Dear Friend: I  am in the greatest transition of my life so far and am writing to share this experience with you. I have cancer in my right breast and the medical report is that the cells are a fast growing and invasive kind. . . . I first went to Oliver Cope in Boston the first week in October. The mammogram at that time was inconclusive and a biopsy was done on Tuesday, October 17th, when Andrew and I returned from celebrating Peter’s marriage to Anne Williams in Santa Fe on the 15th. The wedding was a wonderful celebration with all our family and hers together as well as close friends.

I’m gouging (laboriously) in a drainage pipe to avoid paying $20 an hour to somebody who knows how to do it right with proper tools. It is hot, I stop often and, being on top of the pup feeder, I can see into adjoining yards the same old mess except for a pretty (sort of) microwave oven, on chrome legs.

The Sea, The Sea opens in a contemplative mood. Charles Arrowby, a famous playwright and director, has at the age of sixty retired from a frantic career to an eccentric house on a promontory overlooking the sea. What he wants, or so he says, is to live quietly, looking back on his life and writing about it at random. For awhile he does so. In loose diary form he writes of the place where he is living, his daily routine, his elaborately simple cuisine — making this one of the tastiest books in recent memory — and dWelling at some length on people and episodes from his past. The reader settles into this pace, and looks forward to a long comfortable novel.

How many novels have you read lately that challenge stereotypes, while giving you characters you can love and hate, with a plot and an ending that satisfy both your sense of what must happen and what you wish would happen?​

I have watched most of my good human friends come and go from Chapel Hill, but most of my favorite trees are still around. It’s just natural to enjoy watching friends grow, and it’s also wise for indigents like myself to keep in close touch with friends who have upward mobility.