October 27, 2003
The lives of dentists revealed
A little while ago I saw The Secret Lives of Dentists. This morning I read an essay on Salon by one Jane Smiley, who wrote the novella, "The Age of Grief" upon which the movie is based, about her experiences seeing the movie. That would be interesting enough as it is, for it isn't every day that you read an essay that contains reflections on literally seeing one's self being played by someone else in a movie based upon one's own fictionalized account of one's life.
But it's also a really interesting commentary on love and marriage. Some of it I think she gets exactly right:
If you could just look across the room and feel that scoured-out, aching feeling that would at some point be consummated with thrilling sex (if A, then B, according to the conventional logic), then he was the one.... Now I think that the markers of true love are trust, kindness, perceptiveness, care and respect.
Later on, she strays into a positive view of divorce, something I can't be comfortable with for obvious reasons. That being said, it's still a really good read.
