Writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one's life. That is the queasy paradox of the artistic life. It is the thing that, like love, removes one both painfully and deliciously from the ordinary shape of existence. It joins another queasy paradox: that life is an amazing, hilarious, blessed gift and that it is also intolerable.

Women now were told not to settle for second best, told that they deserved better, but at a time, it seemed, when there was so much less to go around.

Once love had seemed like magic. Now it seemed like tricks.

There seemed nothing so true as a yellow tree.

I always had the sense with her that she didn't suffer fools gladly but that life was taking great pains to show her how.

The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney." ... We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone. And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that.

An author's life is different, complex, and ongoing, while a character's remains frozen in one little story.