"After we die the only real thing left of us, the only real fragment of the person that we were, is not the children we had, not the pictures taken of us, not the random trinkets we gathered over our lives–it's what we wrote down, what we said about ourselves. That lives and breathes. That speaks beyond our lips to say at any moment after, just as we were in that moment. Writing then is the very serious work of living. It is the chronicling and preserving of ourselves–it is the task of immortality.

And like all such tasks it ultimately fails. Only, it fails more accurately."