The Best of Us

We celebrate births and deaths, we mark anniversaries. But what are we really celebrating or marking? Sometimes the real significance lies in events that have long preceded that which we are marking.

When we celebrate a birth or an anniversary, we’re really looking back on the events that lead to it. We’ve gotten better as a society with marking death as a celebration of life. But it’s more than just the life of the one that passed, it's all the people they touched, the ripples of impact that they had, and the way in which their legacy is carried on.

And so with Joyce Maynard's new memoir, The Best of Us, she marks some of these powerful and significant moments in her own life.

My conversation with Joyce Maynard:

Alexandra Fuller

It is one of the tragic ironies of the psychoanalytic age that we are attracted to people, particularly our partners, who often turn out to be the very ones that begin to repel us later in life.

At first, its those once endearing and now annoying habits. And then, it becomes annoyance at their larger world view.

Perhaps it's because in partnering, we seek to make up for those things that we are lacking. Perhaps its because we buy into to the old adage that opposites attract. Even though, contemporary research shows us that that is simply not true, that partners that are similar tend to do better.

Today we seek and talk of authenticity, but is it possible to be authentic, while trying to compromise with anyone that is the opposite from who we are at core?

Those are some of the central ideas running through Alexandra Fuller's memoir, Leaving Before the Rains Come.

My conversation with Alexandra Fuller: