Stein wrote her first portrait in 1910, a text in three or four pages about Toklas. Gertrude Stein never likes her food hot and I do like mine hot, we never agree about this. This is why her writing can be so uneven, because it was never clear either for Stein or her reader what a decision in writing for Stein might be. This​ was also why the crisis between Stein and Toklas in 1932 was so useful. The last thing that she had finished, Stanzas in Meditation, and which I am now typewriting, she considers her real achievement of the commonplace.’ But Stein was wrong.