Emily Stone

"In this first-person narrative of a deliberately repressed personality, Emily Stone and her lover Peter Meadows (later her husband) share a fastidious distaste for the untidiness of humanity in its normal state -- a compulsive need to attenuate emotional entanglements. Both of these pathological personalities are at once repelled and attracted by frank, generous human commitment as represented by Emily's oldest friend, Sasha Courtney. Sasha's fatal illness releases Peter into the world of human feeling (in his case, a lifelong struggle with psychosis) and imprisons Emily more deeply in…