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I’m finding it really hard to accept that today is September 1 :(

TLDR: I’m moving this newsletter over to Substack, where it’s going to take a slightly different form. Your email will be automatically migrated over! That’s basically it. If you want the backstory, keep reading. Otherwise—happy long weekend!

When I started this blog, I purposely left it loose. There was no theme beyond whatever I felt like writing in a given moment. I wanted to let it evolve, and that would have been impossible if I had defined it with any kind of premature certainty. This determination to let it become whatever it was going to become was present, I can see, even in my , during that chilly month we spent out in Montauk. Insofar as this blog actually does have a throughline, it’s been a total lack of structure. I write what I feel like writing! With whatever frequency I feel like.

I started this blog because I needed it. Re-reading that post from almost two years ago reminds me of just how lonely and difficult that first Covid fall was. I can tell how much I was craving structure, accountability, contact with the outside world. Using the blog to regularly* project my voice into that outside world seemed like a solution. (*Yeah � about that. At the outset I planned to send a post every single week, which clearly didn’t happen, lol.)

But the projecting, the writing, turned out to be a mere avenue to the real solution. This blog became an excuse to stay in touch, to trade emails and messages with people far and wide. I reconnected with friends I hadn’t seen in a long time. I wrote in a more personal way, and this opened up a different, deeper kind of conversation. There is something beautifully life-affirming when you find a way to make yourself vulnerable, and the world rewards that vulnerability. Now, in my case, you can’t actually see that reward—it’s certainly nothing material or physically tangible—but that doesn’t make it less real. What I’m saying is that, if I had to tell you how the process of writing this blog changed me, it would be that it made me a little more brave; a little more open-minded; a little more willing to take a risk.

Lately I’ve been thinking about where I want to take this writing practice from here. I love writing fiction, but I also love this other kind of writing, and I want to have both in my life. And now, after a few years of semi-regular blogging, I feel ready to put this voice to a more specific use. Let’s call this blog the 1.0 version. It was a thing I wrote for myself, without boundary, without structure, because that’s what it needed to be. But for the 2.0 version, I want to write something with a more clearly defined shape, with a more specific utility. I want to write something for you.

By you I mean: you the writer, you the artist, you the creative person. By you I mean: everybody, because creativity is just another word for freedom! Whether consciously or unconsciously, we’re all trying to figure out how to live in this world—how to live in a way that is compassionate and respectful—while also maintaining the integrity of our inner freedom, because without that, we’re lost. (Or, at least, that’s what I believe. If you disagree, that’s cool! Such is the nature of freedom!)

So, to that end: I’m relaunching and revamping this newsletter! I’m going to be starting a Substack in early September; the first post will go out next week. This 2.0 newsletter will have a theme. It’s going to be more professionally-centric, about writing and publishing and creativity. It’s going to have a name and everything. It’s also going to have a much more regular cadence. There’s still going to be a healthy dose of Me in the newsletter, because � well, I’m Me, there’s not much I can do about that! But where this blog has been decidedly amorphous, this 2.0 newsletter is going to be more practical, and to-the-point.

Do I feel a little nervous about making this change? Yes! Obviously! Is it possible that this whole thing is going to flame out and fail? Absolutely! But, look. I gotta try. What else are we doing here?

In terms of housekeeping: I’ll be migrating my email list over to Substack, so if you received this email, you’ll also be receiving my 2.0 newsletter. Yay! If you »å´Ç²Ô’t want to receive it, you’ll have the chance to easily unsubscribe when that first missive goes out. Boo! But also, look, I won’t take it personally. Also, I’ve changed the sign-up form on this website so that any future sign-ups will be for the 2.0 Substack rather than this old gal.

This is going to be the last thing posted on this blog for a while. There’s a chance I might come back here to write things that feel too long-winded or loosey-goosey for the 2.0 version, but also, there’s a chance I won’t. (Though I’m not going to delete this blog or anything like that. These posts will live here forever, or until I decide to become a hermit woman who shuns technology, or whatever.)

It’s my hope that you’ll come with me on this next stage of the journey. That we’ll keep talking, that we’ll stay in touch! And so, if you have made it to the end of this far-longer-than-it-needed-to-be post: thank you. If you have ever given me an encouraging word about this blog: thank you. It was your feedback that gave me the gumption to keep trying.

When our friend E. started working as a curatorial fellow at the Met Museum a few years ago, she mentioned that employees are allowed to bring visitors to the museum, including on Wednesdays, when the museum is closed to the public. They’d suspended this practice during the pandemic, but earlier this year, they brought it back. Last weekend I was talking with E. about how I really needed to see the Winslow Homer show before it closed, and maybe I would go squeeze in a visit on Monday or Tuesday, and she said: “Well, how about a private tour of it on Wednesday?�

Friends in high places! This is one of the perks of loving people who love their work. Not only are your conversations more interesting and soul-searching (when a person spends their time thinking about things that light them up, their enthusiasm becomes contagious), but there is also a good chance that, at some point, because they love that work, they will want to share that work with you. I love nothing more—truly, nothing more—than getting to see how another person spends her time. Understanding the texture of another person’s ordinary Wednesday is, for me, the height of intimacy.

Anyway, that’s not actually the point of this post. The point is that Andrew and I leapt at the opportunity, and in doing so, managed to check a major item off the New York bucket list. We didn’t have a ton of time, squeezed as we were by the other obligations of an ordinary Wednesday, but E. had planned our visit well. We met at the ground floor entrance near 81st Street. This was a doorway I’d stepped through many times before, and inside, though the museum was basically deserted, the shape of the room was familiar: the ticket counters, the elevator, the coat check. But then E. led us past the restrooms, to the door that separated the public from the private, the stage from the backstage. With a quick buzz of her pass, we were through.

There are moments, as a novelist, when you can feel your brain working in overdrive. You’re like a greedy sponge, trying to soak up every last bit of your surroundings, absorbing knowledge that you couldn’t otherwise access. Doors labelled Government Affairs; doors labelled External Affairs. Pallets stacked with shrink-wrapped copies of catalogues destined for the gift shop. The bulletin board near the security guard’s lockers. The staff cafe. Long basement hallways spanning multiple north-south city blocks. A sign on the wall, E.’s favorite: YIELD TO ART IN TRANSIT. “I feel like a kid in a candy shop,� I said, slightly giddy. There are moments when you are hyperaware of how special an experience is. Every detail sticks with you. Every detail teaches you something, and makes you ask new questions. Every detail might prove the genesis of some future story. This heightened attention, in my experience, has the curious effect of actually expanding my sense of time. (Back in 2019, for instance, we spent a week in Russia. A week isn’t much, in the grand scheme, but that week contained more soul-shifting inspiration than entire seasons of my life.)

After walking through the staff cafe, we climbed a staircase and reemerged into the museum, in the Egyptian wing. A few moments later and there we were, in the Temple of Dendur. There was another group taking selfies, another employee and her friends, but soon they left, and the three of us were alone.

If you’ve ever been in the Temple of Dendur on a Saturday or Sunday, you know how busy it can get. It’s a big room, but for most of my life, I’ve only experienced it in a crowd: people milling around the reflecting pool, voices echoing from the vast glass wall. But last Wednesday, when it was emptied of other people, the room felt somehow smaller, and more intimate. Like looking at your apartment on the day you move out, after the furniture and boxes are downstairs on the truck, you suddenly think: how did it all fit in here? I didn’t have to jockey or elbow my way up the steps. It left my mind free to wander. As I looked at the temple, and at the priestess statue tucked inside, which I had never noticed before, I was struck by how unlikely this was. In its two thousand years of existence, this structure had witnessed so much. Empires, wars, new religions. Think about how many millions (tens of millions, hundreds of millions?) of people had spent time in its presence. But right then, for that microscopic sliver of its lifespan, we were alone with it.

**

Several years ago, I started a spreadsheet to track the books I was reading. When someone asks me what I’ve been reading recently, I have this tendency to draw a total blank (uh…my email? an article in New York mag? Freedom by Jonathan Franzen except that was back in 2010?), and so I started writing the books down, to counteract that tendency. The spreadsheet is very basic. I keep track of the title, the author, whether it was fiction or nonfiction, and then I have a column called “Notes� in case I feel like noting down my reaction, which I do about fifty percent of the time. My reactions are highly subjective and unscientific, things like “blah� or “meh� or “long as shit� or “liked, didn’t love.� But some books merit the all-caps treatment. Peppered through the spreadsheet are “LOVED� and “INCREDIBLE� and “SO FRICKING GOOD.� Middlemarch gets “WOW, WOW, WOW.� War and Peace gets “WHAT CAN I EVEN SAY?!� It’s like the New York Times Book Review for stupid people.

The books that merit those rapturous all-caps reactions tend to be the classics. Occasionally a contemporary novel sneaks in there (Homeland Elegy by Ayad Akhtar), or a semi-recent work of nonfiction (The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk), but most of the time, we’re talking about Leo Tolstoy, we’re talking about George Eliot and Toni Morrison and Paul Bowles. I think there is a reason that I love these classics so intensely; I think the passage of time has a lot to do with it. Because, in reading each of them, I have the uncanny sense that the authors—despite that passage of time, not to mention our meaningful differences in background and race and nationality—are speaking to me, and to me directly.

When I pick up a copy of War and Peace or Beloved or Middlemarch, I know that there are, technically speaking, millions of copies of this book in existence. I know that there are certainly other people reading this very book as this very moment. I know that this book wasn’t written for me, for Anna Pitoniak, for this specific human body. But when I open the book, it doesn’t feel that way. It feels private. It feels like we’re alone in the room, just the two of us.

Some art speaks loudly. A crowd doesn’t dampen it. Some art actually needs the crowd: the concert, the opera, the sculpture in a city park, the public monument, the blockbuster movie. Some art operates on multiple levels. Watching a performance of one of Beethoven’s symphonies is a very different experience from listening to it on Spotify in your living room, but both experiences are equally important, because both will reveal different aspects of the art to you. But there is something, to me, very special about experiencing a work of art alone. Whether reading a book, or listening to music on the subway ride home, or lingering in a museum right before it closes: that sense of total privacy opens up a kind of bi-directionality. I am looking at the art, but I also feel that the art is looking at me. It’s a subtle, slippery feeling. It doesn’t always happen. But when it does, it’s magic.

See, I’m a word person. Always have been, always will be. I love reading, I love writing, I love talking. I can talk until the cows come home! But, like most of us, I’m also drawn to what challenges me. There is art that doesn’t rely on words. And while words can be written around that art (scholarship, wall text, blog posts like this), they never actually touch or affect the art itself. To experience the art is to sit there quietly, not saying anything, not using the words in your brain. Just sitting and looking in silent communion.

Even if I can’t articulate exactly what these moments mean to me, I can tell you how much I treasure them. A few years ago, I had a feast of them. The Hermitage in St. Petersburg has a stunning collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art, but when we visited, the galleries were nearly empty. The crowds, it seemed, were focused on the galleries across the square, with the Tsar’s old state rooms and the Faberge eggs and the Rembrandt portraits. But where we were—Matisse, Monet, Gaugin, van Gogh, the list goes on, and often I was the only person gazing at a given work of art. There was a room filled with Picassos, and I spent several minutes in that room, totally alone, transfixed in particular by

In New York these opportunities are harder to come by, but that’s part of what makes them so special. That’s part of why last Wednesday with E. was so meaningful. But I do my best. I keep chasing that feeling. I like to go to a museum late in the day, just before it closes, and linger until the guards kick me out. The last time I went to MoMA, I managed to be the last person in the Just me and Henri Matisse, alone for thirty glorious seconds, until the guards said, ma’am, we mean it, it’s really time to go. And so I say goodbye, and step back into my regular life, but those thirty seconds will have always happened; they will always be woven into the existence of that piece, even if I’m the only person who remembers that existence.

**

Before I leave you! Housekeeping. I have a handful of events scattered across the coming months, , but I wanted to alert you to a few in particular.

Coming up soon: if you’re in the Hamptons area this summer, I’m speaking at the on Sunday, July 31 at 5 p.m. This is my first event out east as a quasi-resident, though hopefully not the last!

And further out: if you’re in British Columbia, I’ll be appearing at the . Exact details to come (the festival is announcing the 2022 line-up next month), but this one is also special. Whistler is my hometown, and honestly, if you had told eight-year-old Anna that she would someday come back and get to talk about one of her novels, her mind would have been blown. (And then she would have gone right back to watching the Magic School Bus.)

The deck in question.

Several weeks ago, a mother deer and her fawn took up temporary residence in our yard* here in Springs. Deer are a big problem in this part of Long Island (signs throughout East Hampton proclaim the deer death count from the year before, numbers in the 500s or 600s) and I’ve learned to adopt the local custom of scorning these garden-eating, tick-carrying creatures, no matter how cute they might be.

But even my hardened heart began to soften at the sight of this fawn. We saw him (I »å´Ç²Ô’t know whether this fawn is a him or her, but I’m going with him to differentiate from his mother) for the first time in late May. As we were standing in the kitchen, making dinner, he and his mother walked through our yard, a dozen feet away from the deck. The fawn looked no more than a few days old: white spots stippling his back, wobbly legs, sticking close to his mother’s flank. The magic seemed unlikely to repeat itself. We took pictures, and a video, and felt lucky that we’d been looking through the window at that precise moment.

Apparently, though, the mother had been in our yard for a reason. The next day, the fawn was back. He was bedded down right outside my office window, nestled up near the oil tank. Curled up, he was no bigger than a kitten. He was also alone—the mother was nowhere in sight. After an initial burst of panic (was he okay, was he lost, was he hurt?!?), the Internet reassured me it was common for mothers to leave their fawns in safe places while they’re out feeding. And he looked safe—this tucked-away part of the yard was sheltered and cozy—but every once in a while, he would stand up on his shaky little legs, and he would peer around, and I imagined him wondering where his mother was, and it nearly broke my heart.

I knew that it was imperative to keep our distance. You never touch a fawn: fawns have no scent, which protects them from predators. If you touch them, and give them your scent, you’re making it that much harder for them to survive. But, even from a distance, we grew attached to this sweet little fawn. For a few days, he became the center of our world. I texted my family with pictures and constant updates. We had friends over for drinks, and we took them into my office to show them the fawn through the window, which was very impressive to their eight-year-old son. (And let’s be real: if you have something that impresses an eight-year-old, you have something good on your hands.)

The mother came to visit a few times. Whenever I saw her through to the window, I was relieved, and part of me hoped that she was here to pick her baby up from daycare—my little heart couldn’t take the stress!—but part of me hoped the fawn would stay. I tried to catch her eye through the window and silently transmit my reassurance: her baby was safe, she had picked a good spot, we posed no harm. But at some point on Thursday night, she was ready to move him, because when I woke up on Friday morning, the fawn was gone.

It was sweet while it lasted, I thought. And I assumed that was the end of our fawn saga.

**

I was out and about on that Friday morning. It was a beautiful sunny day, but when I got back to the house around lunchtime, the vibe was kind of � iffy. That Mercury-in-retrograde kind of energy. Despite the clear weather, the power had temporarily gone out, though now it was back on. Friends of ours, who were supposed to visit that weekend, had just told us they had a medical emergency and couldn’t make it. A family member had just gotten Covid. A bunch of emails had piled up in my inbox, and I felt an urgent desire to triage those emails, to restore some order to this funky afternoon. So I sat down at the dining table with my laptop, and had just started triaging those emails when I heard an awful screaming from the yard.

Our fence had been neglected over the years. (Much about our house, we’ve learned, had been neglected over the years. Are you interested in learning about the all the ways a boiler can malfunction? You’ve come to the right place!). In the back corner of the yard, where our fence meets the neighbor’s fence, some of the boards were warped and weathered, leaving gaps here and there. When I ran outside to see what was happening, I saw the mother deer near that back corner, alert and highly agitated. Then I looked closer and saw the source of the terrible, agonizing sound. There was the fawn, his head on our side of the fence, his body on the other side.

His head was stuck in one of those gaps. He was yanking and wrestling desperately, trying to get free, screaming all the while. The mother deer was helpless. The only thing she could do was to shield him, to stand guard. When another deer approached, drawn by the noise, she charged and chased him away. My heart was pounding. I felt just as panicked as her. I ran upstairs and, not remotely caring that Andrew was in the middle of a Zoom, barged in and told him we had an emergency.

That screaming—I can’t tell you awful it was. A certain kind of agonizing sound spurs you to action, causes instinct to kick in. I put on my shoes and went outside, and though I wanted to run, I forced myself to approach very slowly. I took one step. A long pause. Then another step. I held my hands high above my head, hoping that this gesture of I mean no harm would be legible to the deer. I held the mother’s gaze, too, trying to tell her that she could trust me, that I wasn’t going to hurt her baby. But how could she know that? Her agitation increased as I drew closer. I’m a human being, after all, and human beings are known to carry guns. It was going to be a choice between sticking with her baby and saving herself, and in the end, when I was about ten feet away, she had to save herself.

His mother now gone, the fawn was screaming even louder. At my approach, he began to buck, his tiny hooves scrabbling against the other side of the fence. “It’s okay,� I said, kneeling down, trying not to sob, raising my voice over his screams. “It’s okay! It’s okay!� I grabbed one of the fence planks and pulled as hard as I could, hoping to widen the gap enough for him to get his head through. Don’t touch him! I reminded myself. I kept pulling, and he kept screaming, and it seemed to last forever, and I thought: Please make it stop, just make it stop!

And then, at a certain point, he stopped screaming. He had squeezed himself free. Or at least I thought he had. He had gone quiet, and sort of � slumped down. His little head was now back on the correct side of the fence, our neighbor’s side of the fence, but he was just lying there, totally frozen. By this point, Andrew was with me, Zoom be damned. (There are many reasons I love this man, but his willingness to blow off his clients in order to help a trapped fawn is one of the top.) “He’s still breathing,� Andrew pointed out. But maybe his neck was injured? Or maybe he didn’t realize he was free? His little body was slumped against our neighbor’s side of fence, in an awkward contortion.

We conferred. Andrew stayed on our side of the fence, and I drove around to the next street, to help from the other side. By the time I got there (I was so panicked that I managed to get lost, which is impressive when you consider how small our neighborhood is), Andrew had fetched a beach towel. He handed it to me across the fence. I knelt down again, and this time it was easier to get close to the fawn. He wasn’t screaming, wasn’t fighting back; he had given up. He was utterly and completely still. Oh God, I thought, as I loosely enclosed his body in the towel, careful not to touch him. Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. Gently, very gently, I tugged the towel away from the fence. And then, like magic, in one blessed moment of awakening�

The fawn stood up. He was free! He was free, and realizing this, he fucking booked it. His gait was a little wonky at first, but by the time he reached the edge of the yard, it was clear he was okay.

