In July 1974. after a long afternoon with my friend Barbara Myerhoff, the anthropologist best known for the renowned Number Our Days, I left for a summer in England. Barbara, realizing she was ill, gathered up the pages of a novel I had just finished writing and went into the hospital. Barbara was 39; I was 40. The letters that Barbara and I called our Co-Respondence began that summer, and when our regular letters stopped, in 1976, we had written over 600 pages. The correspondence begun when we were apart continued unabated even when we were living just a few minutes away from one another in Los Angeles.