There is something fascinating about how they weave praises and concern for each other's spouses into these letters, in attempt to assuage guilt and avoid acknowledging the threshold they've both clealry crossed by even beginning this correspondence.

Will Hugo like me? Why hasn't June written me? Is Hugo angry at all the mail? Isn't June just .. darling??

Oh brother. I'm gonna have to stop myself from creating a post every 2 pages.

"Three minutes after you have gone. No, I can't restrain it. I tell you what you already know—I love you'

'I am a child compared to you, because when the womb in you speaks it enfolds everything—it is the darkness I adore. You were wrong to think that I appreciated the literary value alone. That was my hypocrisy talking. I have not dared until now to say what I think. But I am plunging—you have opened the void for me—there is no holding back.'

'And I lie, Ana'is, when I tell you that I do not want to worship you. Did you expect me to tell you these things? When I saw [Marcel Pagnol's film] Marius, I was dreaming of you—you are like that boat going out to sea, and your sails are full spread, and the sunlight is playing all over you. And like Marius, I have joined the boat at the eleventh hour—I have jumped out the back window and raced to the wharf.'

Oh Henry!! I did not expect a confession this early. These pages and pages (I only added a few quotes) are just overflowing with that consuming feeling you get when you fall in love. Only a writer could capture it wholly.

"In which multiple housemaids and drivers and villas are not exclusive to the wealthiest few, but the normal trappings of upper-middle-class life. At the time I lived there, about 90 percent of Qatar’s residents were non-Qatari. Of these, most were “third country” laborers—people who had come from Pakistan and India and the Philippines and Bangladesh and Nepal (and, later, most every part of sub-Saharan Africa) to drive the cars and build the towers and clean the villas. It was on the backs of these people that much of the oil-rich Arabian Gulf was constructed and, to this day, they are afforded almost no rights at all, no ownership of the glittering fantasy that fossil fuel profits paid for and the bodies of these men and women made real."

Another reality that feels dystopian to live through and yet there are so many countries where this is the case, and these dynamics are remain unquestioned and quietly affirmed. It's like a bubble where everyone wants to focus on the big bad out there, and yet are too afraid to confront the ways it's trickled down and affected us here.

"None of this matters much, in the grand scheme of things. I’ve learned to deal with it—but why should she? In truth, I keep a distance between who my daughter is and what she comes from because it’ll be easier for her that way"

5% in and almost bawling because he's managed to capture the complicated feelings of immigrants identity and the choices people make so well. I think people think of the Global South as a bit of a monolith but there are so many identities in this world, so many, that carry this level of shame and heaviness and it forces people to make these tough decisions.

The audio is incredible and I love how having watched the movie only adds to this experience.