**

That was our happy ending. (A week later, there was further relief when Andrew spotted the mother and fawn in the neighborhood, together again.) But the rest of that day, despite our successful rescue, I felt weird. My mood was brittle. I was snippy, I was stressed, I was nervous, I was overwhelmed. It was like I had no skin; as the afternoon and evening went on, the smallest hiccup could, and did, make me despairingly tearful. (In retrospect, the adrenaline was probably taking a while to clear my system.) Ìý

When I woke up the next morning, I did my usual thing. I meditated, I made coffee, I took my coffee out to the deck. Sometimes it takes a while for a feeling to settle within me. It’s like a plane, circling high above a city, waiting for a clear patch of runway. That morning, looking up at the trees stirring in the breeze, the beauty of this blue-skied morning making itself known, I felt an aching but welcome sense of sadness. The catharsis had been patiently waiting for me, until I was ready to greet it.

Nature is red in tooth and claw. Death is a reality. It’s the way of this world. I know this—but there are moments when this knowledge really lands. The fawn was okay, and thank goodness for that, but he, like all of us, moves through a world filled with hazard. (What if we hadn’t been home? What if the plan hadn’t worked?) I sat on the deck, looking up at the trees, and the saddest part occurred to me: often that hazard is not the result of ill intent. We think we’re doing the right thing. We perform an action not knowing what the ripple effect might be. We chop down trees and turn them into fences, and we have good reason for this—we’re protecting our families, we’re protecting our food—but we »å´Ç²Ô’t know what might happen in the future.

A few months ago I read Bittersweet by Susan Cain. She writes about the longing, universal among us, for a more perfect and beautiful world, for a world that is fundamentally whole. It’s a book that stuck with me, a book I can’t stop talking about. I was thinking of Bittersweet that morning on the deck. I’m a human being in the natural world, and I’m familiar with the Heisenberg principle. No matter how lightly I tread, I cannot be in the world without altering the world; none of us can. We bought this house* in January, and as we spend time here, I feel myself growing more attached to the landscape. And I want to lavish my love upon it, I want to show my appreciation for this world by moving through it, by walking through the woods where the deer walk, and swimming on the beach where the piping plovers nest. But this, I am realizing, is the challenge of loving a thing. Because, though you might try to love it just as it is, even your love will change it; even your purest action will have invisible consequences. And this isn’t a reason not to love it—not to walk, not to swim, not to live the life you’re meant—but this awareness, I think, is exactly what bittersweet means.

**

(*And look at this: the lessons that come from a change in environment. Yes, we bought a house! A little saltbox near the beach in Springs, out in East Hampton, which we’re gradually getting into shape. We’re still in New York City, though, and we’ll be splitting our time between the two!)

The room where it happens.

I’m beginning this post while sitting in a space about which —the coffee shop in the basement of the museum at 75th and Madison, the museum currently known as the Frick, formerly known as the Met Breuer, and before that known as the Whitney—and I’m sorry to keep repeating myself, but this really is the world’s most perfect writing venue. I’m sitting at my favorite table, with my back to the northern wall. I like the view from here, the way you can see the whole restaurant, the way the light comes in through the massive windows. The Wifi is good, the coffee is good, the seats are comfortable, the noise level is just right, and the other guests channel that energy that only exists in a museum cafe, that kind of placid contentment induced by looking at great art.

I first started coming to this space in 2018, when this museum was the Met Breuer and this coffee shop was Flora. I wrote a significant portion of sitting on one of the stools along the coffee bar counter. I’ve written before about my routine at Flora, so even though I’m tempted (so tempted!) to plunge back into those distant pre-pandemic memories, I’ll spare you the repeat. What I want to write about is what it feels like today—what it feels like to return to a place that is called something different, that is something different, and yet to be re-encountering myself within this changed place.

The Frick moved to this new (temporary) location a little over a year ago, back in spring 2021, and the Joe Coffee opened in this space shortly thereafter. The Frick is only open Thursday through Sunday, which only gives me Thursday and Friday of the working week to take advantage of it, and some weeks I’m away, and some days I’m at home or at the library, so I haven’t accrued all that many days working here, but that doesn’t matter. I love this new incarnation of the space just as fiercely as I loved the old. Its presence in my life strikes me as a minor miracle—I only need to recall the long stretch of time when the space was empty, when I didn’t know whether it was ever going to come back, when the mere idea of working inside a coffee shop felt impossible, and I’m reminded of that miracle.

When I have friends visiting, I sometimes take them on little walking tours of my neighborhood. I point out the place where I enter Central Park for my runs, and I point out the Society Library, and I point out St. James, and I point out my coffee shops. Because my friends are nice, they indulge me and nod along; they know how attached I am to these places. But it’s hard, actually, to convey to them what I mean, because when I look at these places, I’m not just seeing the brick-and-mortar of it. What I’m seeing are the hundreds of versions of myself who walked through those doors, who ran that pavement, who lit those candles, who sat in that chair and typed those words.

The reason I wanted to write this particular post today—right at this moment it’s Friday June 17, although it will probably be several days by the time this is finished and on your screen—is because I just emailed the revised draft of my new novel, my fourth novel, to my editor. The moment itself is so understated: you write an email, you attach a file, you click send. The things you feel are private, and invisible to the rest of the world. Relief! Fatigue, pride, excitement. There is much work still to come on this manuscript, much revision still to happen, but this is a significant moment nonetheless. The book is becoming more like itself. I love this part of the gig, these invisible thresholds, when you start to loosen your grip on the thing, when you feel your relationship to it evolving. These moments can happen anywhere, and no one else sees them happening, because they happen on the inside. This goodbye is merely temporary! The book will be back on my desk soon enough. But this moment of transition is making me think back on where it all began.

**

Like most writers, I have weirdly specific conventions when it comes to labelling my documents. It’s absolutely terrifying to start a new project, especially that very first moment when you open a new Word doc (Word user for life right here, I simply do not trust the cloud!) and you know that this completely blank document is going to gradually fill with the words that will gradually morph into your next work of fiction—but, dear God, how? How??? Well, you have to start somewhere, so when I start a new novel, I call the document � “book start.� Then I add the date. Yep. Original, right? (Aren’t you riveted right now?) But what I like about this naming convention is that, as the project evolves, as folder grows cluttered with various drafts, I can always find the document where it all began, which also tells me the exact day it all began.

The day a book is published can feel like a birthday. It’s the day your child takes her first breath and gulps down that delicious bookstore oxygen, the day the rest of the world gets to meet her, the day you learn just how gratifying, and challenging, it is for the world to render judgment upon her. But, to me, the real birthday is the day when you and and the work first begin speaking to one another. When you first start that spooky process of conjuring her into existence. Hence the labelling convention: I, with my honestly kind of twisted God complex, like being able to look back and pinpoint that precise moment of creation.

This new novel, my fourth novel, began on April 21, 2020. Those were the dark days of the pandemic: the field hospitals in Central Park, the frightening newness of masks, the meager twice-a-month trips to the grocery store. We »å´Ç²Ô’t need to plunge back into those memories, either. You have your own recollections of those days, and they will be far more vivid than whatever picture I can paint. What I want to describe for you instead is the mindset I had as I opened this document and typed the words “book start, 4.21.20.â€�

I was, at that point, a few weeks into doing the twelve-week program of . Even those early weeks of the program had started to shake loose something in me: a kind of lightness, or playfulness, a desire to simply have fun with whatever I did next. It inspired me to try a new approach to this new novel; I wanted to write with less control, with less of a plan. The pandemic itself also had a weirdly emboldening effect. Part of me thought that we might all be dead in six months, and if that was going to happen, then who the hell cared what happened with this book?

Every book—every work of art—is a reflection of who the artist was in the moment she wrote it. One thing I like about being several books into this career is that, when I look back at a given novel, I’m not just seeing the novel itself: I’m also seeing the ghostly selves, the parade of former Annas, who chipped away at the work. So many hours, thousands and thousands of hours, logged in various rooms and libraries and coffee shops. This pandemic has never stopped, but recently I’ve started to feel a real sense of discontinuity, of true separation from those early lockdown days. They now feel like an entirely different chapter, a completely different life. (It was fiction, predictably, that did it for me. While I , I read Gary Shteyngart’s novel . The way he captures the deep strangeness of that first spring and summer, both the terrifying darkness and gentle blessings of it, it somehow caused this awareness to crystallize.) It’s odd to realize that the person now bringing this book into the home stretch, the person typing this post today, that she’s living in an entirely different reality from the person who began it; and that she, in many ways, has changed too. New homes, new friendships, new understandings, new dreams. There’s a sharp contrast between now and then, between summer 2022 and summer 2020, but this book, for me, serves as a bridge between those moments, and also between those selves.

**

I’ve picked the thread back up, and I’m now continuing this post at the kitchen table of my parents� house, where we’re visiting for the weekend. We spent a lot of that first pandemic spring and summer up here. There are parts of my bedroom that remain trapped in lockdown amber. Last night I noticed that we still had those very first fabric masks, the ones my mom hurriedly made on her sewing machine, using scraps of old cloth, on that April day that the CDC finally admitted we should be wearing masks. Not long after that we moved on to surgical masks, and then to KN95s, and I remember thinking at some point—maybe a year ago, maybe longer�why am I still hanging onto those? And vaguely thinking that I ought to throw them away, but I never did.

I’ve always been a sentimental person. I think it’s part of why I love repetition and routine. Not just because I enjoy the creature comforts of familiarity (although, »å´Ç²Ô’t get me wrong, I do!), but because I like the way my present experiences layer over my past experiences. I like the lessons, the sad and beautiful lessons, that spring from that layering. When I sit in the Joe Coffee in the basement of the Frick, when I pick up that fabric mask, it’s a chance for me to get haunted by those old ghosts. They’re friendly—they’re my ghosts, after all, we’re on intimate terms—but they are also there to offer me some stern and necessary reminders. Like: change is constant. Like: time passes, and the losses rack up. I am never going to be the person I once was. I am never getting that old coffee shop back! It’s foolish to think otherwise.

In April 2020, when I sat down and started writing the story that eventually became my fourth novel, the novel that I’m excited to tell you more about (soon!), there was so much darkness around us, and there was so much darkness ahead. I had no idea how much darkness was ahead! I had no idea how many difficult things, both globally and personally, awaited. And I’m glad, actually, that I didn’t know. That knowledge would have been paralyzing. Instead, I spent a large part of that spring and summer doing simple things. I wrote my morning pages. I did a lot of cooking. I took walks in the woods. I had meals with my family. I felt happy, I felt terrified, I felt lonely, I felt irritable. Sometimes I was grateful; sometimes (often) I was just whiny. I tried to pass the time. I sought refuge in my own imagination. I tried to make myself laugh. I remember Andrew walking into my parents� living room, one day that spring. The living room was where I’d set up a temporary desk. I was getting into a groove with the new novel—the spies, the secrets, the intrigue. I was writing a scene about some inept bad guys, and I was just letting it rip, I was letting these guys be comically stupid, and I was snorting in amusement, and Andrew raised an eyebrow and said: “Having fun in there?�

And the thing is, despite everything that was happening, despite everything that was yet to happen, despite the bleak feelings that sometimes swamped me like a tidal wave—despite all of that, I was having fun in there.

**

Before I say goodbye, a few things I wanted to share! I’ve been really bad at posting on Instagram lately, so here it goes:

I was recently a guest on two podcasts. I was interviewed by the wonderful Zibby Owens for , and interviewed by Mike Consol for . There is basically nothing I love more than talking about the creative process, so I really enjoyed these conversations. Available wherever you get your podcasts!

I also . This was such a charming, enjoyable read. It has both a breeziness and poignancy that feel just right for summertime. Perfect if you’re a fan of historical fiction, especially of the mid-century Mad Men vintage.

Amazon is currently running a promotion for my first novel, The Futures, . I think this promotion only runs until the end of June, so if you haven’t read The Futures and you’re intrigued, act now! Low low prices!

Lastly, a short list of things sparking joy for me these days. Joy the Baker’s . Tina Brown’s (SO JUICY). Hacks, my new favorite TV show. The Beatles, blasting while I’m cooking dinner. Ice cream with rainbow sprinkles. The sky being light until 9 p.m. Summer! Everything, everything, everything about summer.

Well, guys, it happened. Two years into it and I finally got Covid!

