Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself
Alan Alda
Random House
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6617-9
Non-Fiction, Memoir, Essays
Reviewed by Lee Gooden

“After Chile, I was on golden time. It was clear to me that everything I did was something I couldn’t have done if I’d checked out in LaSerena. Now at last, there was no pressure to succeed. There was nothing I needed to prove to anyone. There was only the chance to have another day and to have some kind of fun with it; trivial fun or deep fun, they were both good. I still wanted to get better at what I knew how to do, but that was just another kind of fun,”
-Alan Alda Never have Your Dog Stuffed
In 2005 Alan Alda’s best-selling memoir, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed was published. He wrote about his boyhood growing up with vaudevillian parents and his life time immersion and fascination in the sciences and the dramatic arts. Mr. Alda’s new book, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself is a continuation of his memoirs, starting where Never Have Your Dog Stuffed ended, Alda, had an end-to-end anastomosis, a life saving surgical procedure. In Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself Alda shares his philosophical and ethical ponderings of the lessons he has learned within his life experiences as a child, struggling actor, famous celebrity, amateur scientist, well-respected actor, writer, director, producer, and host and sought after public speaker.
Mr. Alda’s is well known for his humanistic quick-witted and glib character Doctor Benjamin Franklin Hawkeye Pierce in the beloved television series MASH. Like Hawkeye, Alda has a Will Rogers, Groucho Marx self-deprecating sense of humor that has been honed to a fine precision instrument by the passage of time. His love of life is contagious and his energy is awe inspiring. Any bitterness or negativity that seems to go hand and hand with being wealthy and famous today seems non-existent in Mr. Alda. He understands that life is a privilege and is over way too fast to give into self-indulgence or entropy. He writes, “When I was young, I noticed that the Greeks had asked what the Good Life was, and their question stuck in my mind...I came across different answers...There was a cacophony of opinion about what the good life was and what it was good for...I had a feeling the answer would come to me if I listened in on the things I’d been telling myself.”
Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself, is Mr. Alda’s revisitation of various speeches he has made over the years bridged with related and sometimes seemingly unrelated anecdotes. Alda doesn’t preach or become judgmental of others short-comings. He is more concerned with his own limitations and how to overcome them. He writes, “Terrifying myself, it turns out, is one of the ways I have of feeling alive. It gives me a sense of accomplishment to my life. Nothing feels as good to me as doing something I know how to do. But if I do it too many times, it feels easy and a little slick; it loses some of its pleasure. So I have to keep looking for things that are just a little harder. This produces a feeling that’s very close to accomplishment.”
Mr. Alda is a lifetime achiever and learner. His credentials are unprecedented in the performing arts and he is well respected in the scientific community as an individual that can bring an understanding of science and technology to the average person. He inspires the reader to want to learn, to stretch their minds and think beyond the arm chair, remote control and TV dinners. His energy borders on hyper drive and his mind works in leaps and bounds, but he has humility, and an easy accessibility and sense of humor that makes Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself exactly like having a conversation over a cup java with the brilliant man himself.