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self) but the unobserved life. Unobserved people are fascinating.
    A woman named Sylvia Smith wrote a very strange little autobiography in 2001. She lived in London, had done various odd jobs throughout her life, had very little money, no education or sense of aesthetics, read nothing, took everything at face value, was plain. She sent in a manuscript and Canongate published it. It was called
Misadventures
and took the form of a series of vignettes. She would agree to meet a date at the station to have dinner at his house. Asked to bring sausages, she would. And he wouldn’t show up. There she’d stand with her packet of tubular processed meats until she left alone to go home and fry them. That would be a chapter.
    Or she would negotiate bath times with her fellow boarders and they would inevitably fall out. People cannot live together, I think. Smith had a habit of giving her age and the age of those she described at the start of every incident, as if she had been taught in grade school thatthis was a means of authentication. Instead, it sends out the hum of madness.
    I swear,
Misadventures
was gripping stuff. What was distressing, though, was the newspaper feature writers who were sent out to interview Smith and failed to form any kind of connection with her or to translate her for their readers. She was not rich. She was not beautiful. She had never met the great and rarely the good. It was as if her kind were beyond the writers’ ken. They dismissed her while nervously praising her publisher for having taken on such a nonentity, as though she were a member of another species.
    But the fact is, she was normal. One thing I always remind myself when I walk about the streets of my own city is that I am the freak. I am endlessly thinking, rethinking, analyzing, watching, missing out on things that should claim my attention, my brain a buzzing mess.
I’m
the oddity.
    A man named Joe Fiorito interviews normal people for my local paper. And I am sure his editor considers the column to be some kind of social service with a human face. The most startling interview he ever did was with a poverty-stricken Asian man who had been arrested for shoplifting at a drugstore. He had stolen skin-lightening cream. For he had noticed that brown-skinned people didn’t make anything of themselves in this country. I hadn’t even known such creams existed. I wanted to scream, Don’t press charges. Give him a barrel of the stuff.
    Ten years later, I was prescribed a birth control pill that my doctor explained had given me the “mask ofpregnancy.” There were slightly darker patches on my cheeks, something that pregnant women sometimes develop. She prescribed the same skin-lightening cream for my vanity that the man had stolen to survive. I wonder what happened to him.
    Joe understands that the people he interviews are normal. He is the strange one, with his writing talent and his interest in cookery and his astonishing kindness. I am the weird one brooding over my tube of Lustral and what this means in the grand scheme of things, a tide of sorrow sloshing inside me.
    This year, I read that there’s an ingredient in the cream that may be carcinogenic. Is all of life like this, an accretion of odd facts that we hope will somehow form a pattern? Am I writing the book because my role is to figure out the pattern? I know I am worth less than I think. Writers are small people. They are on the fringe. They write their memoirs with great authority, not realizing that they’re the minion of the group, the person who tells the story instead of just living it.
    Better to write a memoir with humility, as Sedaris does. One of the great frustrations of the book world—and I suppose the journalism world, although it is a much more callous surface-skimming place—is that the right books don’t sell. The bestseller lists contain books like
Minge: The Left Behind Code for Women Who Dish
that sustain publishers and yet you’d probably pay not to read