Have you ever been involved with someone so hell-bent on being your muse that he (or she) gauged your fidelity by what you wrote?
Never. Unlike Harry, I have no tolerance for being controlled by sexual jealousy or by anything else. I created Luz out of my own extreme distaste for, and desire to expose in writing, whatever that mechanism is in certain women that causes them to spy without permission on their lovers’ or husbands’ emails or texts or conversations (or poetry) to gauge whether or not they’re being unfaithful, and then to interrogate them obsessively and rip them to shreds and declare vengeance on the so-called “other woman” and throw things and stamp around screaming.
There is something in that loony, pathetic, deranged behavior—most of all a delusional sense of entitled ownership of another person, but also a grasping, desperately insecure possessiveness—that makes me cringe. Luz’s character is based on the wives and girlfriends of men I’ve known. I’ve never behaved that way, and I’ve never been in a relationship with a man who behaved that way. (It wouldn’t last long, to put it mildly.) But it was lots of fun to write about.
