Excerpts

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 get to go down those inflatable slides and then have a great survivor's story to tell. Maybe I would blog about it! But motherhood doesn't have a moment of impact. Instead, you're stuck in an interminable holding pattern, circling the airport and dumping fuel. And the in-flight entertainment is broken. It just goes on and on, tediously. I was praying for something to hit me, just to break up the monotony. Things I once thought insignificant now seemed to matter most of all. I could think only of what to make for dinner, of whether the weather was appropriate for drying two loads of washing or three, and it all mattered so much, because there was nothing else, just me and the dinners and the washing and the children. There was no time for anything else. No mental capacity. No emotional availability. No Benedict Cumberbatch. "Why don't you write anymore?" I would be asked. "Why don't you start a blog again?" Because I have no right. No authority. Nothing interesting. No opinions. No stories. "Nothing happens to me." That's what Dr. Watson tells his therapist in the opening minutes of the first episode of Sherlock when he's being encouraged to write a blog. And then the theme music starts so you know something is about to happen to him. Nothing happened to me. There was no theme music. It was so long since I'd listened to any music at all that our household had changed music-playing systems and I didn't even bother to find out how to operate the new one. I am writing this as if I knew what was going on, or was even reflecting upon it at the time, but that is all hindsight. Then, it was just one day after another, tolerable only for not questioning it. I read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to my children at bedtime, but I didn't even register anything of the conversation between Alice and the Caterpillar when she tells him she can't explain herself because she's not herself. I read that to my children, and I didn't scream and sob and tear out the page and say, This! I am not myself! and circle it madly using all the red pens I could find in the house. I said, "That's enough for tonight," and then I closed the book. I was in too many pieces to process such thoughts, or to attend wholly to them. Wholly!-an impossible idea. The cup of tea was not whole, the alphabet puzzle was not whole, the pelvic floor was not whole, the night was not whole, and I most of all, I was not whole. I never knew Kierkegaard was funny, but I think this is funny: "The greatest hazard of all, losing one's self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss--an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.--is sure to be noticed." I did not notice. I would catch my reflection in the mirror in the bathroom, where I went again and again to wash my hands after changing diapers. So used to gazing down at babies, I was shocked, every time, to discover there was another face up there. Our eyes would meet, and then I would finish drying my red, cracked hands and leave her behind, as if she were nothing at all. I guess it's not that funny. It might sound like I had postpartum depression. Later--much, much later--I would write about these years of my life in a story that was posted to an online parenting group. I watched as the group's mothers and mothers-to-be debated whether I was depressed. "Surely this is mental illness!" someone would comment, only to be matched by someone else commenting, "But this is just normal!" I witnessed my best friend go through terrible postpartum depression during the same period and by comparison, I saw I was absolutely fine. Functional, lucky. Happy, even. For the years I was either pregnant or breastfeeding, I was simply hostage to my chemistry, the hormones that kept me feeling permanently, steadily absorbed. They directed my focus to the children at the expense of all else. Like, you know, independent thought. A free spirit. It was not until the second baby was finally weaned, and I discovered that the brand of tampon I used for the last time four years previous had gone out of business, that I realized I had been in captivity. Well, I say "realized," but it was Benedict Cumberbatch who told me. When I was pregnant, I goaded my mother into talking about the pain of childbirth, and she told me a story that also involves mirrors. She said, matter-of-factly, that giving birth is so painful you feel you've been torn in two. "They should put mirrors in the labor ward," she advised, as if putting it in a suggestion box. "So you can see you've not been broken into pieces." I wondered later if my mother was recalling the pain of labor or actually everything that comes after, because later I understood that is exactly what motherhood is. The "shattering" is what the writer Sarah Manguso calls it in her Harper's essay about writing and mothering: the "disintegration of the self, after which the original form is quite gone." When the haze of hormones, chronic sleeplessness, and alcohol-free nights lifted, I finally knew what had hit me. I looked around for pieces of myself I recognized, and tried to put the component parts back together, but nothing fit the same way anymore. The original form was quite gone. The new composition I made in its place was rough-hewn, with exposed cracks and gaps. That's how Benedict Cumberbatch found a way in. He squeezed my heart, he rattled my bones, he tapped out a message in Morse code on my rib cage: Who are you? *** What came first: the chicken or the eggs Benedict? Correlation or causation; Sherlock Holmes would have something to say about that. Did something essential about Benedict Cumberbatch inspire my desire? Or did he just happen to be there when I was ready to feel it, a case of right place, right time, right top hat? I can only tell you that all of a sudden, a person IÕd seen one hundred times before looked different after one hundred and one. I can only say that feelings IÕd previously labeled as the malformed offcuts of adolescent development caught my eye from the discard pile, and they sparkled like new. Something lurched into motion in the pit of my belly, that churning, squeezing madness for more that leaves you in no doubt why they call it a "crush." Oh! I thought, remembering how it feels. And then, immediately, my next thought: It feels so good. I put the kids to bed, plonked myself on the couch, and watched the Victorian-themed special of Sherlock . I watched Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson solving a gothic mystery about a ghost bride. The game's afoot; elementary, my dear Watson; and so on. I watched all of that, but really what I did was ogle. And look, honestly, that doesn't fully capture what was going on, shall we say, internally . Columnist for The Times , Caitlin Moran, once drunk-tweeted while watching Sherlock that she would like to climb Benedict Cumberbatch "like a tree." "I would do him until Security pulled me off - then wank at him from behind a door." I was neither drunk, nor tweeting, and that is very much for the best. As soon as Sherlock finished, I wanted to watch it again. Again! What a waste of my time that would be! Radical thoughts for new mothers: you feel a feeling all of your own. Total subversion: you act on it, just because you want to. I watched that episode of Sherlock once more. Then I watched all the other episodes. Or, I should say, I watched them again , because I had actually seen them all before, but they were completely different now. Benedict Cumberbatch looked completely different. All the parts of his face fit together perfectly. Now, just the sight of his face would make my heart beat faster. Pulse: elevated; pupils: dilated. My lips would involuntarily bend into a smile when I thought about him. Like I'm smiling now, because that line about the pulse and the pupils is ripped straight from Sherlock , a scene where Benedict Cumberbatch might be at his absolute hottest. I would make excuses to talk about him, to read about him, to look at him, in exactly the same way I have done in the past for crushes, diverting my daily routine to "casually" pass by their house, always finding one more reason to get back in touch, to hit play again. I watched all of his interviews on YouTube. Then I watched everything, all of it, again. I watched him while the children napped. I conducted endless searches of him in Google images with one hand, while rolling toy cars around on the floor with the other. I listened to him on my phone, a background purr while making dinner. When the children were in bed, I made Nathan watch Benedict Cumberbatch's entire back catalogue, one night after the other, including an interminable movie where he plays William Pitt The Younger, and also a whole series set in the early 19th century where Benedict Cumberbatch is on a ship. There's one scene where you get to see his Cumberbottom. It was in South Africa, during the filming of that ship series, that Benedict Cumberbatch and two of his fellow actors were carjacked and (briefly) kidnapped. He discusses the incident repeatedly in interviews, always with the epilogue that afterwards he went skydiving, drove his motorbike faster, and felt more and differently alive. With the same spirit of adventure, I went out drinking. (It's like skydiving for mothers recently retired from breastfeeding.) I made the three-hour bus trip to Sydney alone--alone!--and went straight to a bar to meet a friend I've known for a long time. Excerpted from This Is Not a Book about Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends on It by Tabitha Carvan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.