If she imagines Rachel finding out what she's just done with Kieran, after everything they talked about all afternoon, she feels a sickish kind of unease.
Don't let her know that you're only busy because you have to babysit your little brother; if she imagines you going on an exotic date with a celebrity instead of taking your little brother to pee wee football practice, then all the better.
"If, as I believed, she imagined herself special, my mother's last illness exposed the frailty of this conceit," wrote Sontag's son, David Rieff.
In the wonderful "what-if" passage, where she imagines the banality of her mother's life had she not died, Ruthie finally brings her mother out of the realm of angry dream, into the ordinary.
After Ms. Smaltz left the car, she looked in the rearview mirror and inspected her lips, to see if she had imagined the whole encounter.
I thought that stylish shoes for indoors made a lot of sense," but she wasn't sure if there was a void in the market, or if she just imagined one.
But in the moment, it was inevitably different somehow -- as if she had imagined every possible scenario and yet was still unprepared for the one that played out.
And does she imagine that if he had been more "normal" — less reserved, less scrupulous — he would have written those books she so admires?
The Panopticon "has experiment written all over it," she thinks, and she imagines that if she were to be sent to its as-yet-uncompleted high-security unit, watchers "would inject me in the head — with a big needle full of" something that "makes your skull see-through.
As Helen Fielding subtly – and maybe not even all that intentionally – signals here, it's not that Bridget spent her day tearing her body to shreds in preparation for her date that's the problem, it's that she feels she has to; because she is so full of self-loathing that she imagines that if she doesn't she'll look like Chewbacca.
