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And what about the men who, like Algren, wanted home, children and love? In my Boston hotel, I had glimpsed a man sitting with his female companion at a café table overlooking the harbour. He was in love with her, attentive and gentle and kind. She had taken off her sandals and jacket and sunglasse…

Simone de Beauvoir knew that a life without love was a waste of time. Her enduring love for Sartre seems to have been contingent on her living in hotels and not making a home with him, which in the 1950s was more radical than I believe even she realized. She remained committed to Sartre being the e…

To separate from love is to live a risk-free life. What’s the point of that sort of life? As I wheeled my electric bike through the park on the way to my writing shed, my hands had turned blue from the cold. I had given up wearing gloves because I was always grappling in the dark for keys. I stoppe…

One of my own undiscovered talents, I was convinced, was to be a scriptwriter. Everyone I knew was bored with the same old performance of masculinity and femininity written for the major and minor characters. I flash-forwarded to my seventies, and saw myself typing at the edge of my swimming pool i…

Everything was calm. The sun was shining. I was swimming in the deep. And then, when I surfaced twenty years later, I discovered there was a storm, a whirlpool, a blasting gale lifting the waves over my head. At first I wasn’t sure I’d make it back to the boat and then I realized I didn’t want to m…