HIS LOVELY WIFE is the story of Ellen Baxter, a beautiful woman who, to her surprise-because she was not a Princess Diana fanatic-finds that Diana's death affects her so deeply that it triggers an identity crisis. She's staying at the Paris Ritz on the weekend Diana died because her much-older husband, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, is attending a professional meeting there, and after the crash, she begins to realize that her life parallels Diana's in more ways than she has previously articulated, even to herself, the most important being that almost everything in her life is what it is because of who she married. As she begins to ask some of the same questions about the relationships between passion and compassion, connection and independence that Diana, the ultimate lovely wife, was asking in her last years, she also pursues an attraction to a member of the paparazzi who was in pursuit of Diana when she died. And as she tries to tell her story, to listen to her own voice, she begins to hear Diana's voice as well, and Diana-or her ghost or, perhaps, my character's imaginative re-creation of her-becomes a major character in the book. Like Diana's, Ellen's is a story about what it's like to be a beautiful-but-not-quite-beautiful-enough woman (because she finds it impossible to feel beautiful enough) who loves an emotionally unavailable man and tries, perhaps too late, to create an identity for herself in terms other than those her marriage and the culture have provided for her.