Stephen Rowley

But what I love about that as sort of a moral question is that I think both answers are

defendable morally defendable right i do think the purpose of life is exploration and so how can the lure of you know the answers to a noble question to the universe by a potentially more advanced species how could that not be something that you would be drawn to but at the same time our job as writers is also exploration right it's it's but our exploration is more internal i think you could spend an entire lifetime with a person and not know everything

there is to know about them you know in some ways marriage is is a very brave form of exploration too or certainly what we do as writers exploring the human condition we'll never understand it all entirely so there's there's endless amounts of exploration to be done here so it's just which are you kind of drawn to and so i thought it would be fun to write a novel from that standpoint i didn't know it would be quite as literal when i began i thought it would be more metaphoric

I write a lot at the intersection of grief and humor.

So it is, you know, the humor in this is a bit absurd, the premise.

But also, you know, I thought it would be a metaphor for loss, for a breakup, for divorce, for a partner's, you know, suicide perhaps or death.

When you want to ask questions of your partner and they're no longer there to be able to answer them.

thought to go okay well if that person's not there then who am I yeah first of all we're talking in decades here how we're so young and vibrant how are how are we talking in these great expanses of time I don't understand it but yeah I do think you know that you can lose yourself a little bit in a relationship and in this book this couple has been together for 30 years

Jesse was quite young when they met.

Norman was a little bit older, but he was drawn to someone who was a little more experienced, a little more stable.

But over those 30 years, he stepped into his own and he no longer wants to be in Norman's shadow.

So he didn't really want Norman to leave, per se, but he is ready to stretch and really come into his own.

And so it's an interesting cross-section for him.

It was very fascinating to me to explore this within the concept of a queer relationship, because marriage is something that is relatively new.

Certainly commitment is not, but marriage itself is.

So to explore that institution a little bit and what it means is from someone who didn't grow up expecting to be married or expecting that this was the path that their life was going to take was very interesting, as well as the thought of aging for me as a gay man.

I don't know when I came out in the early 1990s.

that I would live to see this age.

And so what does it mean, sort of middle age and late middle age for gay men when the generation above ours is tragically and largely missing?

There are not a lot.