In 2006, I received an e-mail from an old friend, a professor in São Paulo, who told me that a man who was “extremely neurotic (I might say ‘psychotic’)” was trying to get in touch with me. If we spoke, my friend warned me, I ought not to mention the book I was working on, published three years later as “Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector.” “He wants to know what you’re planning on doing with the Clarice theme since he thinks he owns it,” my friend said. “He is unhealthily jealous of anyone who does anything with the subject.”
