There are moments when it frightens us, threatening to expose us as inauthentic. Well, the big-time impostors we read about in literature run this risk constantly, flirting with destruction, not just humiliation or embarrassment. It's a spectacle that we can't help but find compelling, and it involves a certain level of courage that we sneakily admire, perhaps.

Quiet cunning bested boastful brawn

Just breathing can be such a luxury sometimes.

Love is a powerful painkiller.

The best anti-depressant pill for me would be one the size of a house so you could drop it on me and put me out of my misery.

I disagree that Blood Will Out is a memoir in the conventional sense. It's the story of a relationship, primarily, not an individual. The "me" in the book is a specialized version of me, the person who Clark manipulated and fooled. I could cover the same years of my life from an entirely different perspective in another book, by concentrating on my experience as a husband, say. But I was selective. I focused on my duping.

Memo to extreme partisans: If you can't bring yourselves to love your enemies, can you at least learn to hate your friends?