Perhaps no one gets closer to understanding [how stories really get written] than a writer’s wife. But what must a woman endure for that understanding? For if the writing process can be broken into three simple steps, the preparation, in many a famous case, seems to consist of innumerable antic rounds of carousing, fretting, talking, and whoring. And who wants that? For whom is such an exchange a worthy bargain? Or in other words, what woman in her right mind marries a writer? (Not, of course, that I mean to say that writer’s husbands have it easy—being Leonard Woolf wasn’t a day at the beach—but this is Chicklit, and so I’m choosing to focus on the female half of this endeavour.)