ABSTRACT
Perhaps one day a writer will invent a life and present it simply in the form of a sequence of documents, without emphasis or commentary: birth certificate, school reports, driver’s licence, life-assurance policy, requests for overdue library books, laundry lists, home-contents insurance inventory, shopping lists, unfilled prescriptions, unredeemed petrol-station vouchers, a passport application filled out in a false name but never sent in, and a final sequence of bills from doctors and nursing agencies, climaxing with a startlingly high invoice from a fashionable mortician. Upon such a structure one could impose one’s own consolatory fictions of achievement and development. On the one hand to have done such deeds! On the other: to have paid such a price! And our own lives, by contrast: how boring, how riskless, and how very, very preferable! [John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure (London, 1997), p.194.]
