boombaard’s Reviews > Kiss & Tell > Status Update

“Love of travel? What did this hope to tell us about them? Doesn't everyone love travel if it's to a nice destination, the plane lands on time, the suitcases don't get lost and the exchange rate is favourable? But on the other hand, who doesn't hate travel when it involves a forced march across enemy territory, arrival coincides with a general strike, the moules marinières at the harbour restaurant breed food pois..”

Men and women chapter about whether one can have full empathy if you haven’t experienced it (the author, a man, doesn’t understand why his subject, a woman, spends so much time in the bathroom doing facial care).

Another quote from next chapter Psychology: “The diary is an alarming item because it threatens to be a repository of another’s most unlovable thoughts.”

The brutal way an adult treated the teenager, a brutality made possible by a sense of radical separation, showed how a single person was really a succession of different people crowded within a deceptively continuous body.

[I]f the purpose of biographies is to understand how people experience their lives, the dead biography misses out on an important feature — that we rarely approach our story with the certainties so easily fastened to lives when they are over.

“Ironically, we gain the security to discover faults in others as a consequence of the very strength these faulty characters have been generous enough to grant us.”

I began to wonder if one might arrange the part not according to the familiar chronology but by pioneering the use of the Proustian moment, following the triggers of smells, touch sounds and sight around which the scenes of as life are crystallized.

“I’m suspicious of great minds who don’t like little details — they’re pedants.” Ximenes Doudan quote.