If you have never seen the documentary by the Mayles Brothers, Grey Gardens, about Edith "Big Edie" Ewing Bouvier Beale and her daughter Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale  the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, you should. The two women lived together at Grey Gardens in squalor and almost total isolation. It is not hard at all to see the anguish of "the road not taken" beneath the 'reality' luridness. Over at This Recording, Contributing Editor Georgia Hardstark ruminates

As I write this I’m sitting in my little apartment, listening to the whoosh of the Hollywood freeway outside my window, perfectly content with not seeing or talking to anyone for the rest of the night, hell, probably for the rest of the week.  Happy being in the company of my Siamese cat with whom I share little conversations with, cringing every time the phone rings, hoping that I won’t have to turn another friend down so that I could stay tucked away in my little corner of the world.  They’ll stop bothering to call eventually.

Grey Gardens scared me, because I could see a bit of myself in Little Edie.  When the photos of her as a young girl, an intensely beautiful girl, panned across the screen, I found myself willing that Edie from the past to run away.  What could she have been, had she realized her own potential and asserted herself as that “staunch woman” she assured us she was, the one who didn’t weaken, “no matter what”?  But a lot of nerve I have, ruminating over someone’s lost future while I whittle away the last of my twenties at a desk job that sucks the very soul out of me - and a writing career that I’m sure would materialize, if I had the chutzpah to devote more of my precious free time to it.  Was Edie scared of the same things I am?