Anyway, in the story, the woman is very much alone, and, just as I was doing then, she compulsively reads everything she can get her hands on. Though she reads more methodically than I, moving from genre to genre. Like Goldilocks with the porridges, although nothing satiates; nothing breaches the seclusion. Just when she feels she’s reached the nadir of her loneliness, she turns to reading memoirs. It was one of my finer moments when I discovered that no human life escapes the tribulation of solitude, she says. Other souls had suffered such extremes of separation and abandon, and in their wit
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