all we want in the world is to make everyone’s lives harder. As if we take some pleasure in grinding our gears over every little problem in the world. Let me speak for my people and say, no, it’s not that,” Philpott writes.
Her mind, she writes, simply “seeks the tidiness of a question answered. An agenda complete. A box checked.” She is also a serial fainter, and shares those experiences in an essay about the many moves her family made during her childhood for her father’s medical residencies – new schools, new friends.
“Fainting and uprooting. I never knew when they’d happen, only that they would.” That chapter had its lessons too. “I do know that learning to give in to sudden fainting spells and weathering the end of friendships severed by childhood moves gave me practice in accepting, without struggle, the unexpected. Don’t make a big deal, let it pass, everything’s fine,” Philpott writes.
Cast in a scene of poor choices
Relationship tutorials for Philpott came by way of 1990s television and a steady diet of Thirtysomething and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Part of her beauty is that she owns up to this while many who did the same would share that fact with only the most intimate of friends, and then only after copious amounts of wine and demanding they sign a confidentiality agreement. Again, further evidence that Philpott is your new best girlfriend.
Pondering a mistaken notion about grown-up relationships, Philpott recalls, “I had it in my head that the whole point of a grown-up relationship was to take on life’s rocky obstacles and work things out, episode after episode.”
That line of thinking led her to having a college beau who, during a concert, would sneak off and sell LSD that he’d hidden in the trunk of Philpott’s car. Later, he would come over to her dorm to display his new tattoo that read “Poison,” festooned with skull and crossbones. Neither his line of industry (selling drugs), or ominous tattoo were immediate flags. “This was my Very Adult Relationship and no one – no friend, no parent, no symbol inked on skin – could talk me into letting it go.”
In the end – and it did come to an end – a study abroad program at Cambridge University provided the necessary backdrop for reflection.
“When you make poor choices (and when you’ve watched a good deal of TV in your day), you start to feel like you’re living a movie about a person who makes poor choices. Your props and scenery conform to your narrative and become complicit in keeping you in it,” Philpott writes.
Changing one’s scenery, she learned, is critical.
“It was as if I’d finally harnessed the power of all those moves I’d made as a child. Moving had always put my world behind me, which seemed unfair when I was a kid and didn’t want to leave the world I was in, but now? To be able to remove myself from one story and put myself somewhere new – to drink and watch and wear new things until my new setting became familiar enough to support a whole new character, a new me? What a miracle. What a relief,” she writes.
Wise women of keen wit simply ‘get it’
Did anyone else read Nora Ephron and Laurie Colwin in their 30s and marvel at their eye for detail? Admire how they could cut a hedge with their wit? Be in awe of how so many of the things they wrote about would nail with razor-sharp precision what was going on in our own head as we sat around the table at a dinner party or simply navigated our way through relationships, parenting…life?
Many women felt they’d lost a personal friend when those writers passed; I know I certainly did, and even though their books are still with us, they remain greatly missed. Their absence makes Philpott’s honest and humorous insight – her masterful narratives that speak to vulnerability, missteps, screw-ups, celebrations, getting it wrong, and getting it right – all the more welcome if not downright necessary. We are never – not a single one of us – just any one thing, and I Miss You When I Blink illustrates that point in a way which is nothing short of brilliant. Philpott pays attention to life’s nuances and she’s not too shy to tell her truth, which is very often our truth too. There’s a sense of comfort in that thought.
“Sometimes, in moments of memory or daydream, I feel the different iterations of myself pass by each other, as if right-now-me crosses paths with past-me or imaginary-me or even future—me in the hallways of my mind. “I miss you when I blink,” one says. “I’m right here,” says the other, and reaches out a hand,” Philpott writes.
There’s comfort in that thought too.
Vicki Prichard of Fort Mitchell writes for her blog, Backroads and Bookmarks, where this first appeared.
