In 1989 the Whitney Museum of American Art invited Gober to participate in a series of limited-edition publications pairing artists with writers. Gober proposed to work with Joyce Carol Oates after attending a reading of her short story Heat, which he rewrote by hand for the publication. According to the artist, “It was a story about murder, maybe sexual violence, adolescence, innocence, and guilt, and it provided me, albeit fictionally, with the subject matter I was seeking. I set the story in twin dime-store fake-leather locked diaries because it was a story about two twin adolescent girls.” The endpapers feature a pattern of male and female genitals that Gober produced as wallpaper the same year and as a suite of prints two years later.