Richard Brautigan married Virginia Dionne Adler in 1957, and their daughter Ianthe was born in 1960. The Brautigans were divorced in 1970. Virginia remarried and is now a social worker in Hawaii.

Heidi Benson in her article Fishing for Brautigan stories mentions that Ginny was "the original typist of 'Trout Fishing in America'" and that it wasn't until they were "halfway through [that they] got an electric typewriter". Virginia then goes on to talk about Brautigan's early writing:

"Jewels" is what she calls Brautigan's early writing. "It's hard to make a transition between poetry and prose. Finally, 'Trout Fishing' emerged — to me, they are still jewel-like, they're chiseled, they're spare. They are what they are, and that's the end.".

According to Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian in Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance

"Early after his arrival in North Beach in the spring of 1962, Tony Aste befriended Richard Brautigan, opened an affair with Virginia — Ginny — Richard's girlfriend, then married her" and "the Tony/Virginia/Dick triangle was very much on Spicer's mind when he wrote The Holy Grail."

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