The man writes that the word “great” is often used hyperbolically, though it should be applied to the author whom he is writing about, who he considers to be both great in the sense of literature but great in his size of over six feet. The man recalls how he was advised to write a doctoral dissertation on the writer in his college days, after which he made it his life’s work to attend to his fascination of him in books and articles. Every year, he rereads the five books that the writer put out before his death. He briefly talks about the contradictions of the writer and the person, how his books depict gorgeous displays of food but he himself only ate fast food, how he wrote intimate relationships but himself was a womanizer.

The man goes on to talk about the involvement of the writer’s wife in his work, how some scholars believe she played no role while others believe she played a huge role. The man believes the latter. He believes that she played a secretarial role, notably as a typist, in her husband’s work and often corresponded with his editors. However, there are no manuscripts of his to evidence such claims. He also brings up that there are records of abuse committed by the writer toward his wife, recovered from the writer’s estate. He then mentions that during an eight-year period of separation, 1967 to 1975, the writer did not write a single work and only wrote again after checking into rehab and reuniting with his wife afterward.

The man then focuses on the writer’s wife. After the writer dies in 1981, the wife begins to write and publishes over twenty mystery novels under a pseudonym, though he does not consider them to have any literary merit. He then brings up how she wrote more literary fiction back in the 50s, specifically due to a collection of rejection letters for her short stories from publications ranging from 1951 to 1955, also from the writer’s estate. The writer then poses the question of why the wife wrote the book for which he is writing the foreword of now. After her death, the writer’s estate bequeathed him a collection of materials including the novel of hers published now, which is about a person who commissions a crime and seeks to dodge culpability for it, much like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. He points out similarities between the wife’s presumed manuscript and the writer’s style, though there are notable content differences too.

The man is certain that the wife was responsible for the manuscript, as he found comments left by the writer himself on it, claiming that he didn’t like it very much. Finally, the man remarks on the dedication of the book, which is dedicated to himself by the wife, though he doesn’t know why. He reflects on two encounters he had with the wife in his life, the first of which was when he mistook her for a maid, the second of which was when he caught in the writer’s room while a knife was plunged into him. Court documents insinuate that the man was in fact the writer’s stalker, but the man, in a footnote, claims that no such thing happened and still insists on his innocence. He will spend the rest of his life, in a correctional facility, wondering why the book was dedicated to him.