Jacqueline Kent

And not to mention the woman he was having an affair with when he died.

they all have slightly different perspectives on him, and that actually makes, gives the novel a complexity and a sort of many-facetedness that I think works really nicely, really well.

Actually, yeah, but it's funny, you know.

I was thinking that when I was reading it, I was thinking, well, yep, I understand this.

Yep, I understand that.

But at the same time, Graham, the character of Graham obviously wasn't Ken, although there were similarities because, you know, it's that sort of being a large, ebullient human being that everybody likes, you know, this kind of thing.

And in fact, I guess they were sort of similar.

I didn't think of those when I was reading.

I wasn't thinking, oh, gosh, that's just like Ken or anything like that.

What I was really interested in was her mapping the process of grief for Annie and for other people around her.

And I'm always looking.

I mean, if anything like that's happened to anybody and they read about it, they are obviously going to say, well, it wasn't like that for me or, you know, that's not right or something like that.

But what Sue Miller does is get so many facets of people's relationships with somebody, living and dead,

and manages to make them all work.

I mean, the great surges of emotion that Annie feels, that thing about, as Sue Miller said herself, that she'd like to have him back so she could kill him.

I know that one.

I think many people do.

So it wasn't a case of sort of thinking, oh, this is terrible, I cannot read it.

Because first of all, what happened to me was not uncommon.

It happens to a lot of people.