Sue Miller

And his wife, his first wife, he's been married before, has a theory that the reason he adores her so much is because he used to be a very homely man and then kind of embraced her.

a lot of changes of the 70s and became kind of sexy in a way, I guess.

And his first wife feels that Annie doesn't know the real Graham, and therefore, and that he's very, very grateful to her because she sort of has free to see it out of his league in a certain way, or would have been for the former Graham.

He's had a radical, as I say, transformation.

So there's that, that she's someone he feels is very elegant, immensely desirable from the moment he sets eyes on her.

And then they've evolved a very comfortable way of living together, very, very intimate.

And Annie is intimate with him in a way she isn't with anyone else.

He's her confidant.

And there's a lot of sort of tolerance back and forth.

They each let the other have a lot of room.

Graham has a harder time with that.

He sort of has this appetite for people, too, and mostly for Annie.

And Annie sometimes feels, as I say about her early in the book,

that he's overtaken her, that he's engulfed or lost somehow in him.

And actually after he dies, which is not a secret because it's a flap copy on the book after he says it, I think, he dies fairly early on in the book.

And one of the things she feels after that is that she shouldn't have let him engulf her so much.

She just feels there's nothing left, nothing left at all.

I don't know if that answers your question quite.

It came to me as being very important as I was writing the book.

I had planned to have all of them in there as I was sort of laying it out to myself.