"Her autoportraits of the twenties constituted an ongoing inquiry into the nature of her identity and proposed a series of unstable selves, many of these strange texts reiterate the absence of fixity. Early in the publication she poses the essential question of self-definition, only to back off from the possibility of forging any stable self. “Individualism? Narcissism? Of course. It is my strongest tendency, the only intentional constancy I am capable of… Besides, I am lying; I scatter myself too much for that.”
"Cahun admits to being a narcissist—”It’s my best quality”—then tells us “I’m lying anyway. I’m too scattered for that.” “My soul is fragmentary,” she writes, and her autobiography is a series of the writer picking up the pieces, turning them over, and watching them vanish as soon as they are written: “We change at the same time as ourselves.” In other words: no sooner has she pinned down who she is than she has changed again, eluding her own understanding."
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