Marcel Proust

I'd be happy as Larry.

Yeah, to come home and watch Sean Keenan doing Proust.

You think about like the 70s, like all the Mike Lee TV movies, the BBC produced in like the 70s and 80s.

It's like, just give me some of that.

I just always felt so out of place anytime that we were talking because I was never like a fashion person or like a cool person.

And I just was like reading books with my Proust in my bag or something.

And I, yeah, anytime we went somewhere, I was just like, I don't really belong here, you know, but except with Simon.

Simon! That was the only place where I wanted to belong, just sweet British people who have good taste in music.

Thank you.

So let me just read some from the, well, this is an endorsement for your book, which is called Proust's Snobs, Inverts, and Jews, Performing and Subverting Identity in La Recherche, by Adeline Sondin, Bloomsbury, 2025.

And we have an endorsement from Alex Stoller, Sondin's Intersectional Approach, and theoretical framework of Butlerian performativity offers an exciting new perspective on one of the most significant works of European modernism.

Based on perceptive close readings, her argument that Proust exposes and undermines the social systems that govern human performance and limit our notions of identity is persuasively and consistently developed throughout in relation to the three categories of snob, Invert and Jew slash Jewishness.

That's the end of that quote.

Adeline, first of all, people know what a snob and what Jewish refers to.

And I will try to touch, just grab a little piece from each one.

Okay.

And so, you know, people defend themselves against that and say, oh, it is because he did something wrong or because he talked to me the wrong way.

But at the end, just writing our new book, finished last chapter of our new book, and I started off with a quote from Marcel Proust.

In order to change, you need to see the world with new eyes.

So at the end, if you really want to recover from trauma, you need to, we need to help people to change their perceptions of the world.

It's a frankly extreme experiment in what language and narrative can even do.

In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust Proust grew up as a rich guy in Paris, and had a solid education in literature and law.

From a young age, he was hanging out in fancy social circles, spending time at elite Parisian salons during the Belle Epoque, which was kind of a golden age in Europe at the time.

In 1896, he started working on an autobiographical novel which would go on to become this enormous work.

Memories that you might have forgotten can suddenly come flooding back just because of a random, spontaneous trigger.

The most famous example of this is towards the beginning when he tastes a madeleine, which is like a little French cake, and it instantly transports him back into vivid memories of his childhood.

This is one of the most famous passages in all of literature, and birthed the phrase Proustian Moment, which describes any sensory experience that brings you back to some memory.

I tend to get this a lot from smells, like freshly washed linens reminding me of my grandma's house or something.

Key West is their family favorite so far.

Her favorite quote by Marcel Proust continues to frame her general outlook toward life.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Welcome, Katie.

so he

had the Proust questionnaire at the end.

Oh, yeah.

So I created one for you.

It doesn't have to be, but it's not my story, but it's still a story of sorts.

There's a little Marcel Proust in all of us.

You know, we're all going to have that.

I get it.