For purely personal reasons, I like that Nabokov’s unfinished novel, which he requested be destroyed after his death (but which still hasn’t been, yet, thirty-one years later), is entitled The Original of Laura. Also appealing: the Times Online’s Stefanie Marsh, describing what’s known of the story, writes that what the novel’s main character goes through is: A sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.

Apropos: Nabokov, writing in 1956 about an early version of Lolita (in which version the title character was named Juanita Dark … a counterpart to John Shade?):

Once or twice I was on the point of burning the unfinished draft and had carried my Juanita Dark as far as the shadow of the leaning incinerator on the innocent lawn, when I was stopped by the thought that the ghost of the destroyed book would haunt my files for the rest of my life.