Personal Life
Parker and his wife had two sons, David and Daniel. Originally, the character of Spenser was to have been called "David," but Parker didn't want to appear to favor one of his sons over the other. Parker therefore omitted Spenser's first name entirely, and, to this day, the first name of the fictional Spenser remains unknown.
Parker and his wife Joan separated at one point but then came to an unusual arrangement: she lived on one floor of a large townhouse, he on another, and they shared the others. This living arrangement is mirrored in Spenser's private life: his girlfriend, Susan, had an aversion to marriage and living together full-time. Living separately suited them both, although they were fully committed to each other.
Read more about this topic: Robert B. Parker
Famous quotes related to personal life:
“He hadn’t known me fifteen minutes, and yet he was ... ready to talk ... I was still to learn that Munshin, like many people from the capital, could talk openly about his personal life while remaining a dream of espionage in his business operations.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters ‘woman’s peculiar sphere,’ her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)