conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a plot for a book about Lisey, Scott, Story entitled Lisey's Story?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Lisey's Story: Lisey\'s Story is the story of Lisey Landon, the widow of a famous and wildly successful novelist, Scott Landon.\nThe book tells two stories—Lisey\'s story in the present, and the story of her dead husband\'s life, as remembered by Lisey during the course of the novel.\nIt has been two years since her husband\'s death, and Lisey is in the process of cleaning out her dead husband\'s writing area.\nA series of events occurs that causes Lisey to begin facing certain realities about her husband that she had repressed and forgotten.\nAs Lisey is stalked, terrorized, and then mutilated by an insane fan of her husband\'s, Lisey begins recalling her husband\'s past—how he came from a family with a history of horrible mental illness that manifested as either an uncontrollable homicidal mania or as a deep catatonia, how he had a special gift, an ability to transport himself to another world, which he called "Boo\'ya Moon", how Scott Landon\'s brother was put down by his father when his brother manifested an incurable insanity, and finally how Scott Landon had to put down his own father to save him from the madness that had finally taken him over.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Lisey's Story
  What Lisey didn't say was What are you looking for? Or What are you writing down? As Scott had pointed out on more than one occasion, Lisey had what was surely among the rarest of human talents: she was a business-minder who did not mind too much if you didn't mind yours. As long as you weren't making explosives to throw at someone, that was, and in Amanda's case, explosives were always a possibility. She was the sort of woman who couldn't help prying, the sort of woman who would open her mouth sooner or later.
  Her husband had headed south from Rumford, where they had been living ("like a couple of wolverines caught in a drainpipe," Scott said after an afternoon visit he vowed never to repeat) in 1985. Her one child, named Intermezzo and called Metzie for short, had gone north to Canada (with a long-haul trucker for a beau) in 1989. "One flew north, one flew south, one couldn't shut her everlasting mouth." That had been their father's rhyme when they were kids, and the one of Dandy Dave Debusher's girls who could never shut her everlasting mouth was surely Manda, dumped first by her husband and then by her own daughter.
  Hard to like as Amanda sometimes was, Lisey hadn't wanted her down there in Rumford on her own; didn't trust her on her own, if it came to that, and although they'd never said so aloud, Lisey was sure Darla and Cantata felt the same. So she'd had a talk with Scott, and found the little Cape Cod, which could be had for ninety-seven thousand dollars, cash on the nail. Amanda had moved up within easy checking range soon after.
  Now Scott was dead and Lisey had finally gotten around to the business of cleaning out his writing quarters. Halfway through the fourth day, the foreign editions were boxed up, the correspondence was marked and in some sort of order, and she had a good idea of what furniture was going and what was staying. So why did it feel that she had done so little? She'd known from the outset that this was a job which couldn't be hurried. Never mind all the importuning letters and phone calls she'd gotten since Scott's death (and more than a few visits, too). She supposed that in the end, the people who were interested in Scott's unpublished writing would get what they wanted, but not until she was ready to give it to them. They hadn't been clear on that at first; they weren't down with it, as the saying was. Now she thought most of them were.
  There were lots of words for the stuff Scott had left behind. The only one she completely understood was memorabilia, but there was another one, a funny one, that sounded like incuncabilla. That was what the impatient people wanted, the wheedlers, and the angry ones—Scott's incuncabilla. Lisey began to think of them as Incunks.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Lisey's Story
  What Lisey didn't say was What are you looking for? Or What are you writing down? As Scott had pointed out on more than one occasion, Lisey had what was surely among the rarest of human talents: she was a business-minder who did not mind too much if you didn't mind yours. As long as you weren't making explosives to throw at someone, that was, and in Amanda's case, explosives were always a possibility. She was the sort of woman who couldn't help prying, the sort of woman who would open her mouth sooner or later.
  Her husband had headed south from Rumford, where they had been living ("like a couple of wolverines caught in a drainpipe," Scott said after an afternoon visit he vowed never to repeat) in 1985. Her one child, named Intermezzo and called Metzie for short, had gone north to Canada (with a long-haul trucker for a beau) in 1989. "One flew north, one flew south, one couldn't shut her everlasting mouth." That had been their father's rhyme when they were kids, and the one of Dandy Dave Debusher's girls who could never shut her everlasting mouth was surely Manda, dumped first by her husband and then by her own daughter.
  Hard to like as Amanda sometimes was, Lisey hadn't wanted her down there in Rumford on her own; didn't trust her on her own, if it came to that, and although they'd never said so aloud, Lisey was sure Darla and Cantata felt the same. So she'd had a talk with Scott, and found the little Cape Cod, which could be had for ninety-seven thousand dollars, cash on the nail. Amanda had moved up within easy checking range soon after.
  Now Scott was dead and Lisey had finally gotten around to the business of cleaning out his writing quarters. Halfway through the fourth day, the foreign editions were boxed up, the correspondence was marked and in some sort of order, and she had a good idea of what furniture was going and what was staying. So why did it feel that she had done so little? She'd known from the outset that this was a job which couldn't be hurried. Never mind all the importuning letters and phone calls she'd gotten since Scott's death (and more than a few visits, too). She supposed that in the end, the people who were interested in Scott's unpublished writing would get what they wanted, but not until she was ready to give it to them. They hadn't been clear on that at first; they weren't down with it, as the saying was. Now she thought most of them were.
  There were lots of words for the stuff Scott had left behind. The only one she completely understood was memorabilia, but there was another one, a funny one, that sounded like incuncabilla. That was what the impatient people wanted, the wheedlers, and the angry ones—Scott's incuncabilla.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know five more paragraphs? End with the sentence ' How could she have found her own sister like that and not have remembered finding her husband like that during the cold-wave of 1996?'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: When she wakes up the following night the wind is still howling and this time when she goes down to the guest room the TV isn't on but he's in there watching it anyway. He's in the rocking chair and bundled up in the african, Good Ma's yellow african, but he won't answer her, won't even look at her. Scott is there, but Scott is also gone.
  Lisey rolled over on her back in Scott's study and looked up at the skylight directly overhead. Her breast throbbed. Without thinking about it, she pressed the yellow knitted square against it. At first the pain was even worse... but then there was a small measure of comfort. She looked into the skylight, panting. She could smell the sour brew of sweat, tears, and blood in which her skin was marinating. She moaned.
  All the Landons are fast healers, we had to be. If it was true—and she had reason to believe it was—then she had never so much wanted to be a Landon as she did now. No more Lisa Debusher from Lisbon Falls, Mama and Daddy's afterthought, Li'l Tag-Along.
  You are who you are, Scott's voice responded patiently. You're Lisey Landon. My little Lisey. But it was hot and she hurt so much, now she was the one who wanted ice, and voice or no voice, Scott Landon had never seemed so smucking dead.
  Even the phone on Dumbo's Big Jumbo, from which she could theoretically summon help, seemed far. And what seemed close? A question. A simple one, actually. How could she have found her own sister like that and not have remembered finding her husband like that during the cold-wave of 1996?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs? End with the sentence '
  Under the title "Lisey and the Madman," an excerpt from the opening of appeared in McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, edited by Michael Chabon (Vintage, 2004).'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I Ain't Livin' Long Like This was written by Rodney Crowell. Besides Crowell's version, the song has been recorded by Emmylou Harris, Jerry Jeff Walker, Webb Wilder, and Ole Waylon.
  And, of course, everything by Ole Hank. If there's a ghost in these pages, it's as much his as Scott Landon's.
  Finally, great thanks to Burton Hatlen, of the University of Maine. Burt was the greatest English teacher I ever had. It was he who first showed me the way to the pool, which he called "the language-pool, the myth-pool, where we all go down to drink." That was in 1968. I have trod the path that leads there often in the years since, and I can think of no better place to spend one's days; the water is still sweet, and the fish still swim.
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  Under the title "Lisey and the Madman," an excerpt from the opening of appeared in McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories, edited by Michael Chabon (Vintage, 2004).