My desk is in rainy London, his was usually in sunny Santa Monica; his weather permeates my head and lifts my spirits morning after morning, whether he is cranky or content, bored or busy, drunk or sober.  If he is anxious about the Berlin crisis, so am I; if he is worried about atomic fallout, so am I; if he is talking with Aldous Huxley about the failure of the air conditioning system in Corbusier's government buildings in Chandigarh, the capitol of Punjab, so am I; if he is reading the Katha Upanishad at Swamiji's birthday puja in the Hollywood Vedanta temple, so am I; if he is having dinner in London with a young and unknown Alan Bennet or Francis Bacon, so am I; if he is intrigued and appalled by the love life of  John Osborne, so am I.

You might say, Get a life.  But the fact is, Isherwood has given me an extra one to live alongside my own already full one.  His diaries have expanded my mind the way mountain climbing expands the lungs.  I am out of breath all the time, sweating to keep up, exhilarated by the view.  So much comes to me from him every day, mingling with my own life and changing its shape.  I raise my sons and also my daughter with, I hope, a lighter touch; [I convert to Catholicism because the goodness I observe resulting from my husband's devoutness seems confirmed by the goodness I observe resulting from Isherwood's]; I realize that if there are things in my life that I genuinely don't want anyone to know, I may not be living in the right way; I see how love must be tenacious through all the boring drudgery of daily tasks, outright failures, bad behaviour, black fear; I believe I can write a novel; I realize with a little shock of self-conscious uncertainty that I already know very personal things which I've read in the diaries about someone I meet at a party for the first time, although he or she knows nothing about me; I love Don Bachardy.

And today, I get to travel to Como and spend the weekend with half a dozen others as the guest of the formidable literary philanthropist Drue Heinz at Casa Ecco.  There, we are to have coffee and later tea on the lawn by the roses, tennis outside the garden walls near the penned geese and the parakeet, a climb to the mountainside chapel here a boy of nineteen threw himself to his death, supper on the terrace overlooking the lake, and above all talk, informally but on the record for the Paris Review, on the theme "Speak Memory: Diaries, Letters and Memoirs in Literature."  The half dozen others are