There is some poet—it might have been Lowell—who said about his writing, “I want to break your heart.” There’s an arrogance in that that has always bothered me. You leave my heart alone! But I do have faith that, anytime I’m sharing a moment of true feeling, it will be recognizable to the reader. What interested me most about the male mentor character in The Friend—far more than, say, the moral question of whether a professor should have an affair with a grad student—was what happens to the identity and self-esteem of such a person when he loses the power to seduce younger women, and when no one is interested in reading his work anymore. All of that contributes to that character’s not wanting to live. It’s much like the case of the very beautiful woman in What Are You Going Through whose identity is so wrapped up in what she looks like that her life is completely transformed when she becomes, merely by aging, not ugly but simply ordinary-looking.

I’m interested in what loss does to people. As you go through life, you lose so much, one thing after another. Some things are taken away from you, other things you’re forced to give up. And you lose loved ones. Parents, friends, animal companions. I’ve gotten a huge amount of mail from readers about the losses they’ve experienced.