conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled The Amateur Marriage about Minneapolis, Minnesota, Raleigh with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Literary.. Start with the sentence 'the author was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She is the author of more than twenty novels, including The Beginner's Goodbye, A Spool of Blue Thread, and Vinegar Girl. Her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Amateur Marriage
  Maybe it was just a long, long way to travel, and that's why it took Dorothy all those months to come back.
  Or maybe she had first tried to do without me, the way I had first tried to do without her—to "get over" my loss, "find closure," "move on," all those ridiculous phrases people use when they're urging you to endure the unendurable. But eventually, she had faced the fact that we simply missed each other too much. She had given in and returned.
  And I could. Nandina had taught me. Nandina was not exactly a teen success story herself (she stood nearly six feet tall even after shucking off her long banana shoes, and had reached her senior year without attending a single one of her own proms), but she steered me through a series of passable-looking moves. She showed me how to bite my lower lip as if transported by the beat of "Pump Up the Volume," and she positioned my right arm so it seemed less like a broken wing and more like a banner, raised triumphantly as high as she could force it. It worked in my favor that nobody was dancing in that walking-embrace style anymore. I wouldn't need to clasp my partner two-handed or anything like that.
  Tiffy turned down my invitation, as it happened. She said she'd already made plans. But still, it was kind of Nandina to offer her help.
  I was wrong to use the word "handicaps" earlier. "Differences" would have been more accurate. Really I'm not handicapped in the least.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I may be different from other people but I'm no unluckier. I believe that. Or I'm unluckier but no unhappier. That is probably closer to the truth.
  But there I suppose I'm fooling myself, because probably everyone thinks he has some unique claim on happiness.
  I daydream of switching to standard pedals, but the Motor Vehicle people have these absurd regulations.
  You would think that I would be eager to know what this assignment was. But remember the corollary: once she'd completed it, she would leave. And I didn't think I could bear that.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I was a rough-and-ready kind of kid, despite my differences. I was clumsy but enthusiastic, eager to join whatever pickup game was happening on our block. Mom would literally wring her hands as she watched from the front window, but my father told her to let me do whatever I felt capable of. He wasn't as much of a worrier. But of course he was off at the office all day, and middle-aged by then besides. He was never the kind of father I could toss a football with on weekends, or ask to coach my Little League team.
  So I mostly spent my childhood fending off the two women in my life—my mother and my sister, both of them lying in wait to cosset me to death. Even that young, I sensed the danger. You get sucked in. You turn soft. They have you where they want you then.
  The first time she saw me, she said, "What's wrong with your arm?" She was wearing her white coat and she asked in a brusque, clinical tone. When I explained, she just said, "Huh," and went on to another subject.
  The first time she rode in my car, she didn't so much as glance over, not even at the very start, to check how I was driving. She was too busy huffing on her glasses and polishing them with her sleeve.
  She was unique among women, Dorothy. She was one of a kind. Lord, she left a hole behind. I felt as if I'd been erased, as if I'd been ripped in two.