ABSTRACT
Many people in this world have an intense one-way relationship with a famous person. Jean Genet death can be a jolt because he lived and died but never sat across from us at table. We never held his hand. In his life, we were no one. There is a particularly bitter taste around death of such a person, especially if he was not fully appreciated in his own lifetime. When the author was a teenager in early seventies, the current piece of popular literature for girls was Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. It was an attractive book because it described propriety with kind of bland disgust that fifteen-year-old girls like her experienced regularly. There was nothing more nauseating than prospect of doing the right thing. She has that edition, with a beautiful black-and-white photo of Genet standing, looking so angelic, one starched button undone, his head too large, his initials carefully embroidered on bottom right side of his torso.
