“The self-consciousness gets in the way of offering much depth of personality to people—as a result, most friends I’ve made in the past eight or nine years are fairly casual. This grows lonely, and leaves me feeling idiotic. I just called, for example, a very dear (and demanding) friend in West Virginia, who wants an explanation for my not coming to visit her and her new baby. What to say? That I would have loved to make the trip but was busy staying out of mental hospital? It’s so humiliating—so degrading. If I knew I wouldn’t get caught, I’d love to lie about it—invent an acceptable cancer,
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