Moreover, as he began organizing and revising the stories for a collection, he became more excited by how powerful they were as a group. They centered on fear, longing, anxiety, depression, and boundaries, the challenge of being human in an inhospitable time. Many of the stories examined courtship behavior—his, of course, which was particularly nauseating to him at times—but also the entire back-and-forth that he had witnessed between men and women, fortified by the many stories he’d heard in recovery and in relationships.
