a set of knives (l'amour, en théorie / love, in theory) +1

Girls Just Want To Have Fun, Cyndi Lauper 

Anna Valenn, Le Blog

Whenever Richard meets his high school friends, people he pretended to know because friends were necessary as clothes - they made it less embarrassing to go out in public - he feels a twinge of self-consciousness, an embarrassed moment when he finds himself wondering what they know about his life now. It's not that he's ashamed about the fact that he is gay, quite so the contrary, he imagines rather fatuously that his preference marks him out, makes him part of a lineage of Baldwin, and Wilde, Shakespeare and Socrates, confirms some long-held but vaguely and never quite articulated sense that he is different from the others, born for some remarkable end, which he is only now beginning to suspect he is not.

In the psychology textbooks he had read during his medical training, he recognised this as a Napoleonic Complex, but nevertheless, the feeling has remained, haunting him, especially now when the first blush of youth has passed and his life is rusted with the emotional potholes that soon become one's path in life, and he can no longer imagine himself as anything other than what he is now - a respectable gay radiologist  with a handsome husband, a thirty-year mortgage, and a stable, loving, monogamous relationship from which he sometimes strays.

It is not embarrassment then, but something more like shyness that he feels at the prospect that once again, as throughout his schooling, people might imagine that they know him and are wrong. It's not as if he isn't out to his family, they have absorbed the news like leukocytes massing over a foreign body, surrounding and making it their own. They have produced from the bourgeois surplus of their lives an excess of enthusiasm for Brian. Holiday cards come addressed to them both, as do invitations to Thanksgiving, a set of knives, his and his bath towels, flannel sheets printed with cartoon barnyard animals.

Love, In Theory by E.J. Levy  / L'amour, en théorie traduction Céline Leroy pour les éditions Rivages - A set of 10 short stories about love and relationships. Smart, tender and funny : enjoyable!

Recueil de nouvelles bien plus amusant à lire, et matière à réflexion bien plus subtile qu'un tas de self-help books, manuels de conseils en management de l'amour et des sentiments.