Luscious Literature Books you haven’t read—yet

By Elizabeth Adler
Collegian Editor
April 9, 2008

This Week’s Book: Things I Overheard While Talking To Myself by Alan Alda

Imagine a writer so versatile that he can write and give speeches to Thomas Jefferson scholars, college graduates, scientists, doctors, authors and actors. You don’t have to imagine anyone too over-the-top. Alan Alda does all of this, and documents it in Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself, his follow-up to 2005’s Never Have Your Dog Stuffed. While recovering from emergency intestinal surgery in Chile, in which he narrowly escaped death, Alda decided that he needed to re-examine life, and find out how to make the most out of the time he had left. But it is really not how long you have left that matters—it is what you do with your time.

Alda is searching for the meaning in life, and what exactly it means to live a good life. Instead of looking to what others have written and discovered in their quests for the unknown, Alda searches for answers inside of himself, and reflects on his own life experiences to draw conclusions about what life is and how it should be lived.

Using the retrospect possessed only by someone who is chock-full of experiences, Alda reviews his own speeches. Each speech that he recounts references an important story in his life, whether it helped to shape his personality, or taught him an important lesson. These lessons may be ones that you’ve heard of before, like don’t over- think things and forget to have fun, but the way in which Alda presents them is distinctively his own because he uses the odd experiences that fame has given him to prove why he is advocating each lesson.

Reading Things I Overheard feels almost like watching a director’s commentary featurette on a DVD. Alda starts by putting the reader in the context of the situation where he was to give a speech. Background information is given in regard to why he has to speak, like it is his daughter’s college graduation, and to whom he must speak, such as the Thomas Jefferson scholars, and how he feels about what he has to do, like speak before a group of scientists when he knows nothing about science. But he does not just give all of the information and then include the entire speech at the end of the chapter. He interjects comments between sections of the speech. Sometimes he adds what he should have said, or critiques himself based on things he has learned since he originally gave the speech. The book works because of this system. Alda knows when and where to comment on his writing and his comments are always insightful and profound because of their straightforward and sincere nature. It is easy to see the same mix of comedy and drama that Alda gave to M*A*S*H in Things I Overheard

While the insightfulness and introspection never wane, the tone does drop from light and funny to heavy and deep. Alda details a commencement speech he gave to Cal Tech graduates one chapter, then moves directly to a eulogy he gave for Ossie Davis in the next. This varying tone made Things I Overheard a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, but almost every memory that he describes is tender, and it is this overwhelming sense of authentic tenderness and affection that ties Alda’s stories together.

While some might think that Alda’s compilation of speeches and anecdotes are self-indulgent and self-centered, it really shows his wealth of knowledge and advice he wants to share with as many people as possible. “Don’t go looking for meaning … I have the distinct suspicion now that there is no hidden meaning to life …Whenever I’ve wanted some meaning, I’ve had to make it myself.” It took a near-death experience to motivate Alda to discover as much about truth and meaning in life as he could. He wants people to know that they don’t have to go through what he did in order to want to get the most out of life.

adlere1@lasalle.edu