I’m writing to you from the other side of what was, in terms of physical symptoms, an ordinary time. I’m feeling healthy, back to normal, and most of all, extremely (extremely!) lucky to have had such a mild course of it. Blessings to the vaccines, to Tylenol and Dayquil, to Gatorade and herbal tea, to hot baths. It was akin to a bad cold, with some extra anxiety layered on top, because I was tracking my symptoms like a hawk. Odds are good that you’ve had Covid by this point too, and there’s honestly not a lot to write home about in terms of the physical progression. But the emotional-mental-spiritual progression! Oh boy. I was texting with a friend during that week, giving her all my highs and lows, and she said: “I see a blog post coming out of this.� Reader, she was right.

I was in San Francisco when I began to feel lousy. I’d come to town for Easter weekend to be with a dear friend. Our first day together was a glorious one, a day of sunshine and walks and long meals and soul-filling conversation. Then I went to bed, and then I woke up feeling crappy (sore throat, slight fever). I took a test and there it was, a line so faint I could barely see it, but a line nonetheless. I should say that this development was pretty unsurprising. I’d been out and about in New York in the preceding days, dinners and work events and other things, and cases have been on the rise in the city, and other friends have been testing positive, and it was bound to happen eventually. I’d taken those risks knowing they were risks. And I think this was crucial for me to bear in mind: that I couldn’t be too aggrieved by this development. (Because that would beg the question: aggrieved with whom? Aggrieved by what?) It was a situation of my own making.

I was supposed to fly home at the end of the weekend, but that obviously wasn’t going to happen, so I changed my flight and made a new hotel reservation. I was going to be alone, hunkered down in a hotel room, for a long while. At first glance, this was sort of depressing. But while I was Facetiming with my mom, the reframe occurred to me. I’d been craving some quiet time, right? I’d been wanting to buckle down on revisions to my new novel, right? Right! “Maybe this is a good thing!� I said. “I’m going to view this as a writing retreat. I’ll feel bad for 24 hours and then I’ll probably feel better and then I’m going to get so much work done.�

This was my mantra. I kept telling my family and friends that it was fine, »å´Ç²Ô’t worry, I was just pretending this was a writing retreat! There is a kind of optimism that borders on derangement, and I am definitely afflicted by this. , which two family members separately sent to me in the span of 24 hours (my brand is strong, I guess). It’s the pathological search for silver linings, the ability to spin literally anything into a positive.

I »å´Ç²Ô’t really know why I am the way I am. A happenstance of genetics, upbringing, wider life experiences, who knows. I’ve pretty much always been this way, but several years ago I learned the price of such deranged optimism, which is that it can—sometimes—mask real pain. I learned what many people have learned before, which is that if pain is ignored for too long, it will rear up and exact vengeance and it will charge a usurious interest rate. A confluence of factors caused me to slow down and learn some of these things. It was helpful to know that I had this pattern of deranged optimism. It was helpful to identify it as a pattern, which is to say, as an entity separate from me. I got better—not necessarily good, but certainly better—at checking in with myself. I did all of the things that people always tell you to do. I began to meditate, to keep a journal, to take deep breaths, to go for walks. I thought about my faith. I tried new things. It helped, a lot.

My deranged optimism wasn’t gone, not by any stretch. She was just, let’s say, balanced out by other internal forces. Sometimes she took a backseat, but she was there for me when I needed her. One of the scary things about letting yourself change is wondering whether you have to say goodbye to your former selves. You have tenderness for those selves. You were those selves. Is it right to judge them, to cast aspersions on them? But this, I think, is a misconception. You »å´Ç²Ô’t say goodbye to them. They are still part of you. You learn to hold them more lightly. To say to them: thank you, I love you, but it’s okay. You can take a break.

**

Those first few days of my hotel isolation, I got a little bit of writing done. Not much. I was pretty congested and tired, and just as the congestion seemed to be improving, then it suddenly got worse. After a few days of progress, I’d had this little setback. I wasn’t getting better. I panicked! I wondered when I’d be able to go home.

My hotel room, up on the 46th floor, had this beautiful view of the South Bay. I spent a lot of time (so much time!) staring out the window. The container ships, the piers, the Bay Bridge, the Sales Force tower. I was safe and secure. I was aware of my insane luck, my luck in this specific situation, my luck in world-historical terms. And yet I was also aware of the strangeness of my situation, living high up in this room, repeating 24-hour cycles, the world busy and bustling below.

And then, several days in, when I had that little setback, the sense of strangeness began to predominate. I felt far away from the world, a slight unreality, a shaky uncertainty, and this freaked me out. I called Andrew and cried for a while, and then decided to make one of those telehealth appointments. Twenty minutes later, I was talking to Dr. P. I described to her my symptoms and situation. She listened, and asked several questions, and offered me the reassurance I hadn’t realized I’d been needing so badly. She was tired—you could see it in her eyes—but even in her tiredness, she was so kind. And it was like that kindness caused something in me to unclench. I could just let go, completely, into what I was feeling.

And after that catharsis (a nice long bout of tears, a hot bath, a cup of tea) I felt so much better. Strangely, I felt a sense of empowerment. I had taken back my agency. Talking to Dr. P hadn’t actually changed the facts on the ground. But in the act of making that appointment, of realizing I needed an authority figure to tell me what to do, I had taken back some measure of control. We had a plan: I would check back in if I got worse. Following CDC guidelines, I would fly home on X day. It was that combination—my reaching out, her responding with kindness, us figuring out the next steps—that allowed me to turn the corner on the week.

I was originally in San Francisco to attend my friend’s baptism, which took place on Holy Saturday. I had so badly wanted to show up for her in this big moment. But, instead, she was showing up for me. She dropped off soup and fresh fruit and tea. She took care of me. Later, when I was on the mend, she met me for masked and distanced walks, tracing the edges of the city. We walked and talked, we walked and talked; in the end we squeezed in as much quality time as we’d originally allotted, if not more. On the last evening, the day before my flight home, we walked through Golden Gate Park to the Pacific Ocean. I ran up to the water, because the ocean always makes me run like a little kid, and I felt happy. I just felt so happy. I told her that this had wound up being the perfect week; that I had gotten from it exactly what I needed.

