I hadn’t realized she and Marco had had a fling, though it didn’t surprise me to hear it. She’d been something of a media star herself for a short time, a current affairs presenter on a popular but serious TV show (the combination existed once), though from what I knew, her own decline had been steeper and harder than Marco’s. The last news I’d heard of her involved money troubles stemming from a messy divorce and a house-sitting stint in the home of friends that had ended badly when she refused to leave.

The passage from her memoir that Sauer had sent began as a reminiscence of the sexual mores of the 1970s in general and the behavior of men at that time in particular. Marco read it aloud from his phone to me and my wife when he visited us that spring to talk about his situation. The gist of it was that men were more overtly sexist then; more unabashedly condescending, imperious, entitled, aggressive and preeningly lustful than they were now, and that young women like herself had been duped into thinking that a reluctance to play along was evidence of a prudish spirit. Marco was offered up as a characteristic specimen of the period, strutting about the globe in his leather jacket and jeans, with a fixed grin of libidinous intent on his handsome face and various phallic items of photographic equipment slung over his shoulder.

Despite the note of ridicule, it was, on the face of it, an affectionate portrait, and I believed Marco when he told me that on first reading it, he’d thought it pretty harmless. He wasn’t sure why the Messenger considered it worth publishing, but his feeling was that if Julia could make some money out of it, then good luck to her. He knew vaguely about her straitened circumstances, and was sympathetically disposed. The leather-jacketed stud stuff didn’t bother him; in fact, he told me it had made him briefly nostalgic for his younger, cockier self.