Albert Entwhistle has had the same routine for years: he goes to work, making his rounds as the village postman while carefully avoids any prolonged conversation, and then he goes home to spend the evening watching TV with his cat Gracie, whose company offers the only bits of light in an otherwise colorless life. But things are about to change: Albert is only a few months from mandatory retirement, and Gracie is dying of cancer. As the rug is about to be pulled from under him, Albert must be ‘up and doing’ — and soon finds himself connecting to his coworkers, his neighbors, and a man he left behind decades ago — himself, before he shut himself up to the world and began dying that slow death of loneliness. The Secret Life is a story of a man waking up to himself and deciding to “color in” the black and white lines of himself before it’s too late.

This was on Kindle Unlimited, so I snapped it up from the basic premise alone, not realizing there was another and extremely important dimension to the story: the reason Albert is the man he is, a man who avoids society and sticks to the safe and prescribed, is because he’s a man attracted to other men, and grew up in a time when that was grounds for being not only constantly harrassed and beaten, but arrested by the police. He hides who he is from everyone, including himself, retreating into a safe cocoon of TV and cat-petting. As his safety net is unraveling, though, Albert takes stock of his life and realizes what a waste it’s been — and begins reaching out. He is especially haunted by having failed to be courageous in his youth, and subsequently having destroyed a relationship he regards as the love of his life. In ways, this book is somwhat like A Man Called Ove or The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Frye, in that we have an older man trapped in his routines and cautious personality suddenly having to ‘go forth in life’ (as Marley put it to Scrooge), despite the threats of potential rejection. Cain wrote this explicitly as a coming-out story, though, so there’s a lot of emphasis on Albert coming to terms with his own identity and then being bold enough to reveal it to those around him. It’s not all about him, though, because in opening himself to others, he finds others opening their lives to him, and becoming part of their stories: he becomes a mentor to a young woman who is struggling in her own relationship, for instance, and her story has parallels to his in that she thinks her boyfriend is ashamed of her for being a mixed-race single mom and wonders if she should just cut bait and run rather than take the risk of being hurt.

Although I could’ve done with less politics (Cain frequently works in allusions with no relation to Albert’s story), my taste for “curmudgeon regains humanity” stories made this a sweet, surprising read for me. I liked that Cain included interviews with men of Albert’s generation to show how Albert’s experiences aligned with reality.

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He really didn’t understand why he now needed three remote controls, a mobile phone, and a consistent Wi-Fi signal just to watch TV. Is that supposed to be progress?

But then he caught sight of himself in the mirror and stopped. There was no denying that, with his personality-free clothes and short-back-and-sides haircut, anyone who saw him would think he was dull and boring. He looked like the kind of man people would call a “drink of water.” But he didn’t feel like that inside; inside he felt like he was a whole bundle of fun. Or at least I would be, if I could only work out a way of getting the fun out of me.

“But don’t you think it sounds a bit daft?” he argues.
“Oh, so what if it is?” says George. “There are worse things in life than sounding a bit daft.”

Albert could see now that for decades he’d been loosely holding on to an empty, gray life. But today was a new day. As of today, he wanted to take his life in both hands and squeeze it tightly, to get everything he could out of it while he still could. And he was ready to make whatever changes were necessary for this to happen, however difficult they might be.