A Bruce Roberts' Anecdote

I came across the following in an email from Stephanie Caruana, alleged author of the Skeleton Key. She is asking him about the Good Housekeeping cover pictured in the previous post:

(Sun, 30 Sep 2001)

I asked Roberts about it one day. As I recall, it was the day I picked him up and drove him home from the hospital. On the way, we stopped and satdown on a small bench on a hilltop overlooking San Francisco.

I said something like: "You remember that thing you wrote about Mary Jo's Liver?

He nodded.

I said, "Well...it seems to me that that may be the most astonishing pieceof writing I ever read. But I read it at Mae's, and I don't have a copy. Could I have one?"

He said, "I'll look for it and give you one sometime." (Buried somewhere in the stack of stuff he had written two years earlier. Ancient history. But he never did.)

I said, "How did you happen to write that?" (It's different from anything else I have seen from him.)

He shrugged. "I was in a funny mood."