Book Review: “I Love the Bones of You” by Christopher Eccleston

I love the Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston. You already know that by my recent discussion about the Ninth Doctor. When I found out he wrote an autobiography focusing on his relationship with his father and his struggles with both anorexia and depression, I knew I had to buy a copy and read the book.

“I Love the Bones of You” is very much a tell-all sort of autobiography. Eccleston holds nothing back, beginning with his earliest childhood memories. The book is somewhat arranged topically and in quasi chronological order that actually works fairly fluidly – except in the final three or four chapters when it’s a bit confusing in terms of what happened relative to other events. It is certainly well written, a compliment I offer less often than people would like.

On the surface, Christopher’s life seems idyllic, especially his family life. Both his parents and his twin older brothers are loving and kind. No abuse in his family, though his father Ronnie does have a temper of sorts. Christopher emphasizes their working class status that colors almost everything in their lives. This is not the United States with its ideas of everyone being the same class (false of course – but that’s what Americans tend to believe): this is England. The England of Christopher’s time (and perhaps still true today) is very much stratified between the working class, the middle class, and the upper classes. Where you are born in that hierarchy dictates nearly everything in your life; Christopher Eccleston shows us exactly how he experienced it and how it affected each member of his family.

Christopher’s challenges with body image and eating are explored at length in often shocking detail. That he manage to survive and to do his work is very much surprising. In this he gets very honest about how the film industry works, especially towards food, eating, and body expectations. He holds nothing back and does not try to paint the film and television industry along rosy lines.

This candor persists when the subject switches to his struggles with depression. The narrative is straight forward, including the cause of his decision to seek in-patient treatment. In a pattern I recognize in my own autobiographical writings, Christopher is ruthlessly honest while still building a protective bubble of privacy. He gives you just enough details to see why he needed professional help – but no more. Skillful writing to accomplish what he does.

In the middle of this and about halfway through the book Christopher Eccleston turns to his professional life, giving us inside insights into films and television shows most of us know him for. Surprising to me because I watch the movie every December is how much he dislikes the movie “The Seeker: the Dark Also Rises” which is one of his most family-friendly films and made shortly after stepping down from Doctor Who. He covers most if not all of his major projects – what he liked, what he thinks of himself, and so forth. He’s very self critical in all of this.

Jude (1996)

The one project Christopher is not critical of is his 1996 film “Jude.” He devotes a full chapter to it entitled, “Strangled at Birth.” Jude sounds like a great film I would love to watch – until I read this chapter.

Earlier in the book Christopher tells us that shortly after finishing drama school he worked as a nude model for art classes. Okay, I knew that before I started this book. Actor straight out of college doing whatever he has to for rent money. Fine. He previewed that he did a lot a projects requiring him to take his clothes off. Fine. But it’s only in this chapter, “Strangled at Birth” where he gets graphic on the matter. Jude is absolutely not a film for children. There is a lot of very explicit sex and violence to the film. Wonderfully artistic, but not for viewers who abstain from erotica and/or horror genres. Christopher is very matter-of-fact and very honest about the film and its content. It’s also one that both he and his family happen to really like among his extensive filmography.

Logically, there’s a fair amount of Mancunian dialect and a lot of references to film, television, and footballers that most Americans probably have never heard of. These references do make the book a bit confusing at times. Chris assumes (rightly or wrongly) that these names are familiar. For me, they are not.

After Chris writes the usual career stuff, he returns to family. There are two short chapters recording what happened when he finally watched his season of Doctor Who with his son and daughter that are light and airy, a break from some of the darker material.

But inevitably the book returns to his father’s decline and 2012 death. This is a book focused on his relationship with his father, after all, a man whose life and character saturates and informs his own life, especially as he raises his son and daughter now.

The final cadence of the book is the eulogy that Chris gave at his father’s funeral. The ultimate salute to the man told him during his dementia, “I Love the Bones of You.”

If you love Christopher Eccleston’s work or simply want a great read exploring dementia, depression, and/or eating disorders, “I Love the Bones of You” is a must-read.

Four stars.

Don’t Force It: Fighting the December Blues

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year” sings the carol in celebration. From about mid November through mid-January, depending on your culture and religion, we are invited to get into the “holiday season” and automatically lighten our mood. We are expected to be extremely social at this time of year even as we are told to spend massive amounts of money – despite the promises of the “very real” Santa Claus coming to town and giving us presents – or at least to our children.

It’s a time of very high pressure from what seems like every possible direction. The ideals presented to us at every turn require healthy families and a comfortable income to attain. The stuff of 1950s and 1960s sitcoms. Mom is baking treats. Everyone has so much to eat we all gain at least 10 pounds. Mom and dad have a peaceful, loving, and happy relationship. And most of all, no one is lacking anything, at least no one worth knowing. The people we don’t like – well that’s different. A simple donation to the Salvation Army or some time volunteering fulfills our obligation to be nice.

But the reality is different. Families are often filled with problems. Couples fight. Siblings, cousins, and other relatives do not like each other and cannot be in the same space as each other without conflict breaking out. Families often cannot travel to see each other for both financial and logistical reasons. Death breaks apart what was before a cohesive and loving extended family. The list goes on and on. Our lives fail to match the ideals in the songs and the images the media and social media show us.

Isolation sets in. Any other time of the year we cope with our isolation well. Life is not perfect, but we find ways to get our physical needs met. We work with available options for socialization. We maintain some form of equilibrium and get through the day. 

