Although Philip's dislike of my daughter was transparent, as was his fierce competiveness for my affections, I hadn't recognized how deep his prejudice ran where she was concerned. I was caught in the middle with emotions and responsibilities tugging away on both sides; it was a no-win situation. Placing Philip's needs over Anna's meant hanging on to an important relationship at the price of my daughter's trust in her mother's protection; putting Anna's first meant keeping faith but surrendering a bond I felt with all my heart I couldn't live without. It was a choice between the security of a companion and the welfare of a daughter. Anna was asked to move out. She was 18.
The circumstances were terrible: Anna witnessed someone she viewed as an outsider calling the shots in her own home and her mother unable to set any boundaries; understandably, she felt angry and betrayed. In addition, Henry Wood House, the student hostel to which she would move, was located across the Thames in one of the least salubrious neighborhoods in London.
But Philip had his way, and it has taken me a long time to accept the repercussions of his calculated move barely two years into our relationship. It wasn't all about hatred for my daughter, though animosity may have been the catalyst- it was about control. Philip made character assessments the way surgeons make incisions. He knew I would make any compromise to support our relationship. If I was willing to jettison my daughter in this manner, what could I ever deny him? These confrontations left me debilitated and unsure, and were to shape many of my future decisions.
He also understood that part of me that was afraid of him. I had once seen a facet of his character that shocked me deeply. Angry over something I frankly no longer remember, he turned toward me with the face of an uncontrollable and malevolent chld in a temper tantrum; his lower jaw thrust forward, his mouth contorted, his dark eyes narrowed. This expression of out-and-out hatred went far beyond anything I could possibly have done to provoke it. I rememer thinking, with total clarity, Who is that?
That feral, unflinching, hostile, accusative, but strangely childlike face would appear increasingly in our years together, sometimes without warning, frequently without provocation, always out of proportion to the events that had given rise to it. The power Philip held over me wouldn't have existed without his ability also to be a tender, thoughtful, and understanding man. Just as I feared the appearance of this "other" Philip Roth to such a degree that, in order to avoid him, there was almost nothing I wouldn't have done to make him disappear. I also feared to lose the Philip who was my dearly loved companion.
When Philip and I were alone in Connecticut, our time together was often sweet and gentle. There were good and there were bad times, as in every relationship. When he had left the house in the morning for his studio, I would occasionally feel lonely and isolated in the depths of the country, but I found ways to make life more interesting. There were projects to work on, walks to be taken, meals to be discussed and prepared, and yoga lessons to be learned and practiced.
Late in the afternoon, Philip would leave his studio, take a long walk, and come into the house to light a log fire. Reading books, eschanging books, discussing books: this was an essential method of communication between us in all the years we were together. My reading was mainly was mainly for my own pleasure, for historical research, or as a distraction from everyday life. But for Philip it was his most vital and consequential activity.
The widely held view as that Philip's gifts shone most brightly in the realm of the savagely amusing, but his work also contained a tenderness that wasn't often remarked upon. The first book he dedicated to me, The Professor of Desire, in which he described life in the country with a former companion, was more lyrical than many of his later works. The Ghost Writer, the first of three novels tracing the life of Philip's alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, was also set in a fictionalized version of the Connecticut house, and was a beautiful chronicle of the reclusive life of an author.
When I came to prepare, a few years later, dramatic readings of Charlotte Bronte, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf, our immersion in works by those authors came to life in a remarkable way. With Philip's advice, I prepared each performance with great care, and he proved to be a brilliant interpreter of character for theatrical presentation. To this day, I approach reading in the same scrupulous manner to which he spurred me.
In 1987, Philip began to suffer from insomnia, lack of appetite, difficulty in concentrating on his work- even to a layman, textbook symptons of anxiety and depression. He became more and more exhausted and, in the end, completely collapsed.
He went to his psychoanalyst, who prescribed two drugs, Halcion and Xanax. Initially, Philip felt some relief, and was able to sleep without the dreams that had recently haunted him for long hours. At this pint he began a harrowing, regressive slide back into his early childhood. Philip's mother had died in August, 1981, and now, suddenly, he became her little boy again. He clung to me in a way he never had before, his entire body trembling with the desperate need for maternal comfort and reassurance. It was a beautiful summer, and the house was filled with brilliant sunlight. "Why don't we walk in the fields?" I asked. "Why don;t we go for a swim?" He had become terrified of the water, and made slapping movements with the back of his hands like a child's first awkward paddle. "No, don't make me stay in the pool," he cried. There was nothing I could do to help. Philip disintegrated before my eyes into a disoriented, terrified infant.
