The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

I don’t like men who leave behind them a trail of weeping women, said W. H. Auden. Who would have hated you.

When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, in 1862, So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.

What are we, Apollo and I, if not two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other?

And this kicker: Writing in the first person is a known sign of suicide risk.

am mourning you as a lover would. As a wife would.

I remember telling him about my dream, the man in the dark coat, in the snow. Was he beckoning—hurry up, hurry hurry—or was he warning me away?