But I did care deeply about the man who would emerge out of that swamp to become the source of love in me. I’d been making a study of that man all my life, and I can tell you: it was never the truth of his circumstances or the facts of his life or the history I’m peppering you with now that made him an object of fascination, but rather the fantastical mind-set and the many fictional selves he hoped to make real, without which life, for him, would not have been worth living.
