To try to explain how Michael interacts with writers is, invariably, to fall short. But here are a few of my favorite moments: He said to poet Matthea Harvey that her mind was “like popcorn—there’s no stopping it.” He told Junot Díaz, “Oscar Wao is someone very much like me.” He asked Brad Gooch about gay spirituality  as it related to Gooch’s biography of Flannery O’Connor. He told Walter Mosley, “The amount of death without mourning in these books is difficult for someone like me, because a mystery writer isn’t going to take you to the funeral of each and every corpse.” (And Walter Mosley replied, “Right, right, right, you couldn’t do that.”) To John Wray, the author of Lowboy, Michael said, “I love the language of schizophrenia.” In a tribute to Walt Whitman, Michael remembered his own discovery of Leaves of Grass : “I started to read out loud. And when I started to read out loud, I started to like it and walked out into the hallway and walked across the campus Pied Piper style, reading mostly not to students but to the runaway kids who used to crowd around the ground floors of the dormitories. And then eventually we all sat on an elevator going up and down reading all of ‘Song of Myself.’”

From his book-lined apartment (no kidding, even in the kitchen cupboards—and all alphabetized), Michael tells me: “I believe in the elaborate taking care of others.

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