**

For the longest time, there has been the question of how this pandemic ends. One variant follows another, and there are different risk levels, and there are different needs. Lately I’ve found myself doing the things I used to do back in 2019—going out to dinner, going to parties, seeing friends, planning trips—and it’s like part of me has moved on, but part of me is still emerging from the pandemic mindset, from the world-altering slowness of 2020. Despite the craziness, the past two years have also allowed me time to be quiet; to reflect; to think deliberately about the life I want. It’s been useful. I find myself wondering if I am ready to reenter the arena.

But there was something about this past week—it slapped me awake. Occasionally I would venture out (wearing my mask, keeping my distance!) and find a bench on the Embarcadero, down by the water, far from other people, and sit in the sunshine and read for a bit. From where I sat, I could hear the clock in the ferry building announcing the hour. The sound was like a bell chiming during meditation: it caused me to look up from my book, to notice the world around me. My distance was purposeful, the shields of my mask, my baseball hat, my book. It was good to know what that distance felt like, what it felt like, in a visceral sense. In a way I sorely needed, the experience was slapping me back into the reality of the world.

I »å´Ç²Ô’t know why, but this past week felt like a punctuation: the ending of something, the beginning of something else.

When I was harping on about my Covid writing retreat, my friends and family indulged me and nodded along, but I could tell they thought I was being a little crazy. I thought I was being a little crazy. (I mean, Anna! Calm down! Just take some Dayquil and watch TV like a normal person!) But I had to be. Sometimes I tell myself things—I project hope into the void of the future, I see sadness and call it good—and I »å´Ç²Ô’t entirely believe what I’m saying, but I try to believe it nonetheless, because, on the deepest level, this is the way I know how to live. I keep trying, because if nothing else, I’m good at trying.

Over the past few months I’ve been working my way through The Red Book, Carl Jung’s hallucinatory masterpiece, a book which speaks to my soul. (Sometimes I will write more about this!) I drink my coffee and hang out with my Swiss buddy for a while, and it’s one of my favorite parts of the day. Just this morning, I read this line, which seems to fit with what I’m saying above: “So if it is a deception, then deception is my God.�

That silver lining may or may not be real. But you have to walk inside the cloud in order to see it for yourself. So you set your feet in that direction, and when you falter, you tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself in order to keep walking.

You’ve probably noticed that I write a lot about my devotion to certain daily habits: meditation, exercise, fresh air, and so on. I try to get at least a little of each of those things every day. There are days when these boxes »å´Ç²Ô’t get checked, and that’s fine—life happens!—but on those days, I can feel the difference. And if I get several of those days strung together, that’s when I really start to notice it.

The same goes for my daily writing habit. I left my publishing job over three years ago (which is hard to believe), and in those years, I’ve come to discover what works for me. I’ve always been a morning person. I’m one of those people who can’t wait to go to bed because I am genuinely so excited about the cup of coffee that awaits me in the morning. Back when I was working full-time, I typically woke up at 6 a.m. and was at my desk by 6:30 a.m., but these days, blessedly, the mornings are more leisurely. I’m aware of how lucky I am not to be punching a clock, not to have the rhythms of my life dictated by a corporate schedule. That freedom fills me with deep gratitude. And yet too much freedom can drive a person bananas. Or, at least, it can drive this person bananas. And so, at a certain point over the last few years, without really intending for this to happen, I developed a rule for myself: on weekdays between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., I am writing. I am my butt in the chair at the desk, and in doing that, I am erecting a firm barrier between myself and the real world, dropping into the parallel universe of fiction.

There are exceptions to this! Of course. Some days there’s more pressing work that overtakes the writing, fun stuff like filing my 1099s (what’s up, tax season!) and responding to long-neglected emails, but I find this both necessary and weirdly satisfying, like finally getting a stringy piece of food unstuck from your teeth. On Tuesday mornings I work a volunteer shift at a community kitchen, which interrupts those hours, but I treasure that interruption; it fills an important part of my soul. And occasionally I just have to play hooky and have lunch with a friend, because that too fills an important part of my soul. These are all good reasons to miss the writing, and I’ve learned not to feel guilty about them. But if I »å´Ç²Ô’t have a good reason, then I am like a salmon in the springtime, moving instinctively upstream, towards the place where I am genetically programmed to be: at my desk.

As I get ready to sit down circa 11 a.m., I engage in a handful of micro rituals. I »å´Ç²Ô’t consider myself a highly superstitious person. I can point to rational reasons for why I do each of these things, but I also recognize that their value to me has long since transcended rationality. First, I make myself a large pot of tea, which provides me a steady drip of caffeine over the next few hours. Except I »å´Ç²Ô’t actually own a teapot, and besides, teapots »å´Ç²Ô’t keep the tea hot enough, so I brew my tea in a Hydroflask. The insulation in that thing is magical. Too magical, actually, it keeps the tea too hot, so I bring along a small tea cup, which I refill several times over the course of the day. Are you bored yet? Yeah, well, sorry. It took me a long time to perfect these systems and I am determined to share this information with the world!

And then, after I triage any unread emails, I close my email tab. This is probably the most important ritual. If I see a new email come in, I’ll immediately check to see what it is, because I’m a dumb old lab rat like anybody, a junky addicted to that tiny dopamine hit, and if Goop informs me about a sale I will absolutely go read about it and interrupt the flow. And then, lastly, I open a tab with Google maps. I type in the location of whichever scene I’m working on that day, and I stare at the map for several beats, as if those pixels are actually the portal to the parallel universe. I became dependent on this practice when I was writing Our American Friend, where many scenes take place in Paris and Moscow. I needed to constantly remind myself of what a character was near, what route she would take, what view she would have from her window. (I know we so often poo-poo what the internet has wrought, but honestly, without Wikipedia and Google maps, I never could have written this book.) But, weirdly, this practice was also necessary when I was writing scenes set in New York, scenes set in my neighborhood, where I needed no help remembering which street intersects with which avenue. It took on its own meaning, completely detached from necessity.

And then, finally, I’m ready to begin. Some days I’m actually excited to start writing, and I launch right into it, full of energy. But most of the time, I feel a pit of dread in my stomach. I »å´Ç²Ô’t want to do it. I »å´Ç²Ô’t want to do it. In that moment I am dangerously aware of the freedom I mentioned above. I could just â€� not write. No one is holding a gun to my head! No one is making me do this. This, I think, is why I have come to view that allotment of time as sacrosanct, as mostly nonnegotiable. The time matters more, much more, than the word count or page count. Even if I just tinker with what I did the day before; even if I just manage to write one single paragraph, one single sentence; even if I just spend the time making notes to myself, little brainstorms and ideas for future scenes, that’s enough. I show up, and in the act of pressing my finger against the pulse of the manuscript, I insure that the pulse is still there. This is like some voodoo writing version of a watched pot never boils, except in my case, it’s a watched manuscript never dies.

