While the second audience is always present,there is no way to verify whether a letter-writer has ever seen “their” dose of advice,much less taken it,unless they write back later with an update. Most don’t. The primary audience,the direct recipient of the columnist’s advice,is phantasmic,exists only in contingency. It’s a bit like being asked for directions by someone who immediately sprints away and disappears into a crowd. You can shout “It’s another block uptown and three more to the left” and hope for the best (maybe someone else in the crowd was heading to the same place,and can use the directions),but that’s about the extent of your reach.
Daniel M. Lavery’s Dear Prudence is a record of his five years as an agony aunt.
Smug self-righteousness,cocksuredness,and heavy-handedness are the besetting sins in such an environment. After all,if a hundred people came up to you in a single week asking for directions,by about the 30th,wouldn’t you start to think,“I must really know my way around this city”? How to treat the hundredth “I love my boyfriend,he’s fantastic,there’s just this one thing” framing with the unique attention it deserves,rather than lumping it in with the last 99? The temptation is to read trends into an individual life,which does no one much good. The goal is to provide a concise answer that never turns into a dismissive or reductive one.
And yet there are 15 more questions of similar urgency to answer for the Wednesday column,in four paragraphs or less,and one can’t respond to all of them with “Gosh,that sounds really complicated – tell me more.” The modern advice column is a product of the 20th-century newspaper,for good and for ill;snappy,digestible,easy to syndicate,replicate,and standardise. Write your local representative,call this hotline,go to therapy,ask for help,dump your boyfriend,talk to your friend,turn to page 5 to read more,tell your mother to knock it off,draw up a chore wheel,buy a longer leash.
Most of this is very good advice indeed! It just doesn’t happen to be very novel,or interesting. The trick then becomes to render something standardised into something personally significant,with at least an attempt at humility,without the air of a tired principal telling every student to get out of their office and do their homework.
Then again – one doesn’t agree to become an advice columnist because one thinks they give bad advice. “Of course this is a good idea,” I think to myself every time. “This is simply the most sensible course of action available.” Ideally,one finds a balance between confident direction – this is the way you ought to go,follow this path and do not depart from it,and you will grow in peace and understanding – and flexible humility – be prepared for this to fall apart at any moment,and willing to try something new.
Quite often people have written in because they have already lingered overlong with uncertainty,letting I dare not wait upon I dare,as Dante writes in the second canto of Inferno:
As one who unwills what he wills,will stay
Strong purposes with feeble second thoughts
Until he spells all his first zeal away —
So I hung back and balked on that dim coast
Till thinking had worn out my enterprise,
So stout at starting and so early lost.
[trans. John Ciardi,1954]
There is a powerful weapon in the advice columnist’s arsenal against overweening confidence,I ought to mention,and that is a lack of personal power. There is no real ability to follow up with someone unless they choose to send an update,no opportunity to ensure conformity to a prescription,no way to identify or compel anyone into a certain course of action,much as I might like to. I’m particularly reminded of the letter-writer who embedded a camera in her cat’s collar in order to monitor her houseguests,and who wrote to me angry over having caught a friend spying on her in return while reviewing the footage.
The advice I may have ended up giving most frequently was to people on the verge of breaking up with their partner.
Most advice-seekers don’t write to an advice columnist in hope of expanding their doubts or dwelling further in uncertainty – I don’t think I ever received a single letter beginning with “I’ve made too many firm resolutions. For the love of God,help me dither!”
I spent five years being paid to make a series of rapid-fire pronouncements about the conduct of strangers,so in some ways I’m uniquely unqualified to comment on whether people now are more likely to rush to judgment than they were 20 years ago. Based solely on the state of my inbox,I’m inclined to guess that people contend with roughly the same degree of doubt they ever have,but they’re slightly less comfortable with it than they might have been in an earlier era.
The advice I may have ended up giving most frequently was to people on the verge of breaking up with their partner,but who feared doing so because their partner was,on balance,“a good person”,to encourage them to make a firm decision without committing themselves to a referendum on someone else’s value.
So many letter-writers seem to suffer from the belief that if their boyfriend or girlfriend is generally kind,well-meaning,doesn’t shoot cats in the street for sport or chew broken glass bottles,that they,the letter-writers,are thereby obligated to date them for the rest of their lives,no matter what their own feelings might be about the matter,and that break-ups are only fair and legitimate if they are precipitated by an obvious,open trespass or betrayal. What a staggeringly difficult standard to live up to! To only be allowed to end a relationship over a fireable offence,never because of a desire to do something else – in such cases I’ve been very glad to counsel certainty and forward momentum.
At other times,and in more precipitate crises,I’ve hoped very much that my column has been the letter-writer’s first,most casual port of call,dashed off carelessly before they went out to seek additional advice from 10 spiritual leaders,14 close friends,nine school teachers,three level-headed aunts,and so on.
A bidet causing problems in a relationship prompted a letter to an agony aunt.iStock
Some of them are easy,like the woman whose boyfriend stopped buying toilet paper once she bought him a bidet,going so far as to offer her a “clean kitchen towel” when she mentioned she didn’t always care to use the bidet. There was only one thing to do in such a situation,where the letter-writer has,if nothing else,the dubious gift of clarity:Tell her to read her letter,and my answer,out loud to him,and if he did not immediately apologise and run out to buy a stock of toilet paper in bulk,to leave him and steal everything in his house that wasn’t nailed down.
That one,blessedly,I did receive an update on a few months later:he apologised,and bought the toilet paper. On the one hand,I was very happy for the both of them,and that he should have seen the error of his ways. But there’s another part of me that would rather have been right.
Daniel M. Lavery’sDear Prudence:Liberating Lessons from Slate.com’s beloved advice columnis out through Scribe,$29.99. He appears at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre on May 22 and 23,and The Sydney Writers Festival,May 24,25,26 and 28.
