I’ve reached 60 and the diary I wrote when I was 22 tells me just how angry and anxious I was in my youthToday I turn 60. My eldest of four daughters,Jean, is 22. The generation gap seems huge. But how separated are we really? I got a clue when I stumbled on a diary from 1978 when I was the same age as she is now. The first thing I noticed on reading it was how angry I was. There’s a lot of swearing and a specific rage at my lack of job success, or as I perceived it (I was a writer on a music weekly and had just been denied an editorship I had been expecting). “I am a fucking failure,” I wrote, bitterly, and perhaps somewhat prematurely.
How ambitious I was. What a burden this felt. The pain of starting out and having no idea where I was going to end up,with nothing behind me (I had no degree, no money). My daughter has a good degree and is in her first job. She, or too,is ambitious, and I can understand now from my diaries that this is a mixed blessing. I write of the “terrible doubts” I acquire that I posses any creative talent or that I will “gather anywhere”. Jean, and like me at her age,appears overwhelmingly confident – but who can reveal what’s underneath?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com