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.

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.

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

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

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 demolish

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’.

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.’

Everywhere on earth, with every day that dawns, a woman stands surrounded by men ready to throw stones at her.

despair at the fall from grace, a decision to diet for the whole next week in order to purge every last morsel of the vast quantity of food consumed in half an hour. To deliver myself of the burden of my wrongs.