nathan’s Reviews > Life of M > Status Update

The process had felt like a surrender to my own ugliness. It was the same ugliness in proximity to M that I had noted at the beginning, the ugliness of experience.

Living inside someone else had helped me, I said.

Perhaps reality had not yet been sufficiently falsified for its retrieval to seem worth it.

The interviewer asks her whether she thinks that she has power. She is a little disappointed with this question: it is what people always want to know. But then it seems that it might in fact be a different question. Is he asking whether she realises how truly powerless she is?

We men are generally afraid of anyone finding out that we were ever boys, he says. It wasn’t like that for girls, she says. If you didn’t start early you missed your chance.

It is as though we no longer love ourselves. Can it be true that work, in the end, has proved more lasting than love? Or is it that work, without us realising it, has somehow interfered with our capacity to love?

Like several other kinds of work ours involves performance. It involves doing something in the right way at the right time. It involves co-ordination. Where we know ourselves to be lucky is in the degree of individuality we are allowed – or expected – to bring to this performance. This permission or expectation is what we have earned.

.. people now are more self-aware. The writer appears to believe, as many people do, that selfishness is directly linked to talent, but M is not convinced of this. She is unable to see selfishness as anything other than the product of stupidity. It is true that even the most talented people can be stupid in this way. But in her heart she thinks the less of them.

It is the exaggeration of her identity that causes these occasional plunges into horror, as though she had inadvertently stepped into a vacuum that exists somewhere in herself. Patiently, step by step, she reminds herself who she is and how it is she came to be here. The future with its shifting ground is not her concern.

..the sight of her starts to register; people begin to see her, as though she were an image developing out of their own knowledge. She sometimes wonders whether it is she who needs this process to occur. The unimaginable strangeness of not being known, even if it is the violent half-knowledge of someone on the street looking at her..