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.

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

Long live whores.

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?

eat as much as one can until night, and the next day, at the first light, renew the fast: black coffee and nothing else. She does not know she has succumbed to the saddest of all passions, the passion for food, object of an unremitting, repressed desire that can only be fulfilled through excess and shame.

By forcing me to think, repeat and write, over and over, that other people must not serve as a means but an end, and that we are rational beings, ergo unconsciousness and fatalism are degrading, philosophy has done away with my desire to flirt.’

Bulimia – an obscenity, that unmentionable pleasure which manufactures fat and excrement to be eliminated, and blood that does not flow. I put a name to that monstrous, desperate form of wanting to live at any price, even that of self-disgust and guilt.

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

The girl of ’58 does not take offence. She even looks amused, accustomed to this mocking aggressiveness with herself as its object.