Intro, Part Three

Once again, here’s a place where Harriet is completely unlike me. I tend to go off half-cocked, act (and speak and write) before thinking, only later realizing it’s too late to reel my words back in, to wish them unsaid. Much of my life is spent wishing for a do-over. And I feel guilty, a lot. Somehow I feel that although I’m a political science professor, I should know more – about everything. I read to close up and fill the gaping holes of ignorance which I’m constantly identifying in myself. I’m not entirely sure who Lloyd George is, or Lloyd’s of London, for that matter. I occasionally force myself to watch C-SPAN, amazed by all the legislation – and senators – which I have never heard of. I don’t have an opinion on Madonna’s latest adoption attempt. Should I? Shouldn’t I?
I feel a strange need and perhaps even a duty to know about things – to have an opinion on global warming (though my specialty is actually Russian information warfare), on whether a dog or a cat makes a better pet, on whether or not you should medicate your child, wear your baby, give birth without drugs, hold a séance and try to contact your dead relatives, invest in real estate. And at some point, I’ve read a book on all these subjects.
I imagine that Harriet is simply much more psychologically secure than I am. To my knowledge, she has never read (or reviewed) a book because Oprah told her she should, because the ladies at the pool told her she would really like it or because her pastor suggested that she should (“Getting a grip on your Anger: For Beginners and Intermediates” springs to mind). Me? Guilty on all counts, I’m afraid. I’m an inconstant reader, I’m disloyal, changing my favorite author from day to day, growing sick and weary of individuals and genres and constantly jumping ship. (“If that Jodi Picoult kills off one more character at the end of her books, that’s it! I’m over her.” And yes, I’d probably write that in a review.)
She’s also very steady. Harriet would never tell you that she “loved, loved, loved that book!!!!” with six exclamation points – anymore than she would tell you that it saved her life, or saved her marriage. Harriet never attempted to deal with her menopausal symptoms by reading a book on the subject, underlining the parts that made the most sense, and then hightailing it off to the natural foods store to stock up on black cohosh and omega fatty acids as the book suggested. (Guess who did, on the other hand? You’d be right. And no, in case you’re wondering, black cohosh doesn’t work.)
Let me be clear here. Old Harriet stays in her lane, but she’s not one of those ‘ghettoized reviewers’ – as I tend to think of them – who specializes only in one or two obscure subjects, thereby revealing more about themselves than you might otherwise know. There are the obsessed homeschoolers, the Jesus freaks, the anti-jesus freaks, the colon cleansing raw food freaks (who usually post entirely too much information about exactly what a particular diet did to their digestive tracts), the “women whose children are just so startlingly gifted that no school would ever exist that could possibly serve their needs,” the security moms who never seem to tire of reviewing and posting lists of consumer reports tracts and home safety products. No, we still know startling little aobut harriet – except that she likes historic novels.
She’s also not a basher, once again maybe a sign of her own security. She will never tell you that she hated a book, that she thinks the writer is an idiot, that maybe SOMEONE should give up writing entirely and take up a new hobby, like packaging industrial solvents. The most she’ll ever allow is that she was perhaps a tad bit uncomfortable with the historic inaccuracies in a particular piece of writing. The costumes were wrong for the period, or a bit of the dialogue left her miffed. She’s a diplomat, that Harriet.