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Michael Kimball

A man whose mentally ill brother commits suicide collects the letters his brother wrote to everyone before he took his life. Instead of one long suicide note, he wrote letters to everybody in his life, start to finish. His brother gathers them chronologically with conversations and articles and documents, trying to learn more about his life.

This book kept me up at night, troubled, and I sobbed like a child at the end, though you know the killing is coming from day one.

Jonathan Ames

“A quel destin inconnu se dirige-t-elle...
To what unknown destiny is she directing herself?... I always say that when I see a beautiful woman. What will happen to her? Where is she going? Where has she come from?”

Jonathan Ames

Kathryn Stockett

Liked it.

Articles, Fiction, Journalism, Essays by Ames

“There’s also religion and intoxicants and good restaurants for solace and consolation, but nothing beats hiding under a comforter with someone you adore, holding on to their ass like a life preserver, and waiting for the world and the day to come to an end.”

“I don’t like to be a bad influence. It’s bad enough that I have influence over myself.”

“It’s very hard to be a ballsy writer when you can’t afford to live anywhere.”

Richard Yates

I’ve yet to meet a Yates book I didn’t like.

Shallon Lester.

Passingly amusing.

Michael Chabon

His first novel.

“I was a fool for a girl with a dainty lexicon.”

“Never say that love is like anything… It isn’t.”

“Absence makes the heart grow fronds.”

”...Had forgotten how much I enjoyed lying across the backseat of a car with my hair out one window and my feet out the other, watching the phone poles pass, listening to music, the engine, the wind passing over the car.”

“Whom the gods would destroy they first make pasta.”

Michael Chabon

Loved the movie, so I thought I’d try the book and wasn’t disappointed.

“I knew that I shouldn’t have, but I did it all the same; and there you have my epitaph, or one of them, because my grave is going to require a monument inscribed on all four sides with rueful mottoes, in small characters, set close together.”

“Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone.”

“Some of them…just told lies. Others wove plots out of the gnarls and elf knots of their lives and then followed them through to resolution.”

Jonathan Ames

Alcoholic young writer and his personal valet, Jeeves, have zany adventures; hilarity happens.

“But I guess we all like to know other people’s secrets so that we can live with our own.”

“But I need more than twelve steps. For what ails one, I require that whole staircase in Rome.”

“In one’s quest to continually divide the world, I think one can safely say that the world is divided between those who pursue breakfast and those who don’t.”