“I thought that, to be a writer, I had to be a collector of experiences. And I thought every experience worth having, every person worth meeting, only existed after dark. I always remembered something Hicks told me as we lay in bed under the fairy lights of her student room twinkling around her window. “One day we will sit in a nursing home, Dolly, bored out of our minds and staring at the quilt on our laps,” she said. “And all we will have to make us smile are these memories.”