How thin the veil

""So this is my return to Traverse City, Michigan. Not to the sprawling white house on Washington Street, which all of us loved, but to Traverse City State Hospital, in other days bluntly called an insane asylum." Picture a slightly decrepit, snow-covered state hospital. A depressed writer checks himself into the asylum and is placed in the ward for alcoholics and the mildly insane. Under the care of a wise and patient, chain-smoking doctor, our hero examines his suicidal motivations, while at the same time keeping a writer's eye on the inmates and their almost universal malady of "woman…