Showing up: this, I have discovered, is the bare minimum, which also means it’s the most important part. It doesn’t have to be elegant or graceful. When I’m finishing a really hard power zone interval on Peloton, sometimes Matt Wilpers tells me to “put a stamp of approval on itâ€� and to “make it look good.â€� (Matt! I love you! But after seven minutes in zone four, really? Really?) Right now, though, I am telling you the opposite. It doesn’t matter! No one is watching you. No one cares what it looks like. Drag yourself across that finish line if you must. This is both the curse and the blessing of writing a novel. It takes such an absurdly long time, and yet the world is really only going to pay attention to it for a microscopic moment at the very, very, very end of the process. But you see what this means, »å´Ç²Ô’t you? It means that, 99 percent of the time, no one is paying attention to you. No one, except you, gives a shit.

**

The other day, I had a phone call with a girl who is currently a sophomore at my old boarding school on Vancouver Island, part of a career mentorship program that connects students with alumni. She wants to be a writer someday. In the course of our conversation, she asked me what I thought mattered more in a writing career: talent, or luck.

My response was that the thing that matters most, far more than either talent or luck, is hard work. In second place I would rank luck, and in third (quite a distant third, actually) I would rank talent. I »å´Ç²Ô’t mean to underplay the role luck plays, because it plays an enormous role, especially when you consider the structural luck of being born into a certain demographic, a certain family, certain educational opportunities. But I think readers tend to be pretty smart. They can sniff out a fake. So even if you luck your way into your first book being published, if you waste that opportunity, if you »å´Ç²Ô’t sit your butt in that chair and make the most of it, your luck isn’t really going to last.

When I was still at Random House, and I was on that 6 a.m. grind, people sometimes asked me how I motivated myself to get up that early. I had a few answers to this. One was that I knew plenty of people who had it way harder than me, people who got up far earlier for things far more demanding than writing: friends with sleepless infants, friends who worked as doctors or teachers. The other was that, quite simply, I had to. When my alarm went off, and I heaved myself out of bed, the same phrase popped into my head every morning: Time to go milk the cows.

It must be in my blood. My dad grew up on a dairy farm, and I grew up with stories about the farm. One thing I know about cows is that they have to be milked. If you »å´Ç²Ô’t, their udders swell, and this causes them pain. If you decide to sleep in, that decision has consequences. You are causing pain to another living creature. That may be not be your intention, but it’s a consequence nonetheless. Some mornings you slip up. You’re so exhausted you »å´Ç²Ô’t even hear the alarm. It’s okay. It happens. None of us can get it right all of the time. I look back at the books I have written and I know that I could have done a better job. I could have gone deeper. I could have pushed the language past cliche. Sometimes I was frustrated and impatient and I blamed the book for this unhappiness. But it was never, at the root of it, actually the book’s fault. This idea didn’t bust down the barricades of my life, pressing a gun to my head, demanding to be written. I invited the idea inside. I gave it shelter. This wasn’t inevitable; this was a decision, my decision. And when I made that decision, I became responsible for it.

My days may be structured with routine and discipline, and sometimes the routine is so predictable that I almost feel like a robot, a tea-drinking, word-typing, Instagram-scrolling, podcast-listening, walk-taking, email-sending robot—but when I am feeling extra-robotic, and a bit sad about that robotic-ness, that’s when I have to remind myself of the freedom that lies at the core of this whole endeavor. I have chosen this. I »å´Ç²Ô’t have to be doing this. If I ever want to stop, I can just â€� stop. I »å´Ç²Ô’t mean this to sound negative, or doom-and-gloom. Rather, it’s the potential of change, the potential of loss, which reinvigorates the fierceness of the love I have for this unlikely thing.

In December 2019, in that last holiday season before Covid, my family took a trip to Mass MoCA. In the Jenny Holzer installation, there was this poster. Two years later and I still think about it all the time. The words have burned themselves into my mind. I leave you with this:

She reads books; she drinks coffee; she points herself toward the rising sun.

As I write this post, it’s now less than three weeks til the publication day of Our American Friend. I know, I know! How many times have I said this now? I sound like a broken record! But before I get into the musings, let me give a quick plug to the book events coming up in February (all of which you can find ). At each of these events, I’m in-conversation with another writer—and you guys, these writers! I’m pinching myself. I have so much respect and admiration for every person on this list.

Jonathan Darman () is a brilliant political biographer, not to mention a dear friend, not to mention the person who introduced me to the Society Library in the first place, so this feels cosmically perfect. Lara Prescott () is the author of The Secrets We Kept, a novel about the real-life CIA intrigue behind the publication of Doctor Zhivago, which I devoured like an ice cream sundae. Jo Piazza () writes crackling, perceptive, of-the-moment fiction, and also created one of the . And Jennifer Close () is someone I’ve admired for the longest time, whose novels strike that impossibly elegant balance between funny and compassionate.

HOT DAMN! These are going to be fun. And the silver lining of these virtual events is that you can join from anywhere in the world. So even though I’m not making it out to the West Coast, and even though there are so many people I haven’t seen in far too long, I still hope you might join for one (or more!) of these events. It really would mean so much to see you there! I mentioned this on Instagram the other day, but it bears repeating: when The Futures came out in 2017, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy doing these events as much as I do. I’ve always thought of myself as an introvert (although, honestly, the pandemic has changed that), but I love them. And they’ve turned out to be very important to me. In a way, the book doesn’t feel real until I’m sharing it with you; until I get to talk to you about it. These events are the first time the book really becomes a thing separate from me. My relationship to it starts to shift. I love my little baby, but I recognize that my little baby has left the nest. It no longer belongs to me. These events are where I mark, and celebrate, the feeling of holding it more lightly.

**

Talk to any writer with a book coming out, and she will tell you how nerve-wracking and topsy-turvy those weeks right before publication are. When you begin writing a novel, you have a frightening amount of control. You decide what will happen to these characters. You decide what they will say, what they will do, whether they get to laugh or cry or