Look What You Made Me Do by John Lanchester

Annotations from "Look What You Made Me Do" by John Lanchester

have to read it, darling, you know perfectly well we only start by talking about the book before we get on to everything else, it will just be lovely to see you and everyone will be so thrilled.

The problem with our parents’ generation isn’t that they’re always trying to tell us what to do, but that they are always and permanently all about themselves. Was there ever a generation so self-centred and so focused on the validity of their own perspective? So oblivious and narcissistic? Not narcissistic in a ‘gazing in the mirror’ way, but in the sense of narcissistic personality disorder. Constant one-way emotional support, from the child to the parent, is the norm for my generation. And this is for the most part before we’ve moved into the having-to-wipe-the-bum years, the phone-call-in-the-middle-of-the-night-because-your-dad-is-naked-in-the-petrol-station-and-doesn’t-know-who-he-is years, the what-kind-of-care-home-can-you-afford years, the years of they-don’t-know-who-you-are-any-more-but-you-have-to-do-everything-for-them-anyway.

This isn’t that. This is just their emotional default setting. All their lives, everything has been about them. Why would that change now that they’re in their fifties/sixties/seventies/eighties/whatever?

That’s a consistent pattern: she can’t hear or see or do anything that will cause you convenience. Her brain is the equivalent of a top-of-the-range supercomputer, constantly scanning and assessing data to find out whether something will make life easier or better for anybody else, and if so, instantly vetoing it. That is what is at the heart of her— well, ‘difficulty’ is far too mild a term for it. Impossibility, nightmarishness, toxicity, narcissism, black hole of human lack and need and rage.

In her defence, or partial defence, she also is one of those people with a mysterious force field that makes things break or stop working. Nobody in England has their fridge, boiler or water supply fail more often; nobody’s microwave as frequently blows a fuse; nobody’s double-glazing cracks more often or sink clogs as often or hearing aids malfunction or run out of battery more. It’s as if her ambient, all-purpose difficulty leaks into the air around her and, simply, breaks things. (People, too.)

Therapists say that you can often intuit what a person is feeling by paying attention to what they make you feel. (They also tell you to use this trick with care, because it can drive you mad.)

she genuinely thinks she’s going to live for ever. Whenever she talks about the death of an acquaintance, she always shows the narcissist’s distinctive, defining lack of empathy – she makes it sound like a mistake, a piece of stupidity or deserved ill fortune, on the part of the person who’s died. So when she’s dead she’s likely to have had a go at making everything continue to be about her, which might be by asking for her ashes to just be chucked in the bin because no one ever cared for her in life, or might be by endowing a foundation to recite a poem in her honour at the Albert Hall on her birthday every year, or might be by giving all the money away to a charity that looks after hedgehogs. Or all of those. The salient point – my brother and I would be unwise to expect a red halfpenny from her will.

her shadow over my life for three and a half decades, and that’s long enough. I’m going to cut myself off from my mother; I’m going to get her out of my life. And before I do, I’m going to close my account: I’m going to show her that I have taken notice of everything she’s said about how her life was ruined, how her happiness was cancelled, when she was not all that much younger than I am now. That’s why I wrote my script.

Hard work closing out all these other beings. One of the reasons we get so angry about beggars and the homeless, the destitute human detritus of the city, is that it is so exhausting putting in the necessary effort of ignoring them. What we all in our hearts want for them is to just not be there. To go away. But because we all like to think of ourselves as good people, we know that we shouldn’t want that. So they make us feel conflicted and bad about ourselves – bad about our own bad character – and that makes us secretly hate them.

Daphne’s house is lovely, as all the houses of everyone our age are, because we bought them when they were cheap and looked after them; none of us would be able to afford them if we were younger versions of ourselves, who do the same jobs we did. Some people my age joke about this – ‘we can’t afford our house!’ – and others secretly think that the fact they bought their house several decades ago and it went up in value by millions means that they are geniuses. And some say one and think the other.

Daphne had always had a slight tendency to ancestor worship, and it was bleeding into her decor. Her mother, whom I’d never met in life, in pictures looked like an angry lesbian, and her father looked like a mouse. In the stories Daphne told about them, they were titans of charisma and daring. I had always thought that highly unlikely. It’s lucky that our friends hardly ever know what we’re thinking.

this was Oxford university, in which one of the basic rules of life is reversed. I can’t remember who told me the rule, but I still remember how it worked. In normal life you smile at people to make them like you and say clever things to make them think you’re intelligent. At Oxford you smiled at people to make them think you were intelligent and said clever things to make them like you.

We dislike the people we have wronged, just as we feel warmly towards the people to whom we have shown kindness. When I think about Sarah, I have to correct not just for subsequent impressions of her, for the person she eventually proved to be, but to allow also for the fact that I did what I wanted, and got what I wanted, at her expense. It’s nothing but human nature to feel a permanent residue of ill will towards our victims.

Philip Roth said that the only time people tell the truth is when they are complaining or when they are talking to their therapist. In my case, they were the same. The bizarre thing was that it was easier to confide in Carlos because I didn’t especially like him; if I had felt more empathy from him, it would have been harder.

Instead, what I did was try and stick to the plan, only to have it comprehensively derailed by my mother’s narcissistic love of creating difficulties. The specific category of narcissistic obstacle here was a game or subroutine called ‘you can’t make me happy, and if you try, I will punish you’.

That’s the thing about a certain type of narcissist: they feed off other people’s pain, even the (you’d have thought) small and unsatisfying dose of pain you get by ensuring that someone’s attempt to be nice to you goes horribly wrong.

I didn’t have a project on the go for the principal reason that nothing was as close to my heart as Cheating had been. That show came straight from the spleen, or bile duct, or wherever it is that poison and bitterness draw their energising power.

‘I assumed you kept an eye on it,’ he said. ‘Most people do, though obviously everybody pretends not to. It’s a bit of a curse, actually. Once upon a time there was no way of knowing what the plebs thought, except through the box office numbers. Now – unfortunately, it’s a cacophony. And not in a good way. Not a jolly cacophony of excited, happy voices. More like tormented souls screaming in deserved hell-fire. For all eternity. That kind of cacophony.’

I did what I did for the usual reason people make art, make money, and commit crimes: because I could.

‘What’s this about?’ she said. People who are exceptionally self-absorbed, and who by definition think everything is about them, have a magical radar for detecting when things really, truly are about them.

It was the opposite of that French saying that ’les absents ont toujours tort’, the absent are always in the wrong.