What is being protected is an idea of yourself – as pure, untainted, unworldly, literarily chaste.
Did the new honesty give you a different idea of yourself as an artist?
It's perfect lab conditions for getting locked into an idea of yourself that would have otherwise been ephemeral.
The shoes you wear, the records you buy, the movies you like, the books you dream of writing — that's your idea of yourself".
"This," she says, "is something to do with a fear of disappointment that the image will not correspond with your idea of yourself".
For Mr. Baumbach, "Frances Ha" is a return to a moment he's never really stopped writing about: "That period in your 20s where you're necessarily having to separate yourself from a kind of romantic idea of yourself," as he put it.
In terms of its effect on my life and work I think it's very good: people push you to produce work you didn't know you had in you, and you can never get a fancy idea of yourself because in Hollywood you get sacked a lot.
Or you could dress like some idea of yourself, a tarted-up badass woman, say, who struggles to break free from social decorum by doing all the things she's not supposed to do: crying in public, showing her ectopic-pregnancy scars, pissing and maybe missing the toilet, coming apart, and then pasting herself back together again.
Rethink your idea of yourself so you're more open to criticism.
Set that as your intention and drop the idea of yourself as someone who is always late.
The starting point for getting your life on track is to hold tight to that desire for a new and ever-developing idea of yourself.
