"Sundown is the start of Rosh Hashanah. I'm afraid, darlings, the time has come for me to go."

Her book is out and Belle says goodbye.
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Update: In fact it's not out. The link is for advance orders.

Belle's writing is built on the tension between a light but sharp and empty style, the style of post-Thatcherite London, and the weight that comes with memory. The first is a facade, and she's loyal to it to a point (as she's loyal to the act of sex) but not beyond it; that's what makes the writing and the woman interesting. As I've said I wrote her a letter when I first began reading her, about a month after she started the blog, and she replied in kind. That is: my note was personal, but from a stranger, and her response was long but guarded. I responded to that with the note that pissed her off and ended communication.
She's the technocrat of her own ass; she's aware of the costs. I told I disagreed with her decisions, but my writing was informal, as if we were frinds. I had no right to use that tone.

In the last week I've gotten an email from an escort with a blog who want to exchange links, been told in another email that I would get along well with a well known young pundit (one who I've insulted more than once) because he "is much more starkly honest (if also unapologetic) about his own elitism than most liberals" [didn't the author understand my use of irony?], and been on a date with a woman who described her sense of decadence as "the idea of looking obscene to the have-nots. You know... Lobster in the midst of famine."

"You worry too much, relax. I have a professional interest in being neither repulsed nor impressed by people."