This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It - Softcover

Carvan, Tabitha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593421914 ISBN 13: 9780593421918

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

Why We Can’t Sleep meets Furiously Happy in this hilarious, heartfelt memoir about one woman’s midlife obsession with Benedict Cumberbatch, and the liberating power of reclaiming our passions as we age, whatever they may be. 

Tabitha Carvan was a new mother, at home with two young children, when she fell for the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. You know the guy: strange name, alien face, made Sherlock so sexy that it became one of the most streamed shows in the world? The force of her fixation took everyone—especially Carvan herself—by surprise. But what she slowly realized was that her preoccupation was not about Benedict Cumberbatch at all, as dashing as he might be. It was about finally feeling passionate about something, anything, again at a point in her life when she had lost touch with her own identity and sense of self.
 
In This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, Carvan explores what happens to women's desires after we leave adolescence…and why the space in our lives for pure, unadulterated joy is squeezed ever smaller as we age. She shines a light onto the hidden corners of fandom, from the passion of the online communities to the profound real-world connections forged between Cumberbatch devotees. But more importantly, she asks: what happens if we simply decide to follow our interests like we used to—unabashedly, audaciously, shamelessly? After all, Carvan realizes, there’s true, untapped power in finding your “thing” (even if that thing happens to be a  British-born Marvel superhero) and loving it like your life depends on it.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tabitha Carvan has written for publications such as The New York Post, Australian Geographic, Overland, Offbeat Home, The Outline, AsiaLIFE, and MamaMia, focusing on issues of identity, family, and pop culture. This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch is her first book.
 

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chapter one

this is a chapter about mothers


"Ooh, you won't know what's hit you."

The thing about Benedict Cumberbatch is he's ready when you are. He's a gentleman. After you; ladies first.

While it's uncomfortable for me to admit it, Benedict Cumberbatch was standing there holding the door open for me for a very long time. It's not that I didn't notice him, because I absolutely did. During the height of global Cumbermania, c. 2012-2014, it was impossible not to. His strange name. His strange face. Sherlock was one of the most watched shows in the world. I remember a phone conversation with my mother, who said Benedict Cumberbatch looked like the underside of a stingray.

Along with his dark, Byronic Sherlock Holmes, he was a jowly blond Yorkshireman in the Tom Stoppard miniseries Parade's End; a ginger, secret homosexual with ready access to a hair straightener in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; a hapless-but singing!-Oklahoman in August: Osage County; the "nice" slave owner in 12 Years a Slave; the "bad" guy in Star Trek Into Darkness; Alan Turing in The Imitation Game; Julian Assange (I shit you not) in The Fifth Estate; and Smaug, a dragon, in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. He famously mispronounced "penguin" as pengwing and it went viral; he photobombed U2 at the Oscars and that went viral; he inspired the creation of the online Benedict Cumberbatch Name Generator (Benadryl Cuckooclock, Bentobox Cuttlefish, Burgerking Scratchnsniff . . . honestly, this should just be the rest of the book) and even that went viral. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine's "Genius Issue"; there was a poem about him in the London Review of Books; he even featured in a New Yorker cartoon-a pregnant woman is receiving an ultrasound that reveals a cheerful man smiling away in her womb. "Oh, don't worry," the sonographer says. "That's Benedict Cumberbatch. He's in everything." And during all of this, the extent of my thoughts on Benedict Cumberbatch was Oh, that guy again? In every role he somehow appeared to be a completely different person, clearing all the data I'd been collecting on what he actually looked like. Every camera angle would reveal a new, planed surface of him, which I could never compose into a whole.

Now, I discuss with other people-many people, many times-their favorite Benedict Cumberbatch parts. Not the parts he plays, you understand. His actual parts. There are the cheekbones (obviously), the nape of his neck, the Cupid's bow of his lip. One woman tells me it's very difficult for her to choose only one and considers her answer for a very long time. She says she believes she could recognize Benedict Cumberbatch from any disembodied fragment of him, "although I might struggle with his ears." I have done an online quiz where you match screenshots of Benedict Cumberbatch's hair with the Sherlock episode it appears in, so I could probably do this too. Finally, she settles on her favorite part: the gap between his thumb and forefinger. Ah yes, I say, nodding. That's a really good bit. I know it well.

