Fictions. I'm living inside someone else's story. It all feels real enough to me but I am aware that I am living through a situation invented by someone I don't know. Episode by episode, I adapt this life to the stage. It's not very hard to do so because the story was composed with my adaptation in mind. I spend too much time writing and not enough rehearsing, and in the end I am only able to organize a staged reading of the first few episodes of my play. A film scout is present at my staged reading. He must like it, derivative as it is, because the play is soon turned into a major motion picture. I am delighted to learn that it will be an elaborate period drama. But I am crushed to learn that I did not get called back for the role of myself. In the reviews, a critic dwells on one small feature of the film, a triangle of sexual compulsion between three generations of a single family. He claims that the director has used it to stand in for the sequence of adaptations that led to the film. I chuckle to myself as I read this, noting that the triangle is the only thing that is identical in all three versions of the story.