I don’t think I’ve ever read anything more depressing than this journal. I am SO glad it’s over.

I also don’t think I’ve ever read anything that captures the longing, the desperation, the hopelessness that is the (possibly?) universal experience of waiting by a telephone for days and weeks and months for someone to call.

So I’m going to go ahead and make the connection that this book was so depressing BECAUSE it’s the most relatable thing I’ve ever read.

Lord. I don’t know what to do next. Should I call a therapist? Or should I try to forget this ever happened with a silly little romance on Kindle Unlimited? Someone needs to tell me what to do.

Maybe the best course of action at this point is to simply share all of the best quotes from Annie’s torture-filled book of yearning. And next time you need words to express the deepest ache you’ve ever felt, you can borrow some of hers instead of trying to find your own.

Here we go:

“To get through this evening without too many tears is all I ask. Writing doesn’t make you suffer in the same way, though it’s just as hard. What I feel now is a wrenching sensation, a sense of exclusion, the desire for death. At eighteen, I ate to compensate. At forty-eight, I know there is no possible compensation.”

“We see each other Tuesday, so five days from now. Which means that he doesn’t need to see me more often. That he may have someone else, despite his preposterous underpants.”

“I drive home very quickly, playing cassettes with the volume turned up all the way, the song “Éthiopie,” and I understand, I remember my “lust for life” at eighteen, the despair that lay beneath, the same as that which I feel tonight, at forty-eight. All because of a man. And when I see him there, in the hall of the embassy, he seems forgettable—a pretty boy, nothing more. I’m rereading Anna Karenina.”

Haven’t had enough yet? There’s so much MORE where that came from!

“I am reliving the darkest and most inadmissible days of my life. I am allowed to be sad about the loss of my mother, or even of Lucrèce, the little cat who disappeared last week—but not to show that the total absence of S destroys me.”

“Lost time has no more meaning in that state because time itself stops. I am in pain because I’ve started to hope again and therefore to wait for a sign, which is very unlikely to materialize. And also because the last weeks have not gone the way I’d imagined, because he did not come, despite his promises that he would.”

“Continued existence is atrocious. Was awakened by a phone call, a wrong number—a woman with a strange accent. Where there is life, there is hope, even of the wildest kind.”

“More and more I have the dark feeling—or not even dark, just saddening—that it was out of indifference that he neglected to call me before leaving, and above all so as not to have to contend with my request: what will you give me to remember you by (the photo I repeatedly asked him for)?”

With all of that in mind, I think we get to the sheer essence of everything this book is with this last quote:

“And so today I’ve caught up to the present day in entering my journal—twenty-six years of journals—into the computer. It’s not much of a story, just a layer of egocentric suffering. Yet I know that it is through this layer of suffering that I communicate with the rest of humanity.”

Thank you, Annie. That you put this book out there makes the rest of us feel a little less crazy.