| 13 | The Confessions of Noa Weber
To talk until I can’t stand myself any longer. To talk, to talk, to talk myself to death—this is apparently why I’m standing here before you today. Forty-seven years old. My daughter will turn twenty-nine this summer, and this story certainly isn’t meant for her. Children, I believe, don’t need to know the whole truth about their parents, and a gasping confession without any perspective won’t make her any the wiser. In any case she’s smarter than I am, or perhaps not smarter, but clearer and more sensible. Her mouth is always where her heart is. I need my daughter, the first row in my imaginary audience, while Hagar is clearly in no need at all of my imaginary striptease. All my Nira Woolf novels have great beginnings that lead straight into the plot. I put a lot of thought into my opening sentences. The opening sentences and the closing sentences. That’s the kind of orderly plot in which I’d like to package myself and my love; to lead my madness along until it leaves me, to lead it and myself along like a story to the end.
A PANORAMIC PICTURE I told you to forget about a panoramic view, but there’s one panorama at least that I can offer you. A panoramic picture of the disease I’ve been dragging around with me for almost thirty years. The picture that comes up on the computer screen after midnight is at its brightest between two and four in the morning, and fades gradually towards dawn, Israel time: