Is to throw together events from my own life, fictionalizing to add color—it’s a pot boiler really, but I think it will show how isolated a person feels when he is suffering a breakdown . . . I’ve tried to picture my world and the people in it as seen through the distorting lens of a bell jar.

Then I thought, "No, I broke it myself. I broke it on purpose to pay myself back for being such a heel.

A little thing, like children putting flowers in my hair, can fill up the widening cracks in my self-assurance like soothing lanolin.

I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have.

But when I took up my pen, my hand made big, jerky letters like those of a child, and the lines sloped down the page from left to right horizontally, as if they were loops of string lying on the paper, and someone had come along and blown them askew.

…beating time along the edge of thought.

Can a selfish egocentric jealous and unimaginative female write a damn thing worthwhile?