Recently, I experienced the frisson of seeing myself three times in fiction in one week: putting kissing first, desiring to escape my natal state, and rolling in the first big money I ever made. Since everything is about me, I wrote an essay about that. I think the essay, should you read it, will bring you the same frisson, except from non-fiction.

Perhaps it is true that good fiction reflects universal experience. I’d like to think my songs (schindler.org/b4) reflect life. For example, just recently, I realized my 20-year-old song you affect me was true because a loved one’s proximity releases endorphins.

Twice I appeared in short stories by the marvelous writer Curtis Sittenfeld. A woman says she has been married for 25 years to a man whose kissing style she doesn’t like. I realized that couldn’t happen to me, because my checklist had boiled down to a handful of requirements by the time I met my wife of 45 years. She had to be smart (like all my lovers), tall (I worked my way up to that; each was taller than the one before) and I had to love the way she kissed.

Women whose kissing I disliked didn’t make it past the moment I discovered that.

Another moment of recognition came when a Sittenfeld character said “I didn’t want to be one of those people who only ever lived in Minnesota.” I did not know that was something anyone else ever thought (although I should have known). By the time I was 18 in Portland, Ore., I had met a number of adults who were born there, went to the U and spent their life there. Many had never been east of Idaho.

That life was not for me. I shook the dust of that one-horse state off my boots and only lived there 14 more months since. Portland is a wonderful place; just not the only wonderful place. Five years in Boston, four score trips to New York and most of my life near San Francisco; I met that goal.

In the Britbox show Joan, when she takes the money from her first big score, cashes it out in small bills and rolls around in it, I also saw myself. Again, I didn’t know that was a thing. At age 14, I picked cherries on my grandparents’ farm. At the end of the first week, I got a check for $100 (about $2.50 an hour for piecework; more than minimum wage then. That’s $26.00 inflated. The minimum wage sure as hell hasn’t kept up with inflation). I cashed the check in $1 bills, which I rolled around in. My frugal Swiss grandmother thought it was crazy for several reasons; mostly for the chance that I’d lose a bill or two.

In retrospect, I wish I’d gotten a pile of 80 $100 bills (1 month’s income) and rolled around in it the day my salary hit $100,000 per annum. (As out turned out, that salary made me a layoff target, but the rolling would have made me feel better about it).

If you read or watch fiction at all, I’d be surprised you hadn’t seen yourself—sometimes quite precisely.

Of course, everything reminds me of me. I don’t think I am a narcissist; that is a particular pathology, and the DSM says I don’t exhibit enough symptoms for a diagnosis. But as two women in college told me (and no one else since) I am self-centered. In particular SG (who tells me she doesn’t remember it) called me “ceaselessly self-promotional.”
I can only assume I haven’t heard it since because people in the real world realize I am only a minor leaguer in that regard.