I know exactly what you mean when you say your ex-husband was a writer and editor and your current partner is not, and that this works much better, allowing you space. After my first marriage, I was never again attracted to literary or even especially intellectual men. I went for visual artists. I wanted my literary and intellectual life to be my own. I think it’s important that you note the difference in occupation. Ambitious, intelligent young women tend to overvalue a mate who does the same work, but it’s more likely a liability. A contemporary version of Dorothea Brooke and Mr Casaubon.

A good first marriage is luck. A good second marriage should not be. The overall tone of Parallel Lives, its attitude toward marriage, derives from my own experience as a young woman discovering that the person I thought was autonomous, me, once I got married, no longer was. I was part of a couple. That is a brutal transition in life. I was too inexperienced to know at that age what kind of person would satisfy my emotional needs over the long haul. I hoped then and still hope that Parallel Lives might help other people make this transition, with a greater understanding of the dynamics of couples.

But I feel I am avoiding the direct thrust of your question: is something lost or gained by sticking with the personal, resisting sublimation as you put it. You do gain great power by rising above the personal. One of the most abused battle cries of my generation was ‘The personal is political’. This has led to an ocean of banalities in public life – politics and journalism both – so that it seems every speech, every investigative article, must begin with a personal narrative. The personal is political only if you are a good enough writer or a good enough politician to make it so. If you want to know just how boring the personal can be, hang out with old people. It is one of the great tragedies of aging that just as every detail of every experience you’ve had in your life becomes precious to you, you have probably lost the ability to make it interesting to anyone else not assigned you as a school research project. You are desperate to tell your story, but your story, to your listeners, is ‘the past’, a place in which they have only polite interest or which they will mine for their own art. And that is how it should be.

Thank you so much, Sheila. Between us, something else was just occurring to me. Here again, the difference in our ages comes into play. At a certain point, legality is no longer the issue. Neither is love. I no longer wear my wedding ring, to signal something not to others (that I’m available) but to myself (that my husband is gone, even if I’m the only one who knows it). At ninety-eight, he is just not the man I married when he was in his sixties. He has dementia and is more a remnant than a person. Still, I am morally and practically responsible for him. We’ve transcended the legal and the emotional and reached a level of pure commitment. It’s true for him, too. I am the only person who exists in his world. I am certain there are many other elderly people in similar situations, mostly with the women having to take care of the men. I don’t know how the saintly people we see in movies and read about in memoirs do it!