28 Years Later: The Bone Temple picks up where 28 Years Later left off – in a world of zombie-like infecteds and vigilantes that turn out to be a murderous cult. Ralph Fiennes returns as Dr. Kelson, who makes an unlikely friend in his medical refuge slash memorial site slash bone temple.

When I ask my girlfriend about the book she’s reading, it’s a given I’ll spend the next couple of minutes in utter confusion.

Yesterday Ami responded to my query by saying her latest read made her “fall in love with horses.”

The night before, she’d been lost in Andre Gide’s “Immoralist.” I knew the novel was about hidden desires, but I had no idea Gide had taken things into the stable.

After a lot of back-and-forthing, it turns out she was referring to Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses.”

That’s because whatever book I last saw her reading has invariably been finished and replaced by three new books.

She reads six books at any given time. Classics to sci-fi potboilers. The latest bestsellers to ancient Greek poems. And she inhales them at a rate that makes me wonder if she actually has the job she claims to have or spends all day curled up with the Modern Library.

Her “ideal day” is to go to the Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood, “visit” the cat who sits on the register and prowl the aisles until she finds three books to bring home.

Given that I’ve made my living as a writer for 45 years, you might think it’s wonderful to have a partner who shares an adoration of the written world.

Actually, it’s a torment.

Many professional writers limit their reading. George R.R. Martin and Joyce Carol Oates “quarantine” themselves so other voices don’t creep into their work, as was the case with McCarthy and J.D. Salinger.

Like my literary betters, I sometimes worry that reading distracts me from writing. But unlike them, I live with someone who consumes words at an unimaginable pace.

When I see my girlfriend devour books faster than the popcorn she keeps within arm’s reach, I feel guilty — and envious. It jolts me into remembering how much I love the printed page.

As a kid, my favorite place was library stacks. I’d brush my fingers across the spine of the books, as if they were holy artifacts. But over the years, I’d lost that delight. Nowadays, I spend more time reading friends’ screenplays than I do literature. I began to envy how my girlfriend could lose herself in words just for the joy of it the way I used to.

So, now, when Ami settles in with a book in the living room chair, I do the same. But I’m flustered by how relentless her focus is. How quickly her pages turn.

I know reading shouldn’t be a competitive sport. I really do. But writers are competitive by nature.

I was irritated by how much more she seemed to enjoy reading than I did. The instant she finished a novel, she would extol its virtues and demand we go to the Iliad or the Last Bookstore to get the author’s next offering.

Meanwhile, I was struggling to get through “Ready Player One,” a novel that had been collecting dust for years. Not wanting to be one-upped by my speed-reading girlfriend, I threw myself into it. As we lay in bed together reading, my sighs and muttering about “frickin’ three cliches in one paragraph” caused her to throw sideways glances my way.

I realized this showed a basic difference between us. My girlfriend finds something to enjoy in everything she reads. I, on the other hand, can be nitpicky and hypercritical when I peruse the copy on the back of a cereal box.

Even worse is when she reads something of mine. All I can think is I’m in a wrestling match with all the great writers she cheats on me with.

Last weekend, my girlfriend and I visited the Valley Relics Museum in Van Nuys, a repository of cultural artifacts mostly from the ’80s and ’90s. Ironically, for all my complaints about “Ready Player One,” it had inspired me to suggest the visit. We had a wonderful time, strolling through the aisles and playing the vintage arcade games.

A few days later, lying in bed, I made the mistake of mentioning that I’d written a 2,000-word essay about how the memorabilia — the giant Bob’s Big Boy statue, the cast of E.T., the arcade games — linked to events in my life in unexpected ways.

“I would like to read that,” Ami declared, her eyes not moving from the book resting on her lap.

The way my heart clenched up, you might have thought she was a mugger in an alley saying, “I would like to have your wallet.”

Flop sweat collected on my brow. I was up against her current lineup of Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin and Frank Norris. That’s a daunting standard to be judged by. And I am so critical, I know I would have torn my own essay apart if someone had handed it to me.

At the same time, I secretly longed to hear her speak about my writing in the same loving tones that she mentioned other writers.

Given that written words are the way I engage with the world, this seemed like a critical moment in our relationship. I read the piece over and over. Although it had been sent to my editor long ago, I made numerous tiny changes.

Finally, I emailed it the next morning and braced for a response.

Per usual, she finished the essay in less time than it takes me to address an envelope. Her judgment was cutting: “Cute, but I’m not into it. So C-minus.”

I cannot communicate how much this hurt. It was like a hundred paper cuts to my soul.

