My twelve-year-old and I were side by side at the sink, coring strawberries that we had picked this morning. "Sometimes," she said, "I think it would be nice to be invisible. I like to watch things happening and not participate sometimes." 
 I'm not sure if it's entirely the same as what my daughter was talking about, but invisibility is something I crave sometimes myself, the freedom of not being seen, not for the purpose of doing anything in particular but just to take a break from being someone to other people for a while, and maybe to do my grocery shopping without small-talk. When my daughter made this comment about being invisible, it occurred to me that this is what Christopher Knight managed to do for twenty-seven years. 
 Reading about Knight's experience, I was intrigued by the idea that our self-identity is bound so tightly to our interactions and relationships that if we remove those interactions and relationships, we in some way lose our sense of self. It's both a comforting and an unsettling thought, similar to contemplating the oneness, loss of self, and ultimate equanimity we'll all experience in death (I've not been dead, as far as I can remember, so I'm not positive this is how it is, but it's what I imagine). 
 The story of Knight and how he attained invisibility without dying was interesting, as were the small glimpses we got of his family, but I felt very unsettled by the way in which the author pushed himself into Knight's life. It's bad enough that Knight was ripped from the solitary life in which he'd found contentment, but then to have the author following him around and showing up when Knight asked him---told him---not to just seems pushy and inconsiderate. There are times when Knight clearly rejects the author, and rather than seeing it as a rejection of himself and the connection he's trying to make, the author chooses to see it as a quirk of Knight's personality that he can safely shrug off. I felt squirmy reading about the author's persistence, and I didn't know if I could trust his interpretation of the situation. 
 Once I suspected his view of his relationship with Knight, I began to suspect his point of view throughout the book. Why did the author insert himself into the story so much? Why couldn't it have just been about Knight and not about the author's relationship with him? I can think of many reasons, but once I started to question the author, I found it difficult not to question his motives from the beginning, and that tarnished my experience of the book. 
 At the end of the book, there is "A Note on the Reporting," in which it appears that the author puts a lot of importance on how nice people are to him, not really considering that perhaps this is just the way people in this particular community respond to a stranger showing up unannounced. Reading this, I suspect that there's another story here that someone else could write about the author and his need to be important to people he's never met.