Why couldn't she stop talking? Did all lonely people have that problem? - Richard Yates

Like frustrated suburban wives we fed on each other's discontent; we became divided into mean little cliques and subdivided into jealously shifting pairs of buddies, and we pieced out our idleness with gossip.

This tendency to become deeply attached to unlikely people would remain one of [Yates's] most poignant and self-destructive qualities.

All of this, of course, was but a fleeting distraction from Yates's ultimate concern. "Why aren't you writing?" he'd hector Childress and the others—or, if a given story was already written (and set in type), "Why aren't you revising this? You should be constantly revising!" Nothing was finished in Yates's eyes, not even his own best work: "How could I improve it? he'd fire back [...] Such zeal had the same effect on Childress as on Monica two years before—he began to realise that if this was what a true vocation involved, then perhaps he should consider something else.