What will you think about this from your deathbed? My husband’s wants had been consistent—to get married, to stay married, to have a child—while mine had become clear the hard way. I had, like so many fools before me, gotten right up to the edge of one life in order to learn I had to run in the opposite direction. If I had been more like him, maybe the deathbed question would have made me stay, but I wasn’t, so I left.

Fiction is a record of what has never happened and yet absolutely happened, and those of us who read it regularly have been changed and challenged and broken down a thousand times over by those nothings, changed by people who never existed doing things that no one quite did, changed by characters that don’t entirely exist and the feelings and thoughts that never exactly passed through them.

However satisfying writing is—that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control—it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and agony of loving.

The philosopher Gillian Rose wrote this in her last complete book before she died of ovarian cancer, but I didn’t know anything about Rose when I picked up the copy of Love’s Work that Sara had left in the living room. I was awake early that day, glad to be alone but also wondering how long I was going to be this glad to be alone. As if it was urgent business I needed to take care of, I surrendered most of the day to this short, circuitous mediation on love and death and sex and longing.

There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy. To be at someone’s mercy is dialectical damage … You may be less powerful than the whole world, but you are always more powerful than yourself.