Opening Sentence of the Day: The New Confessions

"My first act on entering the world was to kill my mother."

-- The New Confessions by William Boyd.

So begins the pseudo-autobiography of John James Todd, a Scottish-born filmmaker whose career begins in the trenches of WWI and ends on the Hollywood blacklists of the 1950s. Todd shares first names and outlook with his hero, French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and spends his career working on an epic film based on Rousseau's memoirs, The Confessions.