(He missed all the self-help books about “never explain…”) He meets with her and they email a bit.

His buddy died years ago so he now tries to contact his old flame and make amends. He is incredulous that he could have written it (memory again) - but there it is in black and white in his handwriting. That letter turns up 40 years later in a package from a lawyer and he is shocked to see it. He wrote the two of them a nasty, vicious letter and promptly forgot about it. The story goes back to his college days and early romances when he broke up with one girl who dumped him for another buddy in his group. He has a couple of adult children he’s never shown much interest in, and an ex- that he meets with for an occasional lunch. The basic story is that we have a man of retirement age who is a doofus. Barnes seems to be a writer that you like or you don’t. There’s not a lot of point in adding an extensive review to book with 12,000 already on GR although it’s interesting to note that its rating, 3.7 is a bit on the low side. “In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives.” The book is a Booker Prize winner, so we expect and we get great writing. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.” Some examples: “…but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you witnessed.” And “I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty.” And “again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. This is by Julian Barnes so we know it will focus on memory and its tricks.

Tony webster the sense of an ending