“The person who would go off the medications that were possibly keeping him alive was not the person he liked,” she says. “He didn’t want to care about the writing as much as he did.” Soon afterward, he stopped the drug and waited for it to flush out of his body. For the first weeks, he felt that the process was going well. “I feel a bit ‘peculiar,’ which is the only way to describe it,” he emailed Franzen in August, who had checked in to see how he was doing. “All this is to be expected (22 years and all), and I am not unduly alarmed. Phase 4 of
