Lynne Truss - A Certain Age

The Married Man

Jim is an American mystery writer living in London. His stories are middlebrow puzzle mysteries, and he enjoys being the omniscient author in command of all the facts. In his personal life, he is conducting a casual long-term affair which he thinks his wife doesn’t know about. She does. She also always guesses “whodunnit” by about the 50th page, which ought to tell him something about how smart she is. In the end, of course, it’s his own inability to pick up clues that is his downfall.

Tone:light Theme: control Ideal casting: Kevin Spacey

This proposal bears a pretty close resemblance to the piece as it turned out, except for the madly unrealistic Kevin Spacey thing. The reason it worked was that its theme was, actually, not control but self-deception. The characters in this book all speak for themselves, but the interest for the person reading or listening to them is always, primarily, in ascertaining and judging how well they know or understand their own story. Alan Bennett describes his Talking Heads characters as people who “don’t quite know what they are saying, and are telling a story to the meaning of which they are not entirely privy”. After I’d completed the second series of A Certain Age, I went to see the excellent revival of Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist, in which a character says there are only two types of people in the world: those who live by what they know to be a lie; and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth. This stark assessment of humanity applies perfectly to the protagonists of dramatic monologues. “We don’t live our lives for other people,” Judy is happy to parrot in “The Daughter”. And she believes it, even though living for someone else is precisely what she’s doing.

I ought to explain why it’s called A Certain Age. The idea for the original series arose out of my rather weak observation that in one’s early forties, a person comes to realise that some particular life choices are no longer open. In fact, many life choices seem already to have been made, sometimes without the involvement of any conscious decision. Thus, a woman might find she could define herself at age forty-two as the mother of a grown-up daughter, or the daughter of an elderly parent, or a wife of twenty-five years. Always keen to impose technical limits on myself, I decided that this system – Mother, Daughter, Wife, etc. – would discipline me, in that each person would talk about just one central relationship. At that time, incidentally, I thought the phrase “a certain age” would have a nice double meaning, in that your forties also bring you more confidence in knowing who you are. However, except in the case of the contented Cat Lover, and the happily restored Pedant, the narrators are subject to the usual curse of the monologue, in that (see above) they don’t know quite what they’re saying, and don’t know the full story anyway.

I wish there were a better, more attractive term than “monologue”. What a turn-off word it is. It has any number of associations, and not one of them is pleasant. “And now Miss Truss has agreed to delight us with one of her monologues!” is the cue for any sane person to tip-toe to the hall, grab a coat at random, and then dash out into the stormy night. But at least banging on about monologues here makes one thing clear. The following are not first-person-narrated short stories. Despite the extraordinary talent the characters sometimes have for remembered dialogue, despite all their unlikely mastery of exposition, these are still slices of drama as opposed to slices of fiction. The way to differentiate the two forms is, by the way, quite simple.

“It was the tragedy of my father’s death that it brought my family together.”

That is the first line of a first-person-narrated short story.

“It was the tragedy of my father’s death that it brought my family together, or I’m not riding this bike.”

That is the first line of a monologue.

Finally, a word about the performances. If by any chance you pick up A Certain Age on BBC Audio, you will discover what an outstanding job was done in studio by each of our twelve great actors (listed here ). Casting A Certain Age was a nail-biting exercise, as it always is for radio, since actors’ agents won’t allow their stars to commit to radio work more than about three weeks ahead, in case something more lucrative comes up. But if the waiting is stressful, the reward is all the greater when your perfect actor actually steps into the studio with his Guardian under his arm and a copy of the script with bits already underlined. I am the soppiest of the soppy when it comes to actors, so I’d better not describe all the ecstatic dancing-on-the-spot I’ve been known to do when the actor has gone. But since I wrote these pieces for performance, I can hardly claim not to care about how absolutely brilliantly they were done.

When editing these pieces to make them identical with the edited broadcast versions, I found that I couldn’t bear to lose (again) some of the precious incidental stuff I had bravely sacrificed in the cause of the rigid 28-minute time-slot. The text does, therefore, sometimes depart from the audio versions – but never for very long.

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