At... at the time, was I upset? I must have been. I don't think exceedingly upset, but I must have been upset sometimes and... and frightened probably.

So there we are. It's 1946 and now we come to 2000, the year 2000, half a century later, and I need a... I need an Aunt Ethel. I need something horrible to witness in my book. And so I invented Alvin, the... the cousin who goes to war… for the British, I think, because America's not in the war. He goes to war and he comes back with half a leg, and he's... he's in bed in my room. And then I have to invent what happens. Well, it's a pleasure to invent what happens. I... I have an idea what it's like to... be in the room with somebody who's in terrible trouble, you know, and... but I... I veer away from that almost immediately because the trouble he's in is different from the trouble she was in. He's a young man, and so on. So I went out and I got some books on amputations. I probably still have them if you want to borrow them. But I got them from 1940. I wanted to see what the amputations looked like and what the prosthetic devices looked like in 1945, so I got a book on prosthetic devices. You can get all these online. Anything you want, you could get, but I had to get them from then – 1940s books. And I was, of course, as fascinated as I was when I was studying gloves for American Pastoral. So it was less... less like research and more like studying.