Writers always need to beware of revealing more about their private lives and thoughts while thinking they are revealing something about a public issue. A case in point:
Here’s some advice for married men who will turn 62 this year: If you want to make up for all the times you came home with beer on your breath, left your socks on the bathroom floor or gave your wife a DustBuster for Valentine’s Day, hold off on filing for your Social Security benefits.
(On the other hand, people don’t read boring columns. So maybe the writer is just being savvy.)
I don’t know…the dirty socks and Dustbuster-gift seem almost too cliche to assume she was digging up material from her own life. Now if she’d started her piece with something a little more off the wall, I might wonder.
For example: “If you want to make up for the time you gambled with (and lost) that chunk of money you and your wife had been saving for a special trip to Italy, so that you had to vacation instead at your brother-in-law’s run-down, smelly beach house, then…”
(And no–the above never happened to me! Though I do hate the beach.)