Friday, August 19, 2022

the last book I ever read (David Plante's Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three, excerpt twelve)

from Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three (New York Review Books Classics) by David Plante:

I was always vividly aware of Germaine as a woman, a large, imposing woman. Her intelligence was to me the intelligence of a woman, because she had, as a woman, thought out her role in the world; the complexity of the role required intelligence to see it, and she had seen it, I thought, thoroughly. Even when, once, she said to me, “I don’t understand women at all,” I took this as an observation of what it was to be a woman. So, if I with some degree of logic believed Germaine understood me, it followed that I believed she understood me with a woman’s intelligence. I wanted to know what she understood.

I was drunk on champagne.

I wanted her to tell me what she thought about me. I believed I needed her to tell me. She stared at me. I stared back.



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