` For personal reasons, or for reasons I don`t know myself, I began feeling old, & I began keeping notebooks. I was nearing the age of sixty`. Georges Simenon`s autobiographical notebooks, in which he recorded his observations, experiences, anxieties & `all the silly ideas that pass through my head`, are one of the most candid self-portraits of a writer ever put to paper. Here, as the celebrated author ruthlessly examines his tortuous writing methods, his past, his fame, his intimate relationships & his fears of ageing, the result is an unsparing, often painfully revealing insight into a man trying both to find & to escape himself. ” As revealed in these notebooks, Simenon`s is a shrewd, lucid mind...the balance tips toward the real, the immediate, the mysteries of human complexity above all... Utterly unpretentious.” (The New York Times).