The Woman Upstairs

I wake up in the middle of the night of my birthday morning, a woman upstairs in a borrowed house, and reach for the book I happen to be reading: The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, recommended by Karen in writing group.

Here's one of the epigraphs, a quotation by Proust:

"Very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a fresh, a third, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from oneself, the lover."

Later from the narrator, Nora:

"....The person I am in my head is so far from the person I am in the world.  Nobody would know me from my own description of myself; which is why, when called upon (rarely I grant) to provide an account, I tailor it, I adapt, I try to provide an outline that can, in some way, correlate to the outline that people understand me to have--that, I suppose, I actually have, at this point.  But who I am in my head, very few people really get to see that.  Almost none.  It's the most precious gift I can give, to bring her out of hiding.  Maybe I've learned it's a mistake to reveal her at all."