All Jeuged Up

In the last three years, newspaper and magazine reporters have endeavored to find out, describing Watson alternately as a tea-spilling flibbertigibbet and a "reserved and maternal" schoolmarm; an unusual girl who studied meditation in grade school and a normal, middle-class Londoner with happily married parents. She has confessed to disgust for Hollywood and a love for Oscar parties; she has had to defend herself as "a solid English girl" and "not a fruitcake." She knows that all that's been said is true somehow, and yet somehow not -- just as so many details in Hilary and Jackieboth adhere to reality and extend it.

"I'd love to meet someone who could explain all of this to me," she sighs, "to make it all make sense, you know? Just the weirdness of it all. It's such an artificial process that happens, but at the same time the questions you're answering are searching questions; you're grappling with them. It's like it's New Year's Eve everyday, and you have to make some kind of resolution about what your life means."

I want to tell her that she doesn't, really, that she can make up a few things to satisfy the throng and hoard her real self away for safe-keeping, and in a way, for her own sake, I wish she would. But Watson has already weighed that option, and pronounced it an even worse fate.

"I suppose I should just sit here and sort of talk nonsense and not say anything meaningful," she considers. "Or I could do a really good PR job on myself, come across all sorted and healthy, as if I've got it all figured out. But when someone's asking you a question, you want to answer it truthfully. That's what a conversation is. And at the same time, you're aware there's a kind of mutual understanding: I'm selling a movie here."

"And also yourself," I remind her. "Most of all, people just want to know who you really are."

"Well, I don't know, do I?" she laughs. "That's the problem. But who does?"