In the fall of 1985, the writer William Styron fell into a deep depression. The author of celebrated novels such as The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) and Sophie’s Choice (1979), he ceased writing that autumn and entered a period of intense brooding and near-suicidal despair. He was admitted to the neurological unit of Yale–New Haven Hospital on December 14 and stayed there for almost seven weeks. Rest and treatment allowed him to regain his equilibrium; he returned to his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, in early February, and by that summer was writing again.

Do you like to go to the club, Mr. Buht?” the girls drawled coyly, withdrawing ­vialed potions and little studded mirrors from their purses, unclasping powders, fingering the heavy pendants and charms that clanked and jangled at their beautiful cleavage—and he realized, no.

Have you met the man who’s lost his memory yet?” said a tall stranger, breathing at me. He wore brown tweeds. His hand held his mahogany-colored high ball unsteadily. His presence was offensive.

From far down the long, flat road the bus comes. “Wichita” it says in white letters, and it has come from Denver, from Salt Lake, from San Francisco, and the girl. Lee, has come just that far herself, riding two days and nights out to this western Kansas prairie to see her grandfather for the last time.

I can’t really remember how I met Tommy. I recollect him first as a smooth cloche of shiny light brown hair sporting the slender plume of a cowlick, a head bent over a book in study hall belonging to someone I’d heard was captain of the tennis team, leader of the Crowd and Sally’s steady; then, without transition, he was my friend and he was struggling to explain to me his theory about Sartre’s Nausea as we kicked our way through autumn leaves. 

After an hour’s fishing, Reuel had caught two perch and a sunfish and Peter had caught nothing. He complained good-naturedly to Reuel that he, himself, had done all the suffering while Reuel had had all the luck. 

The first time it happened I could forgive myself. Cutting across the hall from my office and glimpsing a man—pale, wearing metal-rimmed glasses, a thin man in a light-colored rolled-sleeve shirt 

I owe all this to Gabriel Ratchet. It was he who arranged for the round-trip ticket, two seats side by side, on Scandinavian Airlines, got me my reservation in the King Gustaf Holiday Inn, deodorized my

My mother died—I think of terminal sexual climax—on November 5, 1971, while watching goo-goo eyed King Kong finger Fay Wray in his king-sized palm, and I inherited $200,000. King Kong was rolling his watery eyes around, trying to focus on that little white fetus in his left hand, lowering his submarine-sized, black, greasy right index finger toward screaming Fay, Mom was squirming in her seat, the people behind me were yelling “Down in front” because I’m so tall and always had to sit down front with Mom, who was eating hot, buttered popcorn and drinking Diet Pepsi.

The red and cream Santa Fe Trailways bus pitched and rocked along the cracking, heat-racked asphalt. Around the square, jagged Rupp comers, along the dust-haloed fields, across the Twin Bridges, past windbreaks and leaning, paint-less barns, past sagging, rusted barbed wire, and turned left at the cemetery, turned by the yellow, condemned (no fire es-capes) mausoleum.