It isn't easy to narrate happiness or love, and it's hard to prove their existence through recorded facts and descriptions. What is the precise evidence for love? Documentation of sexual encounters? Examples of daily intimacies? Easier to tell and to corroborate are stories of pain, dramatic events, betrayals. Love meanwhile lives in the mundane, the moment-to-moment exchanges, and can so easily become invisible after the people who shared it are no longer alive. But, of course, it leaves traces.

— My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland (Page 211)