Maybe I’ve forgotten him because I wrote about him; I’ve always thought that writing about someone is the kiss-off. Nabokov, in Speak, Memory, was apprehensive about writing about his nanny since he liked revisiting her in his thoughts and he knew once he’d committed her to print, he’d lose her. Some people wonder why I’ve not written about them. If they’re a current part of my life, I need to keep them on life support; my husband is Michael Carroll, whom I’ve been with since 1995. I’ve never written about him; he’s too precious to me. My recent fiction is less autobiography and more thought experiment. I assemble my monsters from stolen body parts (his nape, her stutter). Often I want to lead the reader to a better (more compassionate, more forgiving, bolder, more loving) world by picturing it as if it already existed; George Meredith called that process “moral sculpture.”

— The Loves of My Life by Edmund White