six degrees of separation from kevin bacon and Gertrude stein

has anyone else experienced the feeling of being completely saturated in Gertrude stein's world and for only a second be distracted by something else (telephone ringing, traffic, etc) and suddenly you feel out of place? I know it's a really weird feeling, but i keep having it every time i try to read Alice B. Toklas in a noisy place. I think it may be the way she is organizing it chronologically as well as the content matter that makes it seem that it's not her life story so much as it is one of her dinner parties. She has the book organized into chapters which represent large chunks of time (several years at a time)... but that doesn't seem to be how she's organizing her life. It seems that she is doing it by the people she knows. She'll mention person A, briefly describe them and the circumstances of their meeting and then she'll meet person B who she met through person A and the cycle continues. I remember reading today pages upon pages of just introductions of people. It's a very uncomfortable feeling because you do feel like you're meeting these people in some capacity and you feel like the polite thing to do would be to respond in some way... which of course is silly and impossible... but you none the less feel like you are being rude and will somewhere down the line get a plate of fried egg instead of omlet because you snubbed these literary figures. Never has an autobiography given me such social anxiety before! It's just a really interesting experience because it evokes the physiological exhaustion of meeting a lot of people at once but it's really just her writing style.