To my knowledge Philip had never experienced a depression of such intensity. Had the doctors diagnosed his condition during this first episode and treated him with the appropriate medication, I believe he might have been able to control this devastating illness. We had little help and no advice; alone in Connecticut, we spent the better part of three months hoping against hope that his despondency would somehow come to an end by itself. From my point of view, Philip's mental coming apart is almost impossible to describe; but from his, there's a grueling and sobering account in his 1993 nover, Operation Shylock, which is neither inaccurate or overblown. It was just as he recorded it, with the added factor, unmentioned in the book, that I was dangerously close to going down with him.
My strength- no, my endurance- was fading fast. Philip suggested asking his old friend Bernard Avishai, a fellow writer, to come from Boston and stay with us for the next few weeks and I agreed. I am convinced that Bernie saved Philip's life. Less than a year before this episode, Bernie had suffered a similar breakdown. He also had been prescribed Halcion, and become suicidally depressed. Philip, who had feared he was losing his mind, was relieved to hear that his terrible situation could possibly have been drug-induced. For, in that case, he could see some end to the labyrinth in which he had become lost. Bernie put him in touch with his own doctor in Boston, who agreed with the hypothesis. With the encouragement of our longtime friend and doctor, C. H. Havelle, Philip agreed with Bernie that the only way out of the inferno he was experiencing was to go "cold turkey" that very night. Bernie offered to stay with Philip during the next 72 hours, which he warned would be agonizing for Philip to endure- and he stressed, for me to witness.
My first reaction was distrust: I didn't know Bernie well at the time, and was extremely protective of Philip. But the situation was desperate. I moved out of the bedroom and let Bernie take over his care. Philip spent the next three nights alone with Bernie; in the morning they both emerged from their sleepless ordeal drained and shaken. I don't know what Philip experienced during those nights; he never spoke of it. By the time Bernie left us a week later, Philip, although weak and frightened of a relapse, was already on the path to recovery. We spent some time on Martha's Vineyard with William Styron and his wife Rose. For Philip to be with such an old friend helped him restore his spirits.
Sometime thereafter, he began sporadically to write again. he started on a new book; it was to be called Deception. Although his custom had always been, when he was enthusiastic about his work, to discuss it openly, this time the book was barely mentioned. I had no idea what he was writing about, nor any suspicion that he might have a reason to be less than informative about the contents of the new book.
I rarely visited his studio, which was only blocks from our apartment in New York City. I always respected it as his private territory. On one occasion I recieved unexpected good news in the mail and ran excitedly, letter in hand, to visit him. His reaction was cold, alarmed and unwelcoming. I told him I would never interrupt him there again and left. When he completed Deception, he didn't invite me to read the material, as he had previously done with other books at this stage. The manuscript sat on his desk for three weeks; then, early one morning, he brought it to me before he left for the studio.
I eagerly opened the folder. Almost immediately I came upon a passage about a self-hating, Anglo-Jewish family with whom he lives in England. Oh well, I thought, he doesn't like my family. There was a description of his working studio in London, letter-perfect and precise. Then I reached the depictions of all the girls who come over to have sex with him- in the most convoluted positions, preferably on the floor. As Philip always insisted that the critics were unable to distinguish his self-invention from his true self, I mindfully accepted these Eastern-European seductresses as part of his "performance" as a writer; but I was not so certain. Finally, I arrived at the chapter about his remarkably uninteresting, middle-aged wife, who, as described, is nothing better than an ever spouting fountain of tears constantlly bemoaning the fact that his other women are so young. She is an actress by profession, and- as if hazarding a guess would spoil the surprise lying in store- her name is Claire.
I no longer gave a damn whether these girlfriends were erotic fantasies. What left me speechless- though not for long- was that he would paint a picture of me as a jealous wife who is betrayed over and over again. I found the portrait nasty and insulting and his use of my name completely unacceptable.
