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Life Pointers: The Top Ten List You Can Take To The Bank

by Lynn Darling
Spring 2007

"Turning 40 cures pretty much everything."

Life Pointers: The Top Ten List You Can Take To The Bank

Expert: Lynn Darling
Strategy: Hindsight

In 1983, the Washington Post style writer Lynn Darling and her married boyfriend, Lee Lescaze, the newspaper’s assistant managing editor, decamped from D.C. after their affair became public. Their scandalous flight landed them in an awkward domesticity in New York City, followed by marriage in 1986, the loss of his son, and the birth of their daughter. Eleven years after Lescaze’s death from cancer, Darling presents Necessary Sins (Dial Press), an apologia addled by catastrophe, regret, lingering guilt, and, if you believe in it, sin. Darling, as an expert apparent in life lessons, told us what she wished she’d known then.

The Curse Of Being A Promising Child

1. As the daughter of hard-working second generation immigrant parents, I wish I’d known I didn’t have to be extraordinary.

2. I’m a slow learner despite being a “prodigy”.

3. There were all these women I looked up to—at Harvard, and then at the Post —who were just as terrified as I was. If I’d only known that.

Bad Behavior, And Related

4. Anti-establishment was a sacrament in the ’60s, but that kind of excessive behavior became a habit—a default, even—by the ’80s.

5. Guilt gets tired. I was interviewing an old friend at the Post while working on the book. “Lynn,” he said, “you’re the only one left on the planet who hasn’t forgiven you yet.” Forgive yourself early.

6. Fashions change. It would have been nice to know that there was something after wedge haircuts and cha cha heels, or that the future belonged to Yohji Yamamoto.

7. It’s best to embrace your inner self-loathing neurotic—she’s not going anywhere, so you might as well learn to live with her.

Getting Old

8. Perfection is a myth. Writing is like baseball—a hit every third time at bat is quite good.

9. Turning 40 cures pretty much everything.

10. Sometimes, the girl you think is fucking up your life turns out to be the one who saves it.