Leith - Bits of me are falling apart: dark thoughts from the middle years

Acclaim for William Leiths THE HUNGRY YEARS

An engaging and truly funny book It is a rare author who can turn a diet into a comic epic.
THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Leiths writing is touching, evocative and deep.
TORONTO STAR

William Leith integrates hard scientific data with the lyric of description, so that his facts and figures blend seamlessly with a persuasive first-person voice. Leith writes about food addiction the way Hunter Thompson wrote about drugs and politics.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Wincingly honest [A] brilliant sort-of memoir
TIME OUT (UK)

As a memoir and as comedy, it succeeds beautifully as a confessional, it is pretty much a masterclassfrank, tough-minded, funny, generous.
NEW STATESMAN (UK)

The subject of this book is compulsion and it is compulsively readable.
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH (UK)

[Leiths] prose has the confident, ringing sound of a man used to hitting nails smartly on the head.
THE GUARDIAN (UK)

To my son, Billy

I wake up, middle-aged and cranky, on an old mattress. Half of my life has gone. I piece the facts together. Im on an old mattress because Im sleeping in my office. Im sleeping in my office because I always sleep in my office. I always sleep in my office because my office is my home. My office is my home because my relationship has broken up.

My relationship has broken up because

Because.

I look at the sky. It is a terrifying pale sky with streaky clouds. I must have fallen asleep without closing the curtains. As I look around, my gaze is followed, and sometimes overtaken, by a shoal of vitreous floaters, shadows cast on my retina by broken-off bits of my inner eye. Bits of me are falling apart. Bits of me are starting to return to a previous life, of being even smaller bits, and those bits, in turn, are preparing to break into smaller bits yet.

Its a Billy daya day I will see my sonwhich makes me both joyful and terrified, the joy of seeing my son tempered by my fear of what will happen when I see his mother. When I see her, the quality of my thinking, always variable, can collapse into a form of dementia I had, until recently, never known. And I just cant seem to think my way out of the problem. Other middle-aged guys tell me they have similar trouble with their golf swings. Something familiar, like the ability to hit a small, dense ball, or to talk with authority, or even coherence, to the mother of your son, just goes, just goes, and if you try to think about it, you can make things a lot worse before they get better.

And now I remember its the last time Ill see my son for two weeks, because hes going on holiday; hes going on holiday with his mother. But Im not going.

I was supposed to go, but things didnt work out.

So today I will be saying goodbye.

I pull myself into a sitting position, something Ive got a lot better at since I started doing Pilates several months ago. Now I can sit up almost perfectly, because I have regular sessions with a coach whose job it is to teach me to sit up. I spend maybe two full hours a week practising sitting up. I can sit up better than Ive been able to since I was a kid, when everything came naturally. Now that my body is failing, some things do not come naturally. They come unnaturally, which is a lot better than nothing.

Im doing everything I can to halt the ageing process. No overeating. Regular herbal tea. Lots of water. A particular kind of porridge in the morning. Very little bread, but masses of fruit. A great deal of brisk walking. I walk an average of 15,000 steps per day. And, although a lot of research seems to show that a single glass of red wine in the evening would be beneficial, Im teetotal.

Maybe Ill give drinking one more chance. But not soon.

Also, I quit smoking and I dont take drugs. I used to do these things when I was younger, when my brain and body needed them less; now that my withering and corrupted tissues cry out for these stimulants, I cant have them.

Theres a book next to my bed: Gary Nulls Power Aging. I borrowed it from my father. Hes eighty, and theres not much he can do. But meI can do something. Sure, Im ageing. But what sort of ageing am I doing?

Power ageing.

Science tells me that if I avoid bad things, and do good thingsand if Im not one of the 10 or so per cent who get hit by something nasty in middle ageI can be healthy, in a physical sense, for quite a while.

Psychologically Im not so sure.

If you want to know the truth, Im not feeling good right now. Im tired and depleted, declining and falling, listless, indecisive. I feel like a footballer in his sad final seasonplaying through pain. I feel like the Dennis Quaid character in Any Given Sunday, one of Oliver Stones several movies about male inadequacy. Quaid is the ageing quarterbackinjured, slow, worried about the younger guy who might take his place, more worried still about the unknowable void that is just beginning to come into view. The first time you see it, the first time you see the void, it looks really close, like a full moon on a warm summer night; you just turn a corner and there it is. You can almost touch it.

I let go of my sitting position and thenboof!Im back down on the mattress, looking up at the stippled paint on the ceiling, which depresses me.

Im forty-seven. I didnt want to say that. I wanted to wait a while before I said that. In fact, I have an urge to say something else: I dont feel forty-seven. But this is not strictly true, is it.

I feel forty-seven physically, and I feel forty-seven mentally.

What else is there?

Anyway, four years ago, when I was single, I felt like a superannuated teenager, and now I feel like a divorced, middle-aged dad living in an office. Its all happened so fast. You spend the first half of your life learning how to make things move quickly, and you succeed, and then you wake up in the middle of your life and you feel like Rip Van Winkle.

In the Pink Floyd song Time, Roger WatersI think its himsings about letting your life slip, as if youve missed the starting gun. When I first heard those lines, at the age of sixteen, I thought: Ill never make that mistake. Ill never miss the starting gun. Ill hear it, loud and clear. Bang! How sad and pathetic, to miss the starting gun.

Whenever I think of this, I remember a teenage English lesson. We were studying a poem by Philip Larkin about a sad old manautobiographical, I suppose, in that Larkin always seemed to be a sad old man, even when he was quite young. The teacher asked us to sum up our feelings about the man in the poem, and one boy wrote that the man was hanging on in quiet desperation, quoting the Floyd song. And the teacher said, What a brilliant lineyouve captured it exactly! And we all laughed inwardly, thinking wed somehow hoodwinked him, because everybody knew that Pink Floyd was the opposite of Philip LarkinFloyd being for young people and Larkin being for sad old people.

Later in that same lesson, we looked at another Larkin poem about a man who throws an apple core at a wastepaper basket and misses, and then realises that he was always destined to miss, even before he started eating the apple.

I thought: Ill never feel like that.

Now, if anybody put me on the spot, Id say it was my favourite poem.

So when I say I feel forty-seven physically, and also mentally, but in some other, elusive way I