You know what getting married is? It's agreeing to taking this person who right now is at the top of his form, full of hopes and ideas, feeling good, looking good, wildly interested in you because you're the same way, and sticking by him while he slowly disintegrates. And he does the same for you. You're his responsibility now and he's yours. If no one else will take care of him, you will. If everyone else rejects you, he won't. What do you think love is? Going to bed all the time?

Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists. Biography
Born in Los Angeles California Smiley grew up in Webster Groves Missouri a suburb of St. Works


Novels
Barn Blind (1980)
At Paradise Gate (1981)
Duplicate Keys (1984)
The Greenlanders (1988)
Ordinary Love & Good Will (1989)
A Thousand Acres (1991)
Moo (1995)
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (1998)
Horse Heaven (2000)
Good Faith (2003)
Ten Days in the Hills (2007)
The Georges and the Jewels (UK title: Nobody's Horse) (2009)
Private Life (2010)


Short story collections
The Age of Grief (1987)


Non-fiction books
Charles Dickens (2003)
A Year at the Races: Reflections on Horses Humans Love Money and Luck (2004)
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005)
The Man Who Invented The Computer (2010)


Television
"In Search of Crimes Past" episode of Homicide: Life on the Street (teleplay; story by Henry Bromell & Julie Martin) (1995).

Jane Smiley (born September 26 1949) is an American novelist.