Swift, it seemed, was too modest to comment herself, though the donation was confirmed by multiple outlets.
The young women are identical twins, 18 and beautiful to a fault -- if we are to believe Juliet, the narrator, who sometimes uses descriptions of her sister as a sly way of commenting on herself.
THE website Ask.fm, on which Hannah Smith, 14, received hate messages before she was found hanged, has provoked further controversy by claiming she posted many of the comments herself.
A week ago Brian Williams was in a Manhattan department store buying a gift when a woman walked up to him and introduced herself, commenting that she always watched him anchor "NBC Nightly News" but had recently read that he was going to be the host of that network's "Saturday Night Live".
And: "I tell you this story just to prove that I can". There it is, that push to tell, to observe, and then the deepening: "That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story". Here again, Didion is triangulating, positioning herself, commenting on the inability of narrative to sustain us even as she invokes it just the same.
As she herself commented, it had been a close call.
And yet she usually surprises her questioner by her ability to stand outside -- and then comment upon -- herself.
As Coleman herself commented recently, you can't really go back to a normal life after that.
"The Day Stalin Died", published long before the term "politically correct" entered the common vocabulary, is a dry account of the responses of the communist faithful and faithless in London to the news of Stalin's imminent death, in which the sceptical narrator (a version of Lessing herself) comments on the tearful attitude of her older mentor, "comrade Jean".
Hewitt herself commented on Facebook: "I think she should be allowed to be named.
