';No other writer in recent memory has called to mind so clearly the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald.' --The Washington Post In Almost Perfect, Alice Adams brilliantly and movingly explores what happens to love when the beloved is transformed into someone unrecognizable. They were an almost perfect couple. They met when Stella Blake was not yet a famous writer, but Richard Fallon is an artist known by everyone: charming, talented; he loved and hated adored, admired. And they fall in love when she interviews him for a magazine. But then Stella watches as the man she adores begins a steady and frightening descent into darkness, even madness.