A few scenes feel stage-managed, too, as though Moss, in an effort to unburden herself of this heavy legacy, has tidied ragged life into neat drama.
He's lived a rich and ragged life and, like all great entertainers, he understands exactly who he is ("my mother's catholic, my father's Jewish - I have more guilt than you can possibly imagine").
Moss Hart, who was actor and director and playwright rolled into one, satisfied all such expectations in his best-selling memoir, "Act One," which was published in 1959 (two years before his death) and tidied up considerably a ragged life, particularly in regard to an upbringing discolored by family rancor and madness.
Against that sad obscurity, against surrender, against darkness, A House for Mr Biswas is a book for knowledge, for determination, for ragged unyielding life, a book that, over its great and complex length, shelters the one who reads it.
Mr. Scott wrote in The Times in August that the film, "at first glance a modest, ragged slice of contemporary life, turns out to be a remarkably subtle, even elegant movie".
Because of his proud and touchy nature, he was dismissed in 1855 and spent the rest of his life, ragged and unkempt, in a Gothic mansion in Mostaganem.
The sketchbooks show us Seurat on the move, roaming late 19th-century Paris and its more ragged outskirts, noting life in all its aspects.
As the ragged nature of life pushes on, it is natural that the national fixation on an ominous event becomes ruptured and its anniversary starts to wear out.
Sophy returns to the island, a stand-in for Nantucket or Martha's Vineyard that she calls Swansea, to confront what she later calls "my own ragged, insolvent, unkempt life".
Riis immigrated to the United States at the age of 21 and held various jobs, gaining a firsthand acquaintance with the ragged underside of city life.
She also had been a frequent psychiatric patient, her family says, an iron-willed perfectionist who had dealt with life's ragged edges by making four suicide attempts.