Until the holiday season starts. Then we are pounded with expectations we simply cannot live up to. Socially or financially. With food prices rising, we are struggling to pay rent, electric, and other needs that we simply cannot ignore. There’s no money for buying gifts. There’s no one to exchange gifts with.

The weight of all this hits. We feel like we’ve failed. We feel worthless. We feel forgotten.

This is especially the case when the people in our lives have other people to be with. This month they are too busy to spend time with us. They have other demands, other priorities. We get dropped, ignored, discarded even as our environment demands we be social, generous, and giddy.

Playing flute as a teen for my church’s Christmas service.

But who feels like singing or dancing or any of the other celebratory behaviors expected of us when we find ourselves cold, hungry, and isolated? When there’s no presents under the tree for us?

It’s enough to make anyone feel blue.

Recently though I heard some advice on Twitter that just might make this month easier: don’t force it. Don’t pressure yourself to feel a certain way or celebrate a certain way. It actually is okay to be by yourself on a holiday, to take the time to recharge and relax away from people.

In talking it out I realized that I really don’t like to be around people first thing in the morning on a holiday. Even when I lived in Nebraska and still lived at home with my mother and brother, I would get up early, turn on the tree lights and some soft Christmas music, and sit in the dark quietly. I would ease into the day before facing the inevitable chaos, noise, and drama that came with my family.

When sunrise finally came, the television would be turned on for the morning news. Cooking breakfast commenced. At some point we would sit together by the tree and open presents. But for as long as I can remember, I always started Christmas morning in the pre-dawn dark. Just me and the tree lights. Tranquility. Peace.

Mithril and her husband sit in the tree. 2003 or 2004.

All grown up and free of the abuse and chaos, I managed to keep my personal tradition of sitting in the dark with the tree lights – with the addition of my responsibilities to my cockatiels. The cage has to be uncovered. Fresh water given. And my birds sit with me as I drink my morning coffee. Silence, coffee, and cockatiels.

Maybe then that’s the solution: don’t force it. Do not try to make my life live up to what others do or say I should do. Maybe, just maybe, it’s okay to celebrate Christmas with a cup of coffee, the company of my cockatiels, and some lights glowing on my tree while dawn breaks over the mountains of Pennsylvania. A silent morning. A time for Peace.

A Lack of Empathy Increased Self-Reliance at the Expense of Social-consciousness

Originally published May 2nd, 2012, I am especially proud of this article discussing decreasing empathy as a mental health problem.  This article also appears in my upcoming book on poverty in America.

 

It’s a mental health epidemic. It’s a change in how people conduct themselves socially. It’s been worsening every year since the 1980s. It has created enormous misery in our society. It is…our increasing lack of empathy for other people, our inability to “walk in another’s shoes.”

Declining empathy is one of those social subjects we all seem to be aware of on some level-yet rarely understand enough about to make the needed changes. Athttp://www.psychologyandsociety.com/empathydefinition.html we see a psychologist’s concept of empathy, “a vicarious emotional experience in which you feel and understand what another person feels…there are two elements of empathy: perspective taking (understanding what another person feels), and vicarious emotion (feeling what another person feels). ” This means that we not only experience another’s feelings (psychologists consider that “sympathy”) but truly UNDERSTAND where the other person is coming from. It is both a cognitive and emotional response to another person. In Wicca, psychic empaths experience another’s feelings and experiences very tangibly, often experiencing other people’s pains and sorrows more intensely than those people experience them on a conscious level, picking up on their unconscious and subconscious experiences in addition to the conscious ones each individual readily conveys.

This “feel within” experience is critical to our ability to help others. Entrepreneur Mark S. Birch discusses Empathy in American history in his article, “Empathy and the American Dilemma” (http://birch.co/post/11653486193/empathy-and-the-american-dilemma), describing the evolution of the American middle class and why the “Greatest Generation” experienced far more empathy for others than we do today. His article is an enlightening journey through history, helping us to understand how we moved from a culture of shared social responsibility to “generation me” where “greed is good.” The “Greatest Generation” was more empathic than we are today because of the common experiences everyone shared in the Great Depression and WWII which served as great social equalizers. Mark Birch describes that during depression, “People were standing in soup kitchen lines as equals. People worked alongside each other building the next generation of national infrastructure.” He goes on to describe how during the 1980s, “The political dynamic changed as well to reflect this growing self-reliance. This meant initiatives to lower taxes, shrink government, reduce regulation, and dismantle welfare policies.”

By the 1980s, our sense of caring and helping others that was forged so intensely by the shared experiences of the 1930s and 1940s had severely eroded. Now we live in “Generation Me” where greed is so pervasive and regulation so weak that, as it was during the 1920s (see PBS program “The American Experience episode “The Crash of 1929”http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/transcript/crash-transcript/), those who could manipulate financial systems and profit from them exploited them to the point where both housing and financial industries collapsed. After years of focusing on just ourselves, we are ill-equipped psychologically to help others, to put our profits, our wants, our interests aside and look at the world through someone else’s eyes. We see this in our daily lives in the increase of rudeness, the increase of casual violence, and even just our inability to maintain social relationships for long periods of time. We marry thinking we can make the other person serve our selfish interests-and when they don’t, we discard the relationship, divorce, and look for someone else.

Just think how much better your life could be if you and everyone around you learned what our parents, grandparents, and great grand parents from the Greatest Generation learned: we are all connected, every life is valuable, every life (human, plant, and animal) is precious, every viewpoint is valid. When we transcend our petty momentary desires, we find ourselves and our world enriched. Empathy evolved among humans because it fosters life. We need each other and we need communities. Let us all endeavor think before we speak, look at life through the view points of others, and care about those around us.