A true story having something to do with Jane Austen's perennial appeal

Every year my neighbourhood has a community garage sale. It's very popular because I live in an upper middle class neighbourhood and there is a popular delusion that upper middle class people often put valuable items such as antiques out for sale having no idea what they are really worth. This either never or almost never happens but thousands of people come every year anyway.

It's a fascinating experience from an economic perspective because you get to see how much some products depreciate. Every year there are piles of things left at the end of the day that no one will buy at any price. They get left at the end of each driveway with a little sign that says "free" on them—things that people spent money on that are now quite literally worthless. For example

• Non-fiction books, doesn't matter what they're about, no one wants them. You could heat your house by burning old Malcolm Gladwell books from my neighbourhood alone.
• Novels that get assigned to high school and university students: anything by Nabokov, Joyce, Faulkner, James, Shields, Davies, Atwood, &c. It doesn't matter what critics say, the market says these novels have no value.
• Electronics, computers (and computer manuals), game systems, any television that isn't flat screen. It doesn't make any difference at all that it works and it doesn't make any difference that you only bought it six months ago, the market says it has depreciated 100 percent.
• Any piece of Ikea furniture.
• Sports and fitness equipment—especially skis and golf clubs—is worth nothing at all.
• Appliances
  

Of course, there is a markdown because it's a garage sale. Put the same stuff in a store with a reputation to maintain and some of it would acquire some value. Even at that, though, it wouldn't acquire a lot of value. In any case, a famous book shouldn't need a vendor's guarantee—the critical reputation should be enough.

Sometimes you see entire lives out on the front lawn. Exercise trends, food trends, health trends, sexual trends, spiritual trends, intellectual trends—it's all there at giveaway prices. And seeing this stuff what hits you is not just the money invested but the blood, sweat and tears—parts of people's lives down the drain. You could learn a lot about what not to invest in walking around my neighbourhood on garage-sale day.

Oh yeah, before I leave off. There was a really sad one two blocks over last year. Everybody was gone and there was nothing but these little piles with signs saying "free". This one house had about six banker's boxes with books in them. As the dog went along deciding whether or not to pee on each box, I looked at the contents. They fell into groups. Some boxes had been used to group all the feminist texts: The Hite Report, Rape, the Bait and the Trap, Backlash &c. Others had self help books and books about negotiating, getting to yes and getting along as well as a couple of the Mars and Venus books. The last group had a bunch of new-agey texts like Goddess in Everywoman, The Spiral Dance along with books about vegetarianism and Yoga.

Most notably, some of the self-help books had titles like Creative Divorce, Rebuilding Workbook, and Divorce and Your Teenager. That didn't surprise me because I knew the story that went with the house and the people who lived there. The woman had spent two years trying to convince her husband to see a therapist. It didn't seem to matter what kind of therapist. At first, she pushed for them to go to a marriage therapist together. He asked if she was unhappy with the marriage and she said she was happy but she didn't think he was. He insisted that he was happy as well, so why see a marriage therapist? After that she pushed for other kinds of therapy.

I know this because she told me as it was going on. I'd meet her while walking the dog and she'd let these things drop. I got the sense that she needed to talk to someone about it and a relative stranger was easier than anyone who knew her well. Once she'd let a couple of thing slip and seen that I wasn't going to object, it was easy for her to pick up on the subject next time I saw her. That sort of thing happens to me quite a bit. I must have the sort of face or something. Maybe I just put up with crap other people won't in order to have conversations with attractive women.

She kept telling him he wasn't happy and he kept insisting that he was. "It's so obvious he isn't happy, I can see why he won't admit even to himself," she told me. In any case, he eventually gave in and agreed to see a therapist so that he could determine what it was that had his wife so convinced that he was unhappy even though he didn't think he was unhappy.

One day as the dog and I made the last turn about the block before going to bed I found her sitting on some of the play equipment in the park in the dark crying because she didn't want to cry at home in front of her kids. After six months of therapy her husband had told her he wanted out of the marriage. Talking to the therapist, he'd decided that the happiest time in his life had been before he was married and he wanted to go back to that lifestyle again. Told her he wanted out is understating it actually—they had the discussion while he was packing his stuff into the car. The net effect of the therapy she had so badly wanted him to do had been to convince him that his marriage was worth nothing to him.

A few years had gone by since that happened before the books appeared on the lawn. He has a new girlfriend now and they are living together in a downtown condo. The girlfriend is only ten years older than his youngest child. The woman tried dating too and she went through a succession of boyfriends but lately seems to have given up on the idea of meeting anyone she can have another serious relationship with. I suppose one day she found herself looking at bookshelves full of the books she'd been reading since university—books that once seemed to say a lot about what mattered in life—and decided that there was no reason to believe she'd ever want to look into any of them again.

It was kind of funny in that way that really sad stories sometimes are. Standing in front of the boxes I picked up a few of the books and while leafing through them saw that passages were underlined and comments were written in the margins. It occurred to me that you could take all the boxes home and get to know an awful lot more about this woman than she ought to be revealing. I briefly thought about quietly suggesting that maybe she should just trash the books but couldn't think of a way to put it that wouldn't do precisely the sort of damage the advice would be meant to avoid.

And, then again, are our secrets really that secret? We all imagine that our inner lives really are intimate secrets but any reasonably observant person can read this stuff right off of our facial expressions, our unguarded remarks and our too closely guarded remarks, the spines of the books on our shelves and from what we sell at the garage sale.