The long biography of the Spanish writer Carmen Laforet reads like the scariest horror novel in the last third of the book. Laforet’s life is a warning to all of us who tend to be a little weird.
Laforet was always weird. But she married young, had a lot of children, wrote a weekly magazine column, and the structured nature of this lifestyle kept her from melting into a murky puddle of strangeness.
But when she got to my age, Laforet decided that she needed complete freedom to be her true self. She ditched the husband and the children, got rid of all scheduled writing obligations, and started prancing around Europe in hopes that this lifestyle was going to release her full creative potential.
What happened in reality was the exact opposite. Laforet never wrote anything again. Without the organizing presence of her busy family life, she didn’t know how to keep her weirdness in check. Soon enough, weirdness conquered every aspect of her life. She started dressing like a bag lady, hacked her hair off to achieve an “original” hairstyle, stopped eating anything except ice-cream, and progressively slipped into such eccentricity that people would get scared off.
The space formerly occupied by husband, children, obligations, daily routines and work became filled with weirdness. Laforet’s true self turned out to be that of a lazy liar with poor hygiene.
Reading about Laforet’s unraveling is scary. None of it needed to happen. If only she hadn’t believed in the myth of complete freedom and true self, she would have been able to have a normal, productive life, surrounded by family, and not tortured with loneliness, hunger, humiliation and weirdness in the last 30 years of her life.
Clarissa's Blog 
This reminds me of the people pushing universal basic income. As if being liberated from financial wants leads to something amazing. We will all unlock our unlimited potential! Instead of becoming lazy slobs with no structure who become depressed.
Amanda
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Exactly. Having to make a living is a great organizing principle for a human life.
I have a colleague who retired and almost immediately went downhill in every possible way. She couldn’t get dressed in the morning, developed a series of mysterious ailments that no doctor could diagnose, couldn’t make it to a lunch date with friends without getting confused and lost.
Then I offered her a job as a lecturer. A difficult schedule, low pay, etc. But she revived instantly. Started dressing fashionably, went back to using makeup, became chirpy and efficient. And her mysterious illnesses faded away. It’s an amazing transformation. Not everybody goes downhill after retirement but people who remain afloat are those who organize a busy life full of obligations for themselves after they stop working.
My father tried to retire once, and for the first time in his life became depressed. Then he went back to work and was magically cured. Yes, we all work for money but work is beneficial in many other ways, too.
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Maybe she had dementia.
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She did end up with Alzheimer’s but the weirdness I’m describing is from decades earlier.
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Sounds like she was suffering from some form of dementia. The question is why didn’t her family do anything about it.
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