More reading.

I suspect if Brian Morton's Window Across the River had been written by a woman, it would have been lost to the romance market. It would be so easy to turn this into a book about the relationship between Nora and Isaac, as the dust jacket suggests. That would be too bad, because the book was really about writing, being a writer. The relationship just provides a structure to hold up the real pieces of the story.

It's hard to write about a main character who is also a writer, it's hard not to project your own writing habits and beliefs onto that character, and maybe that's why Morton made Nora the writer instead of Isaac; at least he can distance himself from the main character via gender.

It's a small book (the person @ Amazon who compared it to Anna Karenina was on crack in so many ways--you could kill a small child w/Tolstoy's book, I'm not even sure this one could kill a spider) and I wish it had been longer (oh, if Anna Karenina had only been 700 pages shorter). I would have liked to watch Nora destroy a few more friendships, in fact. Those were the best parts of the books, watching her writing consume her relationships in small bites. Nora does the kind of writing I can't do. She examines the people around her, comprehends them, then writes about the possibilities of their lives. I don't see the people around me for the most part, so I have to make everything up. Nora's a better writer than I'll ever be.