Far earlier than usual, Philip returned home, carrying in his pocket an exquisite gold snake ring with an emerald head from Bulgari on Fifth Avenue. I was waiting for him, shaking with rage. I told him he had used me most shabbily. I told him I wanted my name out of the book. I told him that was the end of the that; there would be no discussion. He tried to explain that he had called his protaganist Philip, therefore to name the wife Claire would add to the richness of the texture. I replied I didn't care whether it did or not. I reminded him that, like him, I was a public figure and would seek any means at my disposal- even legal means- to have my name removed. For once, confronted by my opposition, Philip agreed to remove it from the novel. Then I accepted his guilt offering. I wear it to this day.
In early January, 1990, I asked him to marry me. After 15 years together, after all we had been through in the course of our relationship, I thought that it was time he made me his wife, that marriage would be of immense significance to me. I made it clear to him that, whatever he decided, I would remain with him. He said he needed some time to consider the idea. From any other man this would have been an outright rejection; but after living with Philip, I knew him well enough to understand that he never mae a commitment of any dind with giving every aspect a profound consideration.
I left for London to appear at the Almeida Theatre in a revival of Isen's rarely performed play When We Dead Awaken. Three weeks later, I received a typewritten letter that read: "Dearest Actress, I love you. Will you marry me?" It was signed, "An Admirer." It was typical of Philip to answer in this fashion: a humorous- and, in this instance, a charming-twist on the most serious decision a man and woman can make together; a nameless, impersonal reply to that most personal of requests. Although the time in Connecticut was three A.M., I telephoned to say, "Yes. Yes. I will." That early morning will remain with me always as one of absolute and radiant happiness.
We were married on April 19, 1990, in the apartment of our longtime friend Barbara Epstein, an editor of The New York Review of Books. Barbara and I filled the apartment with white flowers. Bernie made a beautiful toast hailing the union of "best friends," which was silently followed by the raising of glasses and sipping of champagne. Philip added a wry addendum of his own, in which he noted that our assembled friends, having waited expectantly so many years for this day, could finally get some sleep, it was received with cheers and applause. It was a wonderful beginning to our married life.
But something ominous had taken place during the interval between the time of my proposal and Philip's reply which I had chosed to disregard. Had I done otherwise, it would have given me the clearest message that the marriage was no more than Philip paying lip service to my desire to be married. He had consulted his lawyer Helene Kaplan, and with her counsel a prenuptial agreement was drawn up, a document glaring in its absence of any provision for me should Philip decide, for any reason whatsoever, to seek a divorce. Under its conditions, he could terminate our marriage at will, with no further responsibility toward his wife; the apartment, possessions, everything reverted to him. I signed these papers two days prior to our wedding. So committed was I at this point to becoming Philip's wife, I accepted the insult offered, and chose to ignore it. I know that, had I objected, there would have been no marriage. We had been together 15 years, surely time enough for him to be certain I was scarcely out for his money. I wanted to be his wife more than I had ever wanted anything: enough to turn my face away from this blow to my pride and my integrity.
After so many years of living together, I was Philip's wife at last. Often he would remark that, even to his own surprise, our marriage was giving him the greatest happiness; his only regret, he said, was that we hadn't married earier, when we might have had a child. All the strain that had grown between us seemed to vanish. The solitary months we began to enjoy again in Connecticut were balanced by the invigorating time we spent in New York. It was not to last long, however. By the end of the second year, Philip's confidence in our relationship seemed to falter; he began to withdraw from me emotionally. Perhaps too much domestic harmony had become an obstacle to his creativity. Something unspoken was causing a rift, which came soon after in the form of another unexpected and totally unwarranted attack on my daughter.
Anna had been to visit us in Connecticut twice since our marriage- only for a few days at a time. I was happy to have her, and was under the impression that Philip and Anna had reached a kind of truce. Without warning that something in her last visit had upset him, Philip handed me another letter- there had been a gap of many years since the last of these written injunctions- this time demanding that Anna was to limit her visits to Connecticut to only one week per year. He also made it clear that when Anna and I visited New York together, he would prefer that she not stay in our apartment. I decided that the only way to deal with his petty belligerence was to humor him and take no notice. I kept my relationship with Anna secret from Philil, and kept the contents of Philip's letter from Anna.
