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Of course, it isn’t my business, Olivia continued, and it was never my business, and anyway it doesn’t matter what she did to me—it’s so far in the past now, and I always believed she, of all people, she always had the capability to change. It was what attracted me in the first place, you know, how…

When I moved into X’s loft in June 1989 it had seemed empty in a robbed way—bare nails on the wall, hardly any furniture—though I didn’t ask why. We spent nearly all our time at home, especially that first summer when heat waves made the city hellish. When we ventured out at night, everything seeme…

In late 1985, she spent a month alone in a cabin in rural Vermont, then two weeks in Japan, though she took no photographs, and only a few notes, and brought nothing home with her. The only postcard she seems to have sent from Tokyo was back to herself: “I can’t understand why I made this trip, exc…

“Whose thigh is being stabbed here?” the host asks.

“This one,” X said, pointing to one of the drawings.

“What I mean is—metaphorically. What is the metaphor of the thigh?”

“It’s not a metaphor,” X says, almost whispering, staring at the floor. “It’s a part of a leg.”†

“She wasn’t afraid to be hostile … and that was something I was very interested in at the time. Unfortunately, I’ve always been one of those people who wants to be liked, one of the most terrible weaknesses a person can have, but what can you do? Of course, everyone’s virtues come with equal and op…