“The universe has been listening to my conversations, threading everything together. It began last April, when I picked up ​Swann’s Way ​for the third time in ten years.”

As we moved through the “Know Thyself” syllabus, I grappled to articulate the elements that went into knowing myself. I hammered away at myself like an interrogator.

"What do I do when I need solace? When I lose the sense of wonder I can only get by physically being with the people I love, experiencing the places I love, and everything in between? I do what I’ve always done: I write about family.

I have stopped dressing to be seen; I dress for walking. I cropped my hair and allowed it to go salt and pepper. With the mask and the hair and the tennis shoes, I am unrecognizable, sometimes even to myself.

On nights that I can't sleep, I feel sorry for my eggs. I worry that they're suffering in their own snow country of liquid nitrogen. I know such concerns are beyond ridiculous. After all, my eggs are not tiny, microscopic people. They aren't even embryos.

A few years ago, I was brought on board by a New York-based publishing house to be a fiction editor. My first assignment was, instead, a book about Trump’s relationship to Russia.