Isabel Dalhousie, portrayed here in Alexander McCall Smith's novel The Lost Art of Gratitude draws on the demanding conscience of a fictional moral philosopher to eke out this unflattering self-image. Normally we lack such self-knowledge. That is to say, we are solipsistic without realizing that we are. We are strangers to ourselves to a large extent. While much self-help literature suggests that self-knowledge is the first step to human connection, I'm not so sure. Our conscious self-image is the tip of an iceberg of unconscious work that maintains the self-deluding illusion that we are nicer and more in control than we think. Isabel, after all, had the omniscient help of a novelist, who was in a position to create a trick of the light.