Explore the gulf between the stupefying reality of things that happen, at the moment they happen, and, years later, the strange unreality in which the things that happened are enveloped.

It is the absence of meaning in what one lives, at the moment one lives it, which multiplies the possibilities of writing.

We did not think of ourselves as delinquents, but simply as girls who were more intrepid and open-minded than others.

By wanting to return to the camp, I was not trying to feel anything in particular, I was still too young to have that sort of desire – and I had not yet read all of In Search of Lost Time. I was coming back to show how different I was from the girl of ’58, to assert my new identity – a bright and respectable student of literature, destined for the

What others believe about us is nothing compared to that which they do not know and gives them quite a start when they find out, who’d have thought…? I never would have guessed, etc.,

I don’t think it weighed on me unduly to maintain a zone of prohibition in our friendship. To do so, indeed, seems to me consistent with my desire to forget H, the summer camp at S, and the shame I had felt, since my year studying philosophy and reading the works of Simone de Beauvoir, at having been a ‘sex object’. We outdid each other in

To have received the key to understanding shame does not give one the power to erase it.

what about the shame of being madly in love and waiting for a man behind a door he did not open, being called totally deranged and a whore around the edges? Has The Second Sex cleansed me of all that, or on the other hand, completely submerged me?

do not know whether, in Simone de Beauvoir’s dramatic description of the loss of virginity, the girl sees her first night with H, or if she agrees with the statement ‘the first penetration is always a rape’.