Status Updates From Kiss & Tell

“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.

She was Born out of a marriage wedlock and the mom was actually in love with someone else and tried to make him jealous (it didn’t work).

And maybe the person that reads this review is the one who picked it up from my stoop. Or not. Either way, I hope you’ll get out of this book what you want.

And so it was for me with this book that I wanted to give it away to a stoop and random passerby before reading it. But then.. put it aside and read it after all before giving it back to the street again.

And I’m loving it already.

..my own bookshelves and I came across this one.

In the book, the narrator describes how he is in a bookshop, not feeling great about being called unempathic, and he a accidentally bumps into a biography of Wittgenstein that is being praised for the author being so empathic. The narrator writes a bit more about this: just chance and you’re more alert for the word or something higher. Either way, it’s there.

I picked this book up years ago from someone’s stoop, one of those boxes with things to take for free. Maybe they were moving out, or just cleaning out and making space.

Anyway, I recognized the name Alain de Botton; I had seen him being cited in philosophy related TV shows I had watched, but I had never read a thing of him. So I decided to take this book home.

About five years later, I was cleaning up my own..