If the person I cared most about in the world despised my efforts, how could I hope that anyone else would like it? Had I been a fool to devote half a century to a craft I was incompetent at? Had I finally been found out?

Stifling my wounded pride, I typed out a measured response: “So what exactly about it weren’t you into?”

Her response confused me even more. “Huh?” was all Ami said.

I looked up her previous email and realized I had misread it.

She had written: “Cute. But I’m not in it. So C-minus.”

And thus I wrote this piece.

As I said, I’m competitive. I simply can’t go through the day with only a C-minus.

The author is a freelance writer in Sherman Oaks. He received an A-minus on this story; Ami deducted half a point because it didn’t mention she’s hot.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

After dozens of films over a storied six-decade career, Jodie Foster is trying something new, playing the lead role in a French film for the very first time.

There’s hardly a trace of an American accent in Foster’s turn as Parisian therapist Lilian Steiner in A Private Life (Vie privée) and she appears to be very much at home.

The character she plays is an American woman who built her career in France. So director Rebecca Zlotowski added some small asides — and swearing — in English because of Foster’s brisk and fluent French. “People suddenly were just completely confused that I wasn’t a French person,” the actress said.

All apparent ease aside, “I have a different personality in French than I do in English,” Foster told Morning Edition host Leila Fadel during a recent visit to NPR’s New York studios.

Her voice has a higher pitch in French, something she attributes to the French ladies who taught her at the private school she attended, Le Lycée Français de Los Angeles. Foster also had some smaller roles in three French films prior to A Private Life, including in 2004’s A Very Long Engagement.

“I’m just much more insecure and kind of vulnerable because I never know whether I’m communicating properly. And, you know, am I going to find that word at the last minute?” Foster said.

This frustration is also built into the script itself. When we first meet Steiner, she’s constantly frazzled, barely listening to her patients and hardly sparing a minute for her newborn grandson.

Lilian Steiner (Jodie Foster) and Gabriel Haddad (Daniel Auteuil) find love again — for each other — years after their divorce in A Private Life.

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Then, her eyes start watering constantly, something someone more grounded would call crying, but not Steiner, who grows increasingly frustrated that water is coming out of her eyes.

It turns out to be especially fitting for someone who is a Freudian psychoanalyst. “In true Freudian fashion [she] is having a physical demonstration of a psychic ill,” Foster explains.

That psychic ill is caused by the death of a patient (the Franco-Belgian social drama star Virginie Efira), purportedly by suicide.

But Steiner suspects her patient has been murdered and launches her own — inconclusive, darkly comedic — investigation, enlisting help from her ex-husband (played by Daniel Auteuil, a mainstay of French cinema), and rekindling their old flame in the process.

All of those disparate plot lines play into the film’s French title, Vie privée, which Foster explains is a double entendre: “So private life, meaning everything that you think that would mean the opposite of a public life — an internal life. But private also means has been deprived of, so somebody who has been deprived of life, meaning somebody who’s died potentially.”

In her own life, Foster said she’s had to fight for privacy, ferociously. “I had to say I will go to Disneyland and I will not have a film crew following me… I will go to college and I will not give everything to the public eye, in order to make sure that I survived intact,” she explained.

After a frenetic pace of filming in her teens and twenties, Foster says she became more deliberate about the roles she accepted so that she could bring more depth to the screen. “I really was careful to make sure that I had real life and I worked more sporadically than most other actors,” she said.

In a hallucinatory dream sequence while under hypnosis, Lilian (Jodie Foster), left, is transported to WWII-era Paris, where she and her present-day patient Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira) were lovers.

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Today, she’s especially excited about working with women directors. She also directs herself. Recounting that she only worked with one female director — Mary Lambert for 1987’s Siesta — in the first four decades of her career, Foster said she’s now working more with women.

“It’s been a shift that’s a long time coming… But it came very, very late,” she added, noting that the prevailing bias against women directors has only “recently” changed in mainstream cinema.

Foster also hopes to take part in more French movies, maybe even direct a film in France. “That’s something I’ve always wanted to do and something that would be a great challenge for me,” she said.

Director Rebecca Zlotowski, shown here on the set of A Private Life, says she had long dreamed of directing a film featuring Jodie Foster.

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She urged American audiences to embrace learning to speak languages other than English.

“It’s surprising how Americans don’t hear other languages… how you can go your whole life without really hearing other languages spoken in your state,” she said. “We have to make an effort to connect to a wider world and understand that we’re all part of the same universe.”

The broadcast version was produced by Julie Depenbrock. The digital version was edited by Treye Green.