Benedict Cumberbatch could bring his thumb and forefinger together to show you how small it was, the moment in time that tipped me over from when I couldn't look at him properly to when I couldn't stop looking. Somewhere in that beautiful gap, something changed. He'd been waiting for that moment, uncomplaining, of course, until I was ready. He held the door open, and I walked through. Maybe I brushed against him as I passed. Why not? He's got lots of great parts, after all, and you can do what you want in a metaphor.

But this is what that moment actually looked like: Benedict Cumberbatch is wearing a top hat and pulling on a leather glove. He is in an advertisement for the Victorian-themed Sherlock special. The advertisement is in a newspaper, which is lying open on a table in a café, which is where I'm waiting for my takeout coffee. I am drinking coffee because, for the first time in one thousand years, I am neither pregnant nor breastfeeding. I see the ad and I experience a surprising feeling of yearning. I look at that picture, into those eyes that are too far apart on Benedict Cumberbatch's head and yet somehow also perfect, and I think, Yeah, I reckon I'd like to watch that show.

I'm sorry this story about such a momentous occasion is so boring, but that's motherhood.

***

Throughout my twenties and into my thirties, I moved from city to city a fair bit, and wherever I happened to be living, I'd start a blog about it. You need real commitment to get anywhere as a writer, so I was the perfect blogger. I kept a blog about living and studying in Paris when the internet was so new that what I actually had was a "web-log." Then "blog" became a real word, and I wrote one of those, about living in the boho inner west of Sydney. I published it anonymously, and successfully so-when a local newspaper ran a story about it, they assumed the author was a man, and I couldn't have been more pleased. Then I moved to Hanoi for my job and blogged about that, because "blog" was a verb now.

This was where I was living when Benedict Cumberbatch worked his way into the periphery of my consciousness via the debut season of Sherlock. The only way for me to watch the show in Vietnam was to buy pirated DVDs from a dusty little shop in the Old Quarter. They had a binder full of DVD covers that you pointed to, as if choosing from a menu, although this was a menu for burning, not cooking. I ordered Sherlock and it was served up in a flimsy plastic sleeve.

This was exactly the kind of experience I blogged about, the perspective of the foreigner, for whom even buying a DVD is novel. It made the everyday seem exciting, and people liked it. My blog posts started being republished in newspapers and magazines across Asia and Australia, so I churned out more and more material. Every encounter I had was mined for noteworthiness, and every fleeting incident had inference potential, a broader meaning I could attach my opinion to. I had a lot of opinions.

Then my partner, Nathan, and I got married, I got pregnant, and we moved to Australia's capital, Canberra, for Nathan's job. Nobody wants to read a blog about Canberra, notable only for being neither Sydney nor Melbourne, and located inconveniently in the expanse of country between the two. And besides, I was busy. On my son's birth certificate, it was extremely optimistic of me to declare my profession as "writer." When I did the same thing on my daughter's birth certificate less than two years later, it was straight-up fiction. Which is a kind of writing, I guess?

The dates delineating the cultural phenomenon of Cumbermania-2012 and 2014-are also the years my children were born. Such a short time for a mania, but such a long period of my life. The rest of the world was preoccupied with Benedict Cumberbatch, but I was just preoccupied. There were so many babies, and so many years, and I gave Benedict Cumberbatch as much of my attention as I could spare, which was none. I had nothing to say about him. I had nothing in particular to say about anything. I knew the nap times and feeding times of the children. I knew what was on special at the supermarket. I watched my kids watch birds outside our window. I drank half cups of cold tea. I told my husband stories about what I bought at the supermarket. Pretty good deal on hummus. I had nothing to say about the city I lived in. It seemed fine. The everyday was every day. I drew no inferences.

When you're about to become a mother, people tell you, all the time, "Ooh, you won't know what's hit you!" That makes it sound exciting. I entered motherhood in the brace position waiting for the dramatic crash-landing, one where we'd...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593421914
• ISBN 13: 9780593421918
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland