重新為自己蓋房子。二十年的婚姻生活（離婚前）應藏自己的天份“just to keep the family together"。如何“創造一個沒有生活的角色”。Character: 個性和角色是同一個字。
作者如何找回自己生活的故事。小女兒去上大學，她開始要獨居的時候去了法國駐市，在蒙馬特聖心教堂旁。她一直在心裡想想有個海邊的房子（或是湖，或是一條小河），不停在心裡想想房子的模樣，和在現實裡為房子添購傢俱，包括一盆香蕉樹。書裡還去了印度、柏林和希臘。可以說成功的描寫了“沒有故事的生活”但仍然非常有意思。
之前是形容自己離婚後給自己在山坡上找了個小房子的故事，第二本藍色的是回憶自己的母親和南非的童年。
Doppelgänger - 雙胞胎：在路上遇見另一個自己你將會怎樣？
44
Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.
Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941)
99
It is very simple to be happy, but it is very difficult to be simple.
Tabindranath Tagore
178/79 Real Estate
'But if you don't mind me saying this,' he said, 'why do you need a bigger place if it's just you living alone most of the time in the London flat?' It was hard to explain that my flat was full of stuff I'd collected over the years for the unreal estate in my property portfolio. Lamps, rugs, curtains, chairs, a copper fondue pot I had picked up in a flea market in Paris, bed linen mirrors. There were at least three other homes inside my London home. (226 I was collecting things for a parallel life, or a life not yet lived, a life that was waiting to be made. In a way, these objects resembled the early drafts of a novel.)
290
You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise they're simply unbearable.
Marguerite Duras, Practicalities (1987)
17
（發現1999年別人送她的書裡面‘愛妳一千年’的字句）
The odd thing was that the book itself (by a famous male author) was about a man who has left his family and sets about making a new life with various women. One of these young women adores him so much that she reaches over to take the snot out of his nostrils. She has made him her purpose in life and we are clueless about her own sense of purpose. They have lots of sex but we have no idea if she enjoys it as much as he does. If this author's female character feels or think about anything at all, her feelings and thoughts are about him.
It was likely that I had requested this book at the time, so perhaps I had turned what is called a blind eye to all of this, or maybe there was something I wanted to find out. After all, I had brought it with me to the new shed. Yes, all these years later, there was something I still wanted to find out about writing character, in particular female character. After all, to think and feel and live and love more freely is the point of life, so it is an interesting project to construct a female character who has no life. The story in this book was about a woman who has gifted her life to a man. This is not something to be tried at home but it is usually where it happens.
How would a writer set about the massive task of giving a female character no consciousness not even an unconscious life, as if it were the most normal thing in the world? Perhaps it was normal in his world. And yet it takes a lot of work to construct any sort of character in fiction. The writer and film director Celine Sciamma noted that when a female character is given subjectivity, she is given bak her desires. It occurred to me that to create a female character with desires that were not just his own might have been something an author of his generation couldn't even imagine. In a sense, the she in his story was a missing female character. Her own desires were whaat were missing.
