Social experiences are like that. They are not lived by just anyone, but by individuals with particular strengths. The function of the novel, in additon to amusement, is to remind us of ambiguity, ambivalence, variety of viewpoint. Facing the notion that I might write a self-help book, I decided that my way of making it correspond to a serious understanding of relationships would be to draw on techniques of contemporary fiction, in the belief that the fiction of our time represents the reality of our time as well as it can be represented in written narrative. Images of others are creative acts.
Relationships are creative acts.
At the same time, the reader knows that he or she is not Iris, enmeshed with Randall, so that the narrative retains a constant element of oddness. At the heart of the book is the theme of transparency and opacity. We know others in an instant, and yet after years of marriage important aspects of our partner may remain hidden. My hope is that the use of the second person enacts that theme. The second person is often the language of self-help books.