Julian Barnes

And I had loved her deeply.

And I realized that if I killed myself, then I would in a way be killing her too.

I'd be killing the best memories of her.

They would disappear from the world.

And I just wasn't wouldn't allow myself to do that.

And at that point, it just turned on its head.

And I, I knew I'd have to live with grief for quite a long time.

But I didn't think an answer to the grief was killing myself.

Well, I can't really speak for her, but she once said to me,

when we'd been together for, I don't know, two or three years, she said, I love the way you love Pat.

And Pat had been dead for 13 years or something.

So she is remarkably open and realistic.

It doesn't mean I love her any less.

It's just that I think it's right to remember and to write about the dead.

Well, I used to believe, as I think most people do when they're young, that memory was somehow something rather stable, that it was like

You had something happen to you and you wanted to remember it.

And so you took it along to, you know, one of those storage units which are along the sides of lots of main roads and outside city centres.

And you deposited it there.

And then when you needed that memory, you went there.

You opened the box.