I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

STYLE: Are you thinking about suicide? MYSTERY: Yes. STYLE: How would you do it? MYSTERY: Drowning, because it’s what I’m most afraid of. STYLE: What keeps you from doing it? MYSTERY: I have to give away all my stuff. I dropped Patricia’s computer and broke it. So I want to give her mine. She needs a computer. STYLE: Did she care? MYSTERY: No, not

Fear, vanity and selfishness make people do terrible things to each other. For thousands of years these have been the engines of stories. But there was no discernible arc to this particular one; Susie would have to be a good writer to make it fill two hundred pages. ‘Is this something you would really like to write about?’ I asked. ‘It depends on w

She’d become worried that it was her father’s attention that kept her intact, kept her Sylvie, and she felt great sympathy now for her brother-in-law. Sylvie had been feeling this way for only a month, and it was terrible. The size of this manuscript, and the effort in its pages, showed that William had been in this place for a long time.

“What’d she do to you?” I pause, searching for words to describe how Diana lit the tinder that destroyed my career. My life. “She turned me into a traitor,” I say. The truth is far more complicated, but when you live in a world of mirrors, the truth is always distorted. Too often, it’s what we choose to see while ignoring all the inconvenient bits,