The most important aspect of writing the pieces that make up this eighth book was yielding to my obsessive side, letting my own "complicated grief" in on the process. You can imagine how tempting it is to try to fight the part of you that loops and loops, caught up in tangled sorrow from which it seems there's no escape.

Complicated Grief was written in larger and more coherent (if disparate) shapes. The question was how they fit together. The mind is coherent, trust that was the best writing advice I ever got (I got it from Carole Maso and I pass it on). It's true, and clearer and clearer as one grows and gains an improved sense of who one actually is (as versus who one was supposed to be).

"Influence" is itself influenced, coming from an Italian word for the outbreak of a disease (influenza, outbreak). Influence is that which flows across - permeates - the boundaries of the self.

The boundary between expert and amateur was an imposed social-cultural "protection" which actually exposed a number of women to a fatal disease, because decaying matter, as the fireman said of fire (cited in the book's final piece, "Torch Song") "ain't got no rules on it."

I can tell that I shaped the book very deliberately, after a great deal of thought, and that I insisted this piece function as a prologue, but I find the word "intention," confusing ("trust the art," as D.H. Lawrence said, "not the artist"). These speculations are perhaps better responded to by text and reader, rather than author.

We live in a culture that insists on "moving on" (even while our loyalty to and love of the franchise and the sequel give away a larger loopiness). But I tend to dwell or obsess or meditate, and I came back to, for instance, the figure of Dickens's "Miss Havisham" with some (self) recognition if not relief.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (whose mother died ten days after she was born) wrote a novel that anticipates Semmelweis's discovery and serves as a parable for the destructive power of decaying matter.