"My only fantasy about writing was that in my old days, after directing many masterpieces, I would write my memoirs"

A wry confession vibrates beneath the line: the youthful dream was never to be a writer, but a celebrated director who would someday earn the privilege of autobiography. Writing appears not as an original vocation, but as a capstone, an afterglow of cinematic triumph, the place where a life already illuminated by masterpieces would be neatly archived. The fantasy is both grand and gently mocking: a storyboard of destiny in which success proceeds in orderly acts, the memoir arriving as a graceful epilogue.

Embedded is a hierarchy of arts. Cinema, collective and spectacular, promises mastery over images and the world’s gaze; memoir, solitary and retrospective, would merely curate the legend that cinema had already forged. Yet the irony is that Puig became renowned not by directing films, but by composing novels infused with cinematic grammar: montage-like structures, dialogic cuts, intertextual pastiche. He wrote as if he were editing, splicing lives together, proving that the deferred dream of cinema found an oblique fulfillment in prose.

There is also a meditation on time and authorship. The speaker imagines an authority that arrives only with age and accomplishment, the right to narrate oneself after having made something that justifies the narration. Implicit is the belief that memory should be earned, that self-portraiture without prior creation risks vanity. But life scrambles scripts. The intended prologue becomes the main act; the memoir he envisioned as a final flourish disperses into novels that memorialize experience as it happens, transforming the present into retrospective.

The line reveals ambition without swagger, and doubt without defeat. It recognizes how careers are often detours from original fantasies, and how art can migrate mediums while retaining its core impulse: to capture the drama of desire, failure, and reinvention. Far from a lament, it sounds like a playful acceptance that dreams are not abandoned but transfigured, directed, after all, through another lens.