secret self

“I trust fiction as the place where I could be vulnerable,” she says — in part because it “isn’t exposing my secret self or how I think about the world … it’s dredged from some … unconscious sludge.”

I remember laughing aloud, and the laugh being carried by the wind away from me; and, looking at him, I realised he laughed no longer, he was once more silent and detached, the man of yesterday wrapped in his secret self.

For he was gayer than I had thought, more tender than I had dreamed, youthful and ardent in a hundred happy ways, not the Maxim I had first met, not the stranger who sat alone at the table in the restaurant, staring before him, wrapped in his secret self.

Schmid wore the uniform and guarded her secret self at military bases in Missouri, Arizona, Germany, Kansas, Florida, Iraq, Washington and Korea.

“So I go forward,” he added, “take my story from him, and in the space of 20 minutes of inimitable glory and befuddlement, write a sentence across my life: Mark Medoff, you are hereby condemned, for the rest of your days, to expose your secret self publicly.”