In these pages, and in my memories, she reminds me that a short life can also be a good and rich life, that it is possible to live with depression without being consumed by it, and that meaning in life is found together, in family and friendship that transcends and survives all manner of suffering. As the poet wrote in the Bible's Song of Solomon, 'Love is strong as death.' Or perhaps even stronger.

I don't really want to be the costar of anyone's life.

The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.

To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman. And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.

So why don't you go home for vacations?' I asked her. I'm just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them.

I don't have a favourite book, I have hundreds.

You could drive past it without noticing and from what I understand, you ought to.