The stories she was writing through 1961 and 1962 reflected these complications and sufferings. The young woman in “The Party” endures an evening of her lover’s cold and dismissive manner. As she is leaving his apartment, he comments on her “mournful face. Not tragic, of course—just mournful.” She responds, tearfully, “You should be trying to build up my confidence … instead of doing everything to demolish it.” And he: “‘Confidence is one of those things we try to instill into others and then hasten to dispel as soon as it puts in an appearance.’ ‘Like love,’ she observed, turning to the door. ‘Like love,’ he said. “Exactly.’” She wrote even more directly from life in the twinned stories “A Place in the Country” and “The Picnic,” which tell of a young woman’s affair with her cousin’s husband, the discovery of the affair, and its consequences. These fictional characters are starkly different from the protagonists in Shirley’s real-life drama with Tex and Wicky Goldschmidt. Nonetheless, parts of “A Place in the Country” retrace events described in her diaries. And the story’s climax, the scene where Clem tells Nettie that they must part, is drawn almost verbatim:

“I think I told you I no longer loved my wife.”
“Yes,” she said.
“I only said that once, didn’t I?”
“Several times,” she answered, unaccommodatingly.
“Several times, then,” he agreed, with a touch of impatience. “In any case—I see now that I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, that it wasn’t true.”