In the winter of 1992, Philip completed Operation Shylock. He was more optimistic about this book than about any of his previous works. He talked about it incessantly, reading passages to me that were dazzingly incisive and entertaining. I was sure he would one again confound his critics with his superimposition of one identity upon another upon another, while delighting his admirers, who, under the spell o fhis masterful game, understood and appreciated his multicolored weave of fantasy and fact. The sections recounting his Halcion-induced breakdown, recording the trial of John Demjanjuk in Israel, and a scene devising a meeting between a "real" Philip Roth and a "fake" Philip Roth were some of the best things he had ever achieved, navigating the difficult course between investigation and invention with a kind of genius. His publishers, Simon & Schuster, his friends, and his agent, Andrew Wylie, agreed that the book was, without a doubt, his masterpiece.
As with the first book that came at the beginning of our relationship, The Professor of Desire, he dedicated Operation Shylock to me. On the occasion of Philip's 60th birthday he was feted and honored both in New York and in his hometown of Newark for his achievements as an American writer; a documentary was also completed for British television. He was invited to go on tour, giving readings from his last book, Patrimony. Though he had developed a deep-seated fear of public readings and asked me to come with him to give him confidence, his performances were outstanding and often even inspired. It was one of the few occasions in our life that we traveled together.
During that month, I accompanied him to San Francisco, when an unexpectedly early review of Operation Shylock appeared in Time magazine. I read it first; it called the book superb. I ran back to our hotel and showed the article to Philip. As further notices appeared, however, it gradually became obvious he wasn't going to have the critical triumph he had confidently expected.
It appeared that this great novel was not to be a favorite with the critics. Although both Alfred Kazin in The New York Observer and Harold Bloom in The New York Review of Books praised it generously, John Updike's grudging estimation in The New Yorker came as a great blow to Philip's morale. In bookstores, sales, which had started promisingly, began to fizzle out. Time suddenly withdrew its offer of a cover story.
Despite the intensity of his disappointment, Philip remained externally self-possessed. We returned to Connecticut and tried to come to terms with our unmet expectations. The crest of the emotional wave he had been riding before the publication of the book transmuted into its polar opposite.
Philip began to suffer from a recurrence of his previous severe depression. By the summer it had become obvious that he was extremely ill, and quickly plunging headlong into the dark territory he had inhabited five years earlier- a bleak terrain with ramifications he and I both feared, though my fears were rooted in concerns for my own welfare as well as his.
When the trajectory of Phililp's emotional swings became so extreme that I was unable to follow them in a rational manner, I began writing a journal. He became increasingly withdrawn and angry at me. In early August, Phillip signed himself into Silver Hills Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut. Here are a few pages from my account of the events that followed.
Monday, August 9
New York Apartment

I will never be able to forget what happened yesterday. In some very fundamental way I shall always be scarred by what was said in that room at the hospital. Philip came into the room. When I tried to put my arms around him, he turned to stone. We sat down with the doctor between us, like adversaries. He looked pale and drawn. I asked why he was trembling. Philip stared at me with complete hatred, his jaw thrust forward, and snarled, "Because I am so angry with you." "Why are you so angry with me?" I tried to be calm.
Philip went on to tell me, hardly pausing for breath for two hours...He spewed out every mistake I had ever made. Everything that had made him angry over 17 years together. Nothing was omitted. Some were ridiculous, some were petty; some, unfortunately, were true. "Philip, you're demonizing me. You've turned me into Maggie (Margaret Martinson, Philip Roth's deceased first wife}. He disregarded this.
I told him I had taken good care of him through his knee operation, heart operation, and been at his side through two major breakdowns. Philip looked at me coldly; he replied, "I am sorry to disillusion you on that point. You were no help to me whatsoever." Although the expression on his face was poisonous and hateful, his voice never rose beyond its usual lever.

Tuesday, August 10

These three days have been the most brutal of my life. In these sessions I've remained mostly silent. I am paralyzed in the face of this hatred. I also believe that Philip is seriously ill. Finally, I asked him the reason why, if he hated me for so long, he married me three years ago. His snarled reply- "Who knows?"- said it all.

Thursday, August 19

Dr. Block [not his real name] telephoned from Silver Hill to say Phillip has asked if I'll let him have the apartment for six months. Apparently he can't face living alone in the country. Now he wants to be in the city, near his friends, near his psychotherapist, and will give me $5,000 a month to cover my expenses and accomodations in a hotel or furnished apartment. Translation: I must find elsewhere to live while he recovers alone. I asked for time to consider. The request for me to move out made Anna suspect that Philip wants a divorce, and she told me to call a lawyer. He's trying to get me out of the apartment by making me feel guilty, she said. Maybe she's right.

On November 1, I received a strange message for the hotel operator. Someone called "Frederick" wanted to speak to me. Would I accept the call? I didn't know who "Frederick" was. When I accepted, I heard the receiver quickly replaced. I told Rachael, a good friend of Anna's- Anna was asleep in the next room- that I didn't like this: it was either a reporter angling for a story or someone delivering legal papers. The phone rang yet again; this time it was the front desk. A man was waiting downstairs, the concierge said, with a message he could deliver only in person. I was paralyzed. Rachael said we might as well get it over with; I allowed him to come up. He rang the bell and handed me a folder from a satchel. Then, unbelievably, he asked me for my autograph, which I declined. I opened the folder and found divorce papers, summoning me to appear in court within 20 days, and accusing me of "the cruel and inhuman treatment: of my husband, Philip Roth.
My own position was precarious. Assuming I had been disposed to bring a case against Philip in Connecticut to overturn the prenuptial agreement, one of the few alternatives available to me, it would have bee a colossal gamble. Philip, who had more funds at this disposal and was hardly profligate in his financial affairs, warned me he would sooner lose $200,000 in legal fees than be forced to hand over a penny to me. My resources were inadequate; but more to the point, I lacked the courage to take him on.
After a relatively brief period of negotiation and much against my lawyer's strong advice, I settled with Philip for the sum of $100,000. This sum could not buy even a one-bedroom apartment in New York. But it came down to this: anything was preferable to continuing a war of nerves between us; better to get the whole ugly business over with . My lawyer's parting words were "You negociated a settlement because you could not afford, emotionally or financially, a long, costly, and uncertain litigation."
On my lawyer's advice, I wrote out a list of furniture, china, and linens from my former home, iteems I considered to be my personal property. I was scrupulously careful not to include anything I hadn't paid for myself. One evening a few weeks later when I returned home for the theater, Anna wordlessly handed me a fistful of faxes that had come through, one after another.
In rapid, stacatto succession, Philip demanded the return of everything he had given me during our years together. His list included the gold snake ring with the emerald head from Bulgari; $28,500 per annum he had given me over 12 years; $100,000 of his money used to buy bonds in my name; $10,000 for a "special travel fund"; $150 per hour for the "five or six hundred hours: he had spent going over scripts with me; a mirror he had bought to sit over the fireplace in my London house; a portable heater for the kitchen there; numerous books and records he had purchased; 40 percent of the sale money from my car, to which he had contributed 40 percent of the original cost; the sterio equipment from the house in London; half of the costs incurred on our holiday to Marrakech in 1978, for which I could expect the orginal reciepts in due course; and "a little something" for adapting The Cherry Orchard and writing a play about the writer Jean Rhys; and last, for refusing to honor my prenuptial agreement, he levied a fine of $62 billion- a billion for every year of my life.
At first the element of mockery I was doubtless intended to read into these message was entirely lost on me. Anna and I sat there, both stunned into silence, as another fax bean to grind its way out. Could it have been the ninth or tenth that evening? The ludicousness of this scenario started to dawn on us and we began to laugh like children.
It took four month before he saw fit to release some, though not all, of the items on my list. The machine-gun fusilade of that night had concluded with a final blast ordering me never to disturb him again- either by fax, telephone, or in person. By now I was only too happy to oblige, but Philip appeared to have overlooked the fact that he was the one initiating contact. Then, suddenly, communication between us ceased.
I learned the truth sometime after I had ceased to be a factor in Philip's life. He left me for a person I'll call Erda: a beautiful woman who had been a close friend to both of us for years. As the saying goes, the wife is the last to know. Trusting and somewhat naive, Erda also found herself reluctantly playing a role in removing me from Philip's life. Her ambiguous position as friend to me and lover to him must have confused and disturbed her greatly. But once started, there was no easy way to halt the sequence of events: I moved out and Erda moved in.
Totally committed to this new relationship, Erda asked her husband of 25 years to give her a divorce. Confused, bitter, and distraught, he couldn't understand what had happened between them. It was only after the end of the relationship with Philip that she was able to confront him with the truth.
So far as I can gather, Philip and Erda's life together was, in the beginning, fulfilling to both. But soon some familiar patterns began to reassert themselves. With their increasing intimacy Phililp's anxieties over being emotionally engulfed by a woman were galvanized, and he began to withdraw from her. Erda learned that he had been involved with a young woman when Philip and the young woman were both patients of Silver Hill Hospital. Shattered by his manipulation of her and his ultimate betrayal, Erda suffered a collapse. During this time, on the advice of her doctors, she found the strength to break off the relationship. She has embarked on a new life with new surroundings- but the anger, hurt and humiliation remain.
I spoke to Erda abut her affair with Philip, setting aside my own ambivalent feelings toward a friend who had been so cruelly treated by my husband. Our meeting took place after the dust had settled on our misfortunes. She seems to echo my own experience: throughout the relationship, his pitilessly furious face terrified her; she was paralyzed by his invective; and there wasn't anything whe wouldn't do to avoid a confrontration with him. Everything that had passed between my former husband and myself during the 18 years we lived together seemed to recur in the space of a few months between them. The process had simply accelerated.
As I listened to Erda tell her terrible story, the feelings of need and disappointment she expressed could easily have been my own. I received an unexpected letter one day. It was from Philip, and contained the following message: "Dear Claire, can we be friends?" I had awaited these words since our separation; regardless of the past, I knew I needed only to be patient and eventually the illness that had been the true cause of our parting would pass. Replying to his letter, I wrote that there was nothing I desired more than to resume our friendship- it was up to him to state the terms and name the place where we should meet. Philip suggested a restaurant not far from my new home in New York, in one week's time. I spent the next seven days counting each hour, in a state of anxious anticipation.
The day before we met, I treated myself to a facial, a manicure; I picked a pretty outfit I had been saving for a special occasion. And now, here it was. I caught sight of Philip before he saw me. His experience was grave and serious; he was wearing the same raincoat we had bought together in London many years before. He looked, I thought, somewhat apprehensive- but then, so was I. After a careful greeting, we sat down at our table.
Philip was considering me from behind glasses, sizing me up. After our coffees were ordered, there was a long silence. After they were delivered, I tried to conceal the tremor in my hand as I lifted the cup toward my mouth. He also appeared tense. I was determined to be at my most charming and witty. I began the conversation by saying that it was good to see him- and so it was, despite all that had passed between us. Speaking calmly, Philip replied that he had expected me to be full of resentment. I assured him that a meeting would have been pointless if resentment was all I could feel. Good-naturedly, we shoot hands in agreement.
I noticed he was a trifle grayer than before, but otherwise looked much healthier than when I had last seen him. I wondered if there was a new woman in his life. There was another long pause. "You begin," I said. For the next 20 minutes, nonstop, he performed for me a string of wisecracks and anecdotes, sharply funny as ever, completely impersonal, and unrelated to the friendship we were supposedly there to address and re-establish. Immobilized once again by another surprise tactic, I sat and listened, wondering how long this coffee-hour tour de force could endure without something warm- or, actually, something relevant- being said.
I interrupted the flow and looked at him directly. "Philip, why do you want to be friends with me?" He looked back, and the suspicion of a smile crept across his lips.
"Oh, perversion...."
Let down and deeply disappointed, I left the restaurant; I swore I would never again go through such an ordeal. Now begins the rest of my life.

Photos accompanying the article: 1. Third page color of Philip Roth (left) and Claire, lounging outside at an outdoor table with potted plant and wine glass- BLOOM IN LOVE: Roth and Bloom, shown in 1983, shared theri best and worst times at Roth's house in Connecticut. 2. Sixth page color of Philip in front of his Connecticut home. 3. Tenth page color of Phiip and Claire closely together on a couch inside.- PHILIP'S COMPLAINT- Roth and Bloom at their house in Connecticut, mid-1980's. As their marriage disintegrated, Roth "demonized" Bloom, she says. 4. Half page color of Philip seated at a work table looking down at a photo on the table.- GOOD-BYE, PHILIP- Roth in 1994 in Connecticut. Stunned by the mixed reception of his novel Operation Shylock, he once again turned on his wife, she says. 5. Twelth page color of Claire and daughter Anne, aged about 20- THE COUNTERLIFE- Bloom and her daughter, Anna, then 20, in London, 1980. Bloom feels the writer also focused his hostility on Anna.