Where To Start

"...after an evening spent drinking one beer after another by the light of a huge chandelier, the man who would become my publisher contracted with me to finish the text that I had just begun to write. It was supposed to tell, not the story of my life, which was worth about as much as anybody else's, but what my life had told me and what I thought I'd decoded of its language.  And finally, a book appeared in 2001, though the year was a matter of chance, and as incredible as it seems (and it does seem incredible to me) I had completed a slow and sweeping orbit through the space of my own life story hand in hand with a tiny space probe. And for the first time I seemed to approach, in words, a sun I could call my own. And Michel Leiris had been dead eleven years at that time, which meant that it had been more than fifteen years since he'd written that 'literary activity, in its specific aspect as a mental discipline, cannot have any other justification than to illuminate certain matters for oneself at the same time as one makes them communicable to others, and that one of the highest goals...is to restore by means of words certain intense states, concretely experienced and become significant, to be thus put into words.'  Which was where, it seemed to me, everyone had to start."

                from The Mystery Guest by Grégoire Bouillier