Sue Miller

And he thinks about how much braver she is than he, you know, putting her work out there and how he had forgotten to ask her about it and how ashamed he feels of that.

But that's her life.

And that is the way he feels about the creative people

And I think part of it is, you know, he's not really a creative person except having created himself more or less.

But he's just deeply responsive to people who are artists in one way or another and have the courage and probably just puts things out for people to read or look at and judge them and how terribly frightening that is and how brave it is and how he just has this enormous admiration for people

uh, the people that he knows through the bookstore shop too.

Um, and for, you know, the people that Annie knows in the world of photography, but, and they, you know, at the bookstore, obviously they have, um, he and Annie are sort of seen as sort of the, after each reading, um, a party for the, for the reader who comes to do the reading at the bookstore.

And that's, that's part of his just joy.

I mean, he wants to have a party.

He, there's something in him that I think is, um,

That's his participation in this world, in this world of artistry and art and writing and photography and painting and so forth.

The people that he wants to live among, the people that he does live among.

So it's part of a radical change in him that happened at a certain point in his life.

And that he's embraced completely and thoroughly down to the clothes he wears, which he sort of changed at a certain point too.

Well, I do think Tessa Hadley did that wonderfully in her, like, The Past, that novel, and The Master Bedroom, where there's the mother, the failing mother, who she's living with, who dies, and, of course, the book.

There are obviously a lot of, again, 19th century books, but I always liked to really explore the relationship with children as they become adults, or even when they're very, very young.

My first book had a three-year-old character, a good mother, and I think,

And I put a lot of energy into making her feel very real.

I'd actually written it partly in response to, there was a novel by Updike that I read in my relative's youth, in which the character that he's created is a Jewish writer who just is someone who loves to sleep around with people.

And at one point he's sleeping with his mistress, and the child, in this case a little boy, comes and gets into bed with him, and Beck, the character,