A Cabaret, My Friends
People often use similes that compare life to fiction. Usually, however, it is not framed as a negation, but an affirmation. The phrasing here is admittedly a little weird, but the sentiment is easily understood and almost universally accepted:
“Life is not unlike cinema. Each scene has its own music, and the music is created for the scene, woven to it in ways we do not understand. No matter how much we may love the melody of a bygone day or imagine the song of a future one, we must dance within the music of today, or we will always be out of step, stumbling around in something that doesn’t suit the moment.”
The Privilege of the Last to Know
One of the markers of the super-elite among us who enjoy a type of special privilege out of reach even for winners of the record-breaking lotto jackpots is the inevitable and predictable response to being literally the last to recognize how privileged they have been. To the 99%, it is inconceivable that one could actually have to endure a public shaming of the privilege they have enjoyed in order to finally realize that they enjoyed a life that was anything particularly special. Avery Judith Stafford never feels more like a real person than when that moment finally hits and, finally, she realizes that becoming a Senator isn’t an entitlement that comes with sharing the same last name as the previous occupant of that seat.
“Guilt stains this realization of mine. I think of all the privileges I’ve been given, including a Senate seat practically prepackaged for me.”
Figurative or Literal?
Less so with straight-up metaphors, similes can sometimes stamp a metaphorical imprint upon a description of something that might actually strike a reader more literally. The use of language here usually reserved for the literary device of the simile may be perceived by some readers as entirely literal. It is certainly a reasonable reaction to the discovery an adult that your mother has a twin:
“`My God.’ He shakes his head as if he’s trying to rearrange the thoughts there, to put them in some workable order. `My mother has a twin?’”
A Surplus of Metaphor
Judy’s appointment book becomes for Avery a metaphor for the desperate desire to exert control over one’s life even in the face of all the random stuff which serves to detail the most carefully cultivated of appointment-keeping. Almost as if this full acceptance—not really a realization, but more an embrace of the realization—is overwhelming her senses, everything she writes suddenly seems to transform into metaphorical imagery, as if there is no way to literally describe the experience:
“I leaf through more pages, wondering, remembering, thinking about this watershed year. Life can turn on a dime. The appointment book reinforces my new awareness of this. We plan our days, but we don’t control them.”
“Mother of Modern Adoption”
The villain of this story is real life historical figure. At one time she occupied such a place of high esteem in America that she became one of those rare few worthy of being honored with the conferring of a metaphorical nickname. Then came the fall:
“consulted by the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt in efforts to reform adoption policies in the United States, Georgia Tann did, indeed, facilitate the adoptions of thousands of children from the 1920s through 1950. She also guided a network that, under her watch, allowed or intentionally caused the deaths of as many as five hundred children and infants.”
