"It's one of those quantum mechanical mysteries."

Here is just the last sentence of the first footnote* from Jennifer Egan's 2010 novel "A Visit from the Goon Squad":

"All that can be said for sure is that in the presence of Kitty Jackson, the rest of us become entangled by our sheer awareness that we ourselves are not Kitty Jackson, a fact so brusquely unifying that it temporarily wipes out all distinctions between us – our tendency to cry inexplicably during parades, or the fact that we never learned French, or have a fear of insects that we do our best to conceal from women, or liked to eat construction paper as a child – in the presence of Kitty Jackson, we no longer are in possession of these traits; indeed, so indistinguishable are we from every other non-Kitty Jackson in our vicinity that when one of us sees her, the rest simultaneously react."

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*pp. 168-169.