To the pages of Elle magazine, where cinema's Reese Witherspoon Puts Her Life Into Perspective by stealing your neurons.
Last year, Reese and her husband Ryan Phillippe divorced, and we join the Oscar-winning actress some months after the event, as a routine vehicular exit becomes a metaphor for human resilience in the face of unimaginable suffering, and for life in post baby boomer America, where family values must adapt to survive in a world strewn with the detritus of nobly fractured marital unions.
"Right around Christmas time I was sitting in a parking lot and I felt like I just couldn't get out of the car," Reese begins, and you may want to lay your hands on some provisions about now, because this one's something of a long haul, and I'd hate for you to slip into a malnutrition-induced coma before we get to the end.
"It was like, I can't get out of the car," she goes on. "I thought, OK, half of the parking lot has dealt with this. More than half of the parking lot has dealt with this.
"OK, let's make it a little bigger. Half of this city has dealt with this.
"OK, let's make it a little bigger - half of this country, until I finally got out of the car.
"There's this moment in Walk The Line where June Carter says, 'I was never aware of how much I was seen.'
"I was very aware of how much I was seen.
"It was this moment of self discovery and loss of identity and who was stepping out of the car, you know? Who is that person?"
By now, Lost in Showbiz readers will have come up with all manner of adjectives to describe "that person", so we'll leave Reese's tale there, and remind her that these existential crises can be easily avoided if you simply let the valet take care of your parking.
