In this respect we were wonderfully matched. I had been uncertain all my life about how to act, but I, too, could not live a minute an hour a day except in a state of indiscriminate verbal responsiveness: I had a position on everything. What’s more, my anxiety over an absence of response in others was monumental. In the face of silence I talked rapidly and at overwhelming length to fill what I experienced as the void, exhausting myself and those who had brought down on me the punishing need to speak words, words, words. With Joe it was heaven. We had a built-in mechanism for release and
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