This predicament, a sudden revelation of new, pivotal information about one's life, is the subject of many memoirs: Bliss Broyard, in "One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life — A Story of Race and Family Secrets," discovers shortly before her father's death that his family of origin was black and that he had "passed" for white.
The narrative winds towards Stefánie's sudden lapse into dementia, a predicament quite brilliantly described by Faludi not as the usual "bleeding away of identity" but as the opposite, "an onrush of all that she had been, all that she had experienced, suffered, fled".
When preview audiences laughed at Olivia de Haviland's predicament, Copland added a sudden gust of whirling woodwind music, which perfectly captured her state of nervous expectancy.
At almost every step that led to its current predicament, Toyota underestimated the severity of the sudden-acceleration problem affecting its most popular cars.
Like an ignored younger sibling reaching out to give a gentle squeeze of the hand to a pompous, bullying older one in a time of sudden vulnerability, it's a most Canadian acknowledgment of our current predicament.
Mr. Corzine's comments, tiptoeing between criticism of and support for Mr. McGreevey, highlight the predicament that he has been thrust into by Mr. McGreevey's sudden political demise.
When an agitated friend texts me bad news (a breakup, a layoff, a sudden rent increase), my instinct is to find a positive response to the predicament ("But you didn't even like him!" "Now you can finally go freelance!" "MOVE!").
Our car broke down as the sun was setting, and just as we realized our predicament, a whole village of people appeared out of nowhere, like a sudden wind, to push us the final stretch.
The odds seemed as long as those which would reasonably have been placed against Woods landing in such a predicament and, anyway, there was another question that was almost as baffling as the sudden failure of a game that we believed could be re-gathered often by the simple device of an act of will.
It is a predicament that is unusual for a journalist, but it has been complicated in the thirty-four-year-old Varadarajan's case by his sudden status as one of the city's most in-demand bachelors.
