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Happy weekend from the cheating husband

My grandmother kept letters documenting the fallout from my grandfather’s affair (with the woman who became his next wife). In this missive (below), he urges my grandmother to leave her parents’ place and come back to him. The language becomes increasingly unhinged and self-pitying; I suspect he was getting progressively shitfaced as he wrote. Some notable passages (typos reproduced from . . .

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Too far down: Writing and the emotions

Being prone to depression and obsessive, cyclical thinking, I have found that focusing too intently — by which I really mean, too emotionally — on the book I’m writing jeopardizes my mental equilibrium. It also clouds my prose and diverts the path of the action, and causes my characters to become inert and maudlin and to spend several paragraphs contemplating . . .

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