Reading...
It is a remarkable, perfect little book. It says what it has to say, in the first paragraph, and it ends just as it should. "Conventions, like cliches, have a way of surviving their own usefulness. They are then defended or excused as the idioms of living." This is a book about the conventions we accept as the medium of our lives, most of us without questioning their real value to us. For some people, this makes life an absurdity devoid of meaning. People are born, grow up, go to school, get married, get jobs, raise children, and die. This book examines the absurdity of this idiom for some [...] The story involves a woman who lived within these conventions all her life, even while feeling emotionally detached, outside them, as if she were speaking a foreign language. She meets another woman who has spent her life deliberately, consciously, living outside these conventions, even though studying them and the effects of trying to live within their boundaries. When these two women begin a relationship, one in defiance of those idioms of Iife, one accepting that their relationship may just be a visit outside the lines for her partner, the tension comes when each must acknowledge that what she thought about Iiving inside and outside those boundaries may not be true.