My novel was stuck one hundred pages in. I had not been able to commit a word to paper since we had moved to New York six months before. Sometimes a writer gets stuck because she is at a loss as to what comes next. Sometimes a writer knows too much about what comes next and is paralyzed by her own puny prophecies.

I was both.

My novel was about a sixteen-year-old girl who falls in love with a forty-seven-year-old man, the tired plot of countless novels and films by middle-aged men in the second half of the twentieth century. My twist was that I would tell the story from the teenage girl’s point of view. The first titillating chapters had come easily. In my fictional account, the older man sleeps with the mother before the daughter has a chance to seduce him. I guess I thought the age difference wasn’t risqué enough. In any case, the teenager and the old man’s improbable love story somehow rights itself and…

I could not imagine how the story would end.

Lolita and Humbert Humbert marry and live happily ever after? Who would believe such a story? Who would believe a scene in which Lolita takes Humbert Humbert for cataract surgery? Or worries about his prostate? How would I compose the scene where Lolita arranges hospice care for the man who supposedly stole her childhood? Wouldn’t I have to include the day Lolita is at Humbert Humbert’s bedside when he dies? Isn’t that what happily ever after means? A love that lasts long enough that one lover is there to close the other lover’s eyelids?