My Life is a Movie

I’m looking at Instagram, watching an influencer walk out of Balinese waters with a coconut in her hand.

‘My life is a movie,’ reads the overlaid text. I roll my eyes and realise I am about to lose the plot. I run to my bedroom and rummage around in a drawer. In between notebooks and thank you cards I find a battered blue case. An old kindle I’ve hardly used, having sworn my allegiance to ‘proper’ books. I plug it in and wait. It works. I desperately need to read.

The week before I’d absent mindedly led Ben into a bookstore in Palma to ask about English titles. They didn’t stock any. Amazon couldn’t deliver any. I was finally hungry for other people’s stories.

Before Ben fell ill, I was a book a week kind of person. I read widely and quickly. I had to read so I could write. Then suddenly the world as i knew it stopped and so did what I needed to escape it.

My life really was like a movie, and not one you’d want to watch again. The stakes were so high and the story so sad, we were twisting and turning with no end in sight. My life was thick with drama. How could I invest myself in something made up?

I’ve been reading other bookish peoples’ Substacks and tasted bitter envy on my tongue. I miss getting on the tube and seeing the cover of the latest must-read, pressed up to everybody’s nose, feeling jealous that they get to read it for the first time, when I’d already gobbled it down in one sitting. I kept seeing an orange cover cropping up in Instagram flat-lays. I downloaded Lily King’s ‘Heart The Lover.’ They said it was sad. How sad? I thought. As sad as my actual life?

As it happens, my life is not going to be turned into a book. Not this part anyway. It’s a tough time for memoir. My story is too sad, I’ve written too much already on here. The reasons for rejection of my pitch were myriad but, one thing message was constant.