And she told this story: “When I was writing the last pages of ‘The Benefactor,’ I didn’t eat or sleep or change clothes for days. At the very end, I couldn’t even stop to light my own cigarettes. I had David stand by and light them for me while I kept typing.” When she was writing the last pages of “The Benefactor” it was 1962, and David was 10.

Suddenly Susan: An Excerpt from a book by Sigrid Nunez – NYTimes.com.