He mightn't even need to have a difficult past wife if he were a secret romance novelist; perhaps instead of having issues with All Women he could just have issues with His Readers, who read his trashy romance novels instead of his Serious Literature which he writes under another pseudonym and no one buys. It fills him with bitterness! And then this girl, who was carrying one of his very novels the first time he met her, has had the audacity to propose to him! He is sure she must be awful because he is convinced that all his readers are.

And then Una could just be a regular friendly library helper rather than a Random Ghost Wife, which did come totally out of left field, even though I liked the book I felt that. Shouldn't there at least have been a bit of "BTW we are in a world where ghosts exist" foreshadowing?