Articles

- "Did you know that Margaret Mitchell saw Melanie, not Scarlett, as the heroine of the book?" Tamara asked me, as if in passing.- "Melanie who?" I said, taken aback.We had met so that I could question her about her relationship. Tamara had read all my stories, both inside the "Love Stories" project and outside it, and it was fairly easy to talk her and her husband into becoming the models for another one.

‘They have asked me to come in to work — could you please look after my daughter? Yours will have more fun that way,’ your friend asks. And you had been counting on finally getting some rest that day. But you do not want to let your friend down either — she helps you out sometimes too.

Sadly, I hear this question with enviable regularity, in all sorts of shapes and forms. Sometimes it is that it would be nice to set up a dating agency for people who have been through therapy, for ‘non-neurotics’; sometimes it is how to protect yourself from so-called ‘arseholes’; sometimes it is complaints that there are so many of them... And when yesterday yet another client asked me in conversation how you can spot a neurotic so as not to date one, I realised the article was overdue.

Remember how Forrest Gump compared life to a box of chocolates? There it seemed to go without saying that you take one at a time and marvel or despair at each different flavour. Part of the population goes through life exactly like that. And part behaves however it likes, as long as it is not that boring and predictable.