Casebook is my attempt at a love story. I had a vision of a difficult love.

We all - in the end - die in medias res. In the middle of a story. Of many stories.

Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.

He was a man too busy to flush toilets.

Fashion is what seems beautiful now but looks ugly later; art can be ugly at first but it becomes beautiful later.

Love ruined people's lives, the way our parents said drugs could.

My mother was a single parent, a speech therapist who worked for a company that kept a substantial percentage of the income they billed for her to teach stroke victims in convalescent hospitals to talk again.