Status Updates From Faces in the Crowd

All novels lack something or someone. In this novel there's no one.

Everything is or should be fiction.

Wait, she leaves her drinks on bars while she goes out to smoke? I thought this was set in a relatively contemporary time.

“I harbored the secret hope, or rather, the secret certainty, that one day I would finally turn into myself; into the image of myself I’d been elaborating for years”

I need to generate a structure full of holes so that I can always find a place for myself

“Novels need a sustained breath. That’s what novelists want. No one knows exactly what it means but they all say: a sustained breath. I have a baby and a boy. They don’t let me breathe. Everything I write is—has to be—in short bursts. I’m short of breath.”

Nicely Bolanoesque; i wish i'd had time to finish it this weekend.

'I make them eat the whole [watermelon], shouting on our sweaters, because we've forgotten the special rugs their mother keeps for picnics. 'We can't eat anymore watermelon, Papa, we'll explode , they plead. 'Keep eating, nothing comes for free.'

My brain is breaking. I was ill-prepared for this book. My brain lacks sufficient compartments to stuff the excerpts into. Or maybe I lack sufficient thread to tie them together.

She's a pathological liar. More or less.

'It wasn't my habit to take things that didn't belong to me. Just sometimes, some things. Sometimes, quite a lot of things.'