[Kiss and Tell] was listed here at LT as 'essays" and that I had read it and given it ****, however it is not essays and I am about 95% sure I never have read it. de Botton likes to find his own angle on a topic of interest to him and I think he especially likes the liminal in-between states or identifying the oddities of behaviours we take for granted, in this case the exercise of biography writing. An (ex)girlfriend has accused the narrator of being self-absorbed and insensitive to others. He decides that the next woman he meets he will learn everything he can about her. And so his involvement with Isabel Rogers begins and so does the fun. It is an extremely clever book and funny but without sacrificing warmth and a more than a few insights of the profounder sort, although delivered somewhat offhandedly: "The process of intimacy therefore involved the opposite of seduction, for it meant revealing what risked rendering one most open to unfavourable judgement, or least worthy of love." or "Ironically, we gain the security to discover faults in others as a consequence of the very strength these faulty characters have been generous enough to grant us." Or, "What we recall of our childhood is not the significant portion, but memories designed to shield us from difficult truths." Pow! Good stuff! Our narrator, of course, falls in love with the ordinary Isabel who proves, for him, the more he gets to know her to be unknowable. Along the way lots of digressions about the history and nature and evolution of biography: do you include everything? How does one select? Why we are so fascinated by the ordinary doings of extraordinary people when we couldn't care less what our neighbor likes to eat? Very enjoyable. **** ( )

The hero/narrator, dismissed by his latest girlfriend as totally self-absorbed, determines to prove his possession of the quality of empathy by writing a biography, seeing the biographer’s mission as ‘understanding a human being as fully as one person could hope to understand another, submerging myself in a life other than my own’. For his subject he will select someone quite ordinary, to demonstrate ‘the extraordinariness of any life’. So Kiss and tell details the life of the fictitious Isabel Rogers, ‘the next person to walk into [his] life’, presented in proper biographical format. The 12 chapters begin with ‘The early years’, ‘The early dates’, ‘Family trees’; the volume comes complete with preface and index, and two sections of photographs of Isabel, her family and friends, all appearing entirely authentic.
This hybrid novel/biography/ biographical critique comprises three strands. It is at once the (pseudo-)biography of Isabel; an account of the narrator’s developing relationship with her; and much consideration of the nature of biography itself. The tenor of this can well be assessed by quoting the subheadings under BIOGRAPHY in the index:

categories
of dead
details given in
discrepancies between author and subject
eating habits in
ending
family research
ghost-written
impulse to write
lack of understanding of subject
length
men writing about women
private life in
psychology in
relationship between author and subject
writing

There is reflection on the nature of family trees, adapted for this fiction, which is illustrated by a family tree conventional in layout but "tracing the passage of emotional dispositions" with annotations such as:

Christina — depressive, repressive, hysteric =
Henry Howard— alcoholic, promiscuous, authoritarian
Isabel—‘We can go into it another day. Are you sure I can’t get you anything to eat?’
Lucy—sandwich problem, masochist, intellectual insecurity
Paul — aggressive, worshipped too much by mother, neglected by father/sisters

The index — 12 pages, to the text’s 246 — is a properly detailed and structured biographical index. It fills out proper names merely mentioned in the text, and large general topics are duly specified as to aspect:

hands, taking notice of
London:
finding way round
views of living in
men, differences between women and
sex:
continuing friendship after
embarrassment of
first experience
liberal attitude to
manual of
substitutes for
as symbol of intimacy
tastes in

with full breakdown for major characters. Isabel’s own entry fills four-and-a-half columns; that of her mother, one-and-a-half.
As an index to a hybrid fiction/biography, this must be reckoned a most interesting example of the craft. ( )

Reflective account of the practice and philosophy of Life Writing and of the particular being the key to interesting accounts of the day to day life of individuals. Not sure why this is not seen in the same way as his later works. ( )