This book attempts to tighten our grasp of moments of truth, which, as we have seen, requires deepening our understanding of all three aspects: moments ↔ experience ↔ genuinely submitting to the constraints. Chapter 2 focused on the experience aspect, using bulimia to illustrate the potential profit of investigating experience. Chapter 3 focused on the genuinely-submitting-to-the-constraints aspect, laying out a method (Descriptive Experience Sampling, or DES) that tries to take that genuine submission seriously. Chapter 4 returned to the experience aspect, providing some straightforward experiences to illustrate DES and to provide some perspective against which to compare the fragmented experience of the bulimic women.

Now we deepen our focus on the moments aspect by presenting a transcript of a DES expositional interview that I conducted with a twenty-five-year-old college student we will call “Kathy Talbert” (“KT” in the transcript); this is her first beep from her third sampling day. The question, as always, that DES seeks to answer is, What was in your experience at the moment of the beep? During the first two expositional interviews, I had pressed without success to get to her experience at the moment of the beeps. Now, in the third hour of interviewing, I continue that relentless (but supportive) pressure toward the moment with, at first, equally little success. However, six minutes into this third interview we finally arrive at the moment of a beep. There is, I think, a huge difference between talking about experience at the moment of the beep and talking about anything else.