Helpmeet

I'm a little (just a *little*--carrying around Angle of Repose like it's a bible counts as "a little," right?) obsessed with Wallace Stegner right now. I just found this quote from an interview, in which he talks about his wife, Mary (who just passed away this May):

She has had no role in my life except to keep me sane, fed, housed, amused, and protected from unwanted telephone calls. Also to restrain me fairly frequently from making a horse's ass of myself in public, to force me to attend to books and ideas from which she knows I will learn something; also to mend my wounds when I am misused by the world, to implant ideas in my head and stir the soil around them, to keep me from falling into a comfortable torpor, to agitate my sleeping hours with problems that I would not otherwise attend to; also to remind me constantly (not by precept but by example) how fortunate I have been to live for fifty-three years with a woman that bright, alert, charming, and supportive.

I suppose this is why he is able to write so movingly and convincingly about marriage.