I was too intimidated to go around telling everybody that I was a journalist because I didn't really see myself as one—I had just decided to report on myself.
As I looked at the city, wondering how to tackle the task of reporting on it, I found myself thinking back to my thesis.
I had turned up to report a football match and found myself reporting on a tragedy that would last for several hours.
After years of reporting on health, I considered myself a well-informed patient, but it took my elementary-school daughter to state the obvious: She was the victim of too much medicine.
I've spent many years reporting on Newark, and I consider myself pretty well acquainted with the havoc that gun violence wreaks on a community.
I tried to compartmentalize my fears, distract myself by reporting on the lives of other people, but there was no escaping the central conflict in my life.
Luckily, however, such false notes are few and far between in "Report on Myself".
Au contraire, personal humiliations are the subject of his two memoirs, "The Mystery Guest" and "Report on Myself".
The winner of France's prestigious Prix de Flore, "Report on Myself" is a study in raw angst and mortifying self-disclosure: a portrait of the artist as a lover who just can't catch a break.
You don't need to know anything about the Algerian-born Bouillier, though I could tell you that he is an artist of the memoir form — he's published another, "Rapport sur Moi" ("Report on Myself") — and that the French have a pleasantly relaxed view of the liberties one may take with one's own life.
"Report on Myself" — which came out in France in 2002, and which has just been released in a fine English translation by Bruce Benderson — chronicles his parents' erotic peccadilloes, his own amorous obsessions and his perennial inability, in matters of love and sex, to reconcile dreams with reality.
