Wallace Stegner is one of my favorite male writers. Two of his novels I adore are Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety. Stegner was a popular English professor at Stanford but he actually graduated from my alma mater, The University of Utah. Even if I hadn't already been a Stegner fan when I came across the quote below, it surely would have converted me! The Stegners are both deceased but in an interview years ago, Wallace Stegner was asked about the role his wife, Mary Page Stegner, had on his life. I adore his answer! It's a tribute to supportive wives everywhere. And it just may be one of the longest sentences I've ever seen!
So, below (with his characteristic wry humor) is what Wallace Stegner said of his wife, Mary, when interviewed by James Hepworth:
"She has had no role in my life except to keep me sane, fed, housed, amused, and protected from unwanted telephone calls, also to restrain me fairly frequently from making a horse's ass of myself in public, to force me to attend to books and ideas from which she knows I will learn something; also to mend my wounds when I am misused by the world, to implant ideas in my head and stir the soil around them, to keep me from falling into a comfortable torpor, to agitate my sleeping hours with problems that I would not otherwise attend to; also to remind me constantly (not by precept but by example) how fortunate I have been to live for fifty-three years with a woman that is bright, alert, charming, and supportive." -Wallace Stegner
