From one story in the second person to another – mi querido Pedro Almodóvar. He is about 93.5% of the reason I ended up living in Madrid. I love his films and I also love how much he loves books. They utterly furnish his films, both literally and as co-conspirators, like in The Flower of My Secret where he lovingly borrows plot elements from Dorothy Parker’s short story ‘The Lovely Leave’. Or more literally, as with his short film version of Jean Cocteau’s The Human Voice, or Sigrid Nunez in The Room Next Door. He has written a few books. This story, taken from an early collection (his first, I believe), is enchanting for exactly the reasons he states in the introduction: “… all that remains is to ask you to read this book with the same lack of pretension with which it was written.” I particularly liked ‘Advice on How to Become an Internationally Famous Filmmaker’ for, like Lorrie Moore, also narrating an artist in the making and speaking to those of us with a lot of crippling self-doubt: “To pay for your studies and room and board, your uncle takes you on as a brick-layer’s apprentice. And you gotta smile like it’s all you ever dreamed of […] A voice from within tells you: ‘Whatever you do, you won’t be able to escape your mediocre destiny. Never in the history of film has there been a director who was previously a brick-layer.”
Included in The Patty Diphusa Stories and other writings, Faber and Faber, 1991
A Personal Anthology 