$17.95
ISBN 0979327008
available through Cary Tennis Books

Reviewed by Susannah Indigo
(12/12/07)

Even the most entertaining advice columns lean toward the predictable answers, and most of us often think we could do a better job answering than the columnist. Not so here -- what would you tell a woman who is in love with a fat man but can't stand that he's fat? No, not help him lose weight; no, not tell him to shape up or you're leaving, but something else, much more philosophically complex and completely right...which you'd have to buy the book to learn, or else sneak over to the excerpt here in Clean Sheets.

Cary Tennis can write to make you cry, touching things you thought you knew and were through with due to your own searching and/or time passing, but no, there it is, in black and white, explaining that lost love affair from an entirely different perspective, changing your understanding of your life in that one moment of reading his answer. Several years ago I came across his column with a letter asking how to get over an alcoholic ex-lover, that stated “I feel like I can't believe anything that happened or anything that he ever said. It's as though I'm stuck in a Rashomon-style nightmare…what I would like is a little help figuring out how to cope with the fact that I'll never know what really happened, even though I was an active participant in events.“ An interesting question, one that drives many to therapy for a long time, and then along comes Tennis with this answer, which stunned me. I think it covers not just alcoholics, but any kind of "crazy-making" love affair, including mood disorders and other dysfunctions. It’s a great answer, with points that a good therapist might get to over time, but definitely not one they’d deliver so succinctly in a few paragraphs:

One reason you are having trouble resolving this may be that you have never been in an intimate relationship with a sociopath before. The behavior of drunks and addicts in relationships is sociopathic.

Sociopathic behavior in intimate relationships causes intense confusion and rage because it consists of deception at a deep, existential level. The deception is baffling and unconscionable; it is not just deception about ways and means, about whereabouts and actions, but about soul and intent. The soul of an addict, to put it plainly, is not there; when you are dealing with an addict, what may appear to be the soul is merely the front for a voracious, amoral hunger.

With a drunk or an addict, the basic relational contract does not hold; the supposition that each person is vulnerable to emotional pain and equally susceptible to pangs of conscience and thus constrained in his behavior is violated from the start. So that's what we feel after such an encounter: violated.

It might help to conceive of this not as a relationship at all, but instead as a gruesome accident, a hit-and-run. You were blind-sided. This man was drunk and should never have been given the keys to your heart.

(The full answer can be read here.)

And there it was. Of course. It was a kind of long hit-and-run love affair, which is an absolutely perfect way to answer some of those late night mysteries of the heart – it was a deception at the soul level, due to (fill in the addiction/disorder)...and that takes care of that. Brilliant.

Part of the pleasure of reading Since You Asked is the complexity of the questions -- I'm sure readers learned over the years that you just can't ask simple short questions if you expect a great answer -- I mean, how wonderful is it that someone writes in (in detail of course) to basically ask "I'm not sure I have a self -- how do I get one?" Just try a snappy answer to that one. It's the final question in the book, and the answer addresses postmodernism, shifting realities, memory, meditation, kaleidoscopes, and possums, among other things.

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