You Are Not I is a portrait of the elusive writer-composer Paul Bowles, who left the United States in 1947 to live permanently in Morocco. There he created some of the finest American prose of the century, including the international bestseller The Sheltering Sky. In his brilliant and terrifying short stories and novels, he explores haunting themes of desire, exile, and emotional disintegration. Millicent Dillon interweaves episodes in Paul Bowles's...

Born Jane Auer in 1917 to a suburban Jewish middle-class family, at 15 she suffered a riding accident that left one leg permanently damaged. She enjoyed a sensitive and fairly madcap adolescence, and in 1937 she met John Bowles, the composer and write, and despite her frank lesbianism, they married. Until her death in 1973 maintained one of the more freakish, yet touchingly profound marriages on record. Though her body of work was relatively small,...