Like any good memoirist, Wood is shamelessly honest and devoted to his own irresponsibility: lying, thieving and other disreputable behavior (like giving his first wife "a Quaalude sandwich" so he could flirt with her replacement) merit only fleeting self-consciousness.
So even though I wrote The Boys are Back in Town [a memoir about the death of Carr's wife from cancer] in around six weeks, with no notion that there was anything remotely filmic about it, there was a moment when I had this fleeting, self-indulgent idea that the book might be transferred to screen.
The movie's surface has charms: the director, Alejandro Chomski, skillfully contrasts Manhattan neutrals with San Juan pastels; a Puerto Rican Day Parade sequence (spotlighting, in a fleeting, self-serving shot, Ms. Lopez) has texture; and there's no resisting reggaetón's seductive throb.
The irony is particularly pointed in the death, at age seventy-two, of the Chilean novelist Jose Donoso, in Santiago, on the seventh of December, for in his novels the stories that his characters leave behind them in the air generally prove more durable than the fleeting selves that they are seeking.
In a rare and apparently fleeting moment of self-awareness, he writes.
This leads to a note of bitterness, even a fleeting hint of self-flagellation; the mirror is hurled away.
It's in the passages dealing with his fleeting moments of self-discovery that we find the substance and focus that the bulk of the novel so conspicuously lacks.
There may be fleeting moments of self-recognition – the inward flinch at the thought of wearing heels, the choice of bodyboarding over learning to kite surf, or looking at the snow and instead of thinking about sledging, wondering about falling.
In a fleeting moment of self-awareness, one says, "This is embarrassing".
"I don't mean to sound sexist," Walsh prefaced, expressing a fleeting glimpse of self-awareness.
"It could be my fault," the president said, evidently experiencing a fleeting moment of self-awareness.
