But I really start to hate him when he points out that the events in—for example—the life of Athenais almost certainly appealed to me because they can work to some degree as a stand-in for my own. For me to be able to mask myself in Athenais, he says, pieces of her must resonate with me. From that supposition, they can work on a response, a counter-narrative that puts all the pieces of me back in one place and discards the unnecessary fragments: a kind of story like the ones I am telling, but one that is also a surgical tool.