The possibilities. Is there any greater pain to know what could be, and yet be powerless to make it be?

How hollow to have no secrets left; you shake yourself and nothing rattles. You're boneless as an anemone.

It may be a childish torment, but we do not get to choose our demons.

So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.

I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do, but either walk around or read a book or work on your book.

Perhaps love is a minor madness. And as with madness, it's unendurable alone. The one person who can relieve us is of course the sole person we cannot go to: the one we love. So instead we seek out allies, even among strangers and wives, fellow patients who, if they can't touch the edge of our particular sorrow, have felt something that cuts nearly as deep.

Here is a writer possessing the greatest talent: that of fully inhabiting the lives of others. Spargo conjures up these two as no one has done before. Scott and Zelda become, in Spargo's remarkable novel, not people of history but of literature, and reminders of what we fight for, what we fail to win, and the beauty that abides between. A marvel of a book.