An Interesting Little Note
Text has become fluid, but facts remain fixed.
There is an extended metaphor at the end of Chapter 7 in Cleaning House about our housewife and her bonbons. There is a comparison of life to a box of chocolates, but I did not copy that idea from Forrest Gump. I was writing this book in 1979 as my senior thesis at Princeton, and Forrest Gump would not yet exist in the movies until a full fourteen more years would pass.
And then a strange thing happened on the way to researching who said what first and when for this little note. A site called Wiktionary reports that Haruki Murakami published his novel Norwegian Wood in Japanese in 1987 and in English in 1989 and once again, he describes life as a box of chocolates and Forrest Gump would still not appear on the scene for yet another six years.
โYou know, theyโve got these chocolate assortments, and you like some but you donโt like others? And you eat all the ones you like, and the only ones left are the ones you donโt like as much? I always think about that when something painful comes up. โNow I just have to polish these off, and everythingโll be OK.โ Life is a box of chocolates.โ
So, first my female protagonist, and then a Japanese man named Watanabe, and finally an actor playing an innocent savant all say the same thing every seven years or so. I just thought you should know. ๐