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I did truly admire the second act—the one so many people resented. It was about Art’s obsessive romance with Marilyn Monroe. He had denied, foolishly, that the story of that relationship in the play was based on his personal history, denied that his character, Maggie, was based on Marilyn. But he p…

In the last years of his life, my mother found the task of taking care of a four-story house beyond what was left of her strength, and she plotted with one of her sons to move elsewhere. Father resented the move, particularly because she had made the decision, not he. “She don’t talk to me on that …

BARBARA told me she was pregnant.

There are certain common rules of human behavior I believe in and others I don’t. Barbara had been with me, devoted and loving, for a long time. She’d been the only one who’d encouraged me in my screenplay writing. She wanted a child desperately, had tried for y…

I’ve been having throbbing headaches too, frightening because I don’t know what brings them on. So I’ve been beginning to feel the cold wind Time makes as it rushes by. Heeding those warnings, I’ve determined to live what is left of my life on the precipice—that is, recklessly. The word “reckless” …

What I like about this ending is its bittersweet ambivalence, full of what Bill had learned from his own life: that you have to accept limited happiness, because all happiness is limited, and that to expect perfection is the most neurotic thing of all; you must live with the sadness as well as with…