Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.
love had turned into "love affair" with a begining and an end.
An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it may contain less errors of fact than a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely.
Doing nothing, badly.
As long as nothing happens anything is possible.
It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.