Occupational hazard?

There are so many unhappy writers.

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com Raymond Chandler's Long Goodbye On this day in 1953 Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye was published. Many say it is his best novel, and the biographers trace many connections to Chandler's personal life, none of them happy ones. Chandler's last years without her were spent more or less in breakdown, the drunken suicide attempts of the months after Cissy's funeral turning to five, eventually fatal, years of alcoholism. In his last months he was having desperate, disinterested affairs and drinking gimlets again, now all too much like Marlowe in The Long Goodbye: "Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off." In this state he proposed to three different women -- one from Australia, one from England, and one sent to California by the one from England to check into what the one from Australia was up to.