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Carol Wasserman lives in a drafty three-hundred-year-old ruin situated on a saltmarsh in an inexplicably unfashionable part of the Massachusetts coast.

You may have noticed that this scenario is the classic set-up for an uncounted number of romance novels, old movies, and television shows currently airing on the second-tier networks. A rose-covered cottage, a set of shiny yellow foul-weather gear, and a full pantry. Life, however, does not imitate art. At least not often enough to get everyone through the winter.

Carol has been a regular contributor to All Things Considered since 1999. She writes to us about the distance between our bright national mythologies and the more complex truths of ordinary experience.

She is the author of Swimming at Suppertime.