I Wrote This Book Because I Love You by Tim Kreider (October 2018)
Tim Kreider describes his relationships with women (and his cat) in this collection of reflective personal essays. It’s an unusual premise for a book, especially for an author whose relationships probably aren’t of much interest to even his most loyal fans, but this is hardly a juicy tell-all account of who, what, and when from Kreider’s personal life. Rather, he uses these experiences to connect and expand on larger themes that any observer will enjoy reading and thinking about.
A good example is my favorite essay from the collection, ‘The Strange Situation’. It describes a childhood attachment study Kreider participated in and explores how those results may (or may not) have predicted his self-destructive behavior in certain adult relationships. It’s an interesting examination of how we all look for the balance of our free will and our ingrained characteristics in our actions, decisions, and thinking.
It also forced me to consider an intriguing question – to what extent are we responsible for fulfilling our own prophecies? I suppose that any prophecy can quickly become self-fulfilling because of how easy it is to blame instinct, upbringing, or circumstance for the various outcomes in our lives. However, I think we all retain a degree of agency over ourselves that we are not always wiling to acknowledge and that the most important quality of a good prophecy is how it points out where we need to make an extra effort to overcome an ingrained tendency toward a certain behavior, reaction, or thought pattern.
In addition to ‘The Strange Situation’, I also enjoyed reading ‘The Feast of Pain’ and ‘Our War On Terror’. The latter essay requires a caveat – I enjoyed it for how it illuminated another of his works, Twilight of the Assholes, a book of political cartoons he published during George W. Bush’s administration.
Footnotes / endnotes
I’ve always enjoyed Kreider’s writing and this time around I was actually prompted to note down a few quotes. One I liked in particular was about his easy childhood – the worst thing that ever happened to me was math – and another made reference to some difficult experiences from his early adult life – at the time I didn't think I took this too hard; I was just angry and depressed and drank too much for a couple of decades.
I also learned after I finished the first draft of this post that Kreider appeared on NPR's Fresh Air podcast to discuss this book. I haven't listened to it - yet - but here's the link to the podcast transcript for anyone interested.
