“I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen.”

“I was not myself back then. I was someone else. I was Eileen.” is Eileen’s compact account of estrangement from her younger self. Its three short sentences move from disavowal, through the image of another person, to the name that fixes that person in the story: Eileen. The statement does not erase her past; it makes the remembered identity both hers and, in retrospect, a self from whom she feels divided.

The Name and the Division

The declaration follows a portrait of the young woman in 1964 as physically unremarkable and acutely uncomfortable in her own appearance. Eileen remembers her thin frame, acne scars, nervous gestures, and clothes buttoned high; she believed herself ugly and unfit for the world, though she later judges that there was nothing especially wrong with how she looked. Against this account, the sentence’s final naming is deliberately plain. Eileen does not substitute another name for the young woman: she identifies her as Eileen, even while insisting that she was someone else.

That tension gives the expression its force. The remembered Eileen is described as unhappy and angry, trying to control herself and becoming more awkward and unhappy in the effort. She feels like a nobody, a waif, and invisible. The claim of not being herself therefore sits beside concrete details that make the past self unmistakably particular: a body she scrutinizes, clothes chosen to avoid attention, and a persistent anger she cannot master.

Retrospective Framing

The passage marks a difference in time and perspective. Eileen presents the young woman as an imagined figure she can now look back on, then identifies her as the person she was. Elsewhere in the same recollection, she places these events fifty years in the past. The expression thus works as a threshold between the descriptive portrait of the girl and the older narrator’s act of naming her: distance is asserted, but memory keeps the two selves connected.

The sentence also prepares the account of Eileen’s last days as that angry young woman, set in late December in the cold town where she was born and raised. Its wording makes the name Eileen carry two related meanings: the person being recalled and the identity from which the narrator says she has become estranged. The passage establishes that distinction without explaining it away, leaving the gap between past and present as part of the story’s central framing.