The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

If you’ve ever had the misfortune to be written about, you know what I mean.

But, looking back now, I see that your own life can be a story you tell yourself, that you can be both the person reading and the thing being read.

how confident a man must be to write down his own musings, expecting anybody else to be interested in reading them.

Not to remind myself happiness was still possible, but to remind myself that anger was.

Some men, if you say something clever to them, always believe it is their own trick.

But now I know how small the space can be, between being afraid of a thing and wanting it.

‘Thinking is so much better than living,’

the surest way to hide your sins is to write your own account.

There’s still hope, until a thing happens, that it could happen a different way. But then it happens and it is nothing but memory.

Because life boils down to nothing, in spite of all the fuss, yet novels make it possible to believe it is something, after all.