Does love always form, like a pearl, around the hardened bits of life?

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.

It is a brave and stupid thing, a beautiful thing, to waste one's life for love.

We are each the love of someone's life.

A lover exists only in fragments, a dozen or so if the romance is new, a thousand if we're married to him, and out of those fragments our heart constructs an entire person. What we each create, since whatever is missing is filled by our imagination, is the person we wish him to be. The less we know him, of course, the more we love him. And that's why we always remember that first rapturous night when he was a stranger, and why this rapture returns only when he's dead.

When I meet a woman whose energy falters at the first barrier,she seems to fade beside my mother.

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.