While my friends were cultivating the usual romantic dramas, I read books, and resigned myself to not being part of the game and this resignation, this astonishment that a boy would like me, lingered dangerously. By the time it was clear I was going to be all right, I weighed sixty-two pounds. If I wanted to I could delve further into the great gaping insecurity that is always responsible for this sort of bad behavior: when I was thirteen I was very ill, and in and out of the hospital for a year. And even if it hadn't been, I knew from experience that this sort of literary pilgrimage is always anticlimactic: the writer is dead and what remains of him is in his books.” The Metropole was gutted after the war and rebuilt. The setting was devoid of both Greene's seediness - he later regretted popularising the word 'seedy' - and his elegance, which should not, of course, have come as a surprise. Inside was a bare mahogany desk, a brass lamp, a king-size bed with a modern, striped duvet, and several spindly French sofas, also striped. When she finally ducked out to refill her stash of aloe shampoo and little almond soaps, I slipped through the half-opened door.

I was staying next door in suite 226, and after several days of wondering how I was going to get into his room, I noticed the maid's cart outside. For some reason, I had convinced myself that I needed to see the inside of suite 228, which was otherwise referred to in the voluminous hotel literature as 'the Graham Greene Suite.' Greene, whom I had been mildly fixated on for some time, had stayed there during the fifties. “I spent more time than was strictly necessary in the plush red corridors of the Hotel Metropole in Hanoi.

The Power Notebooks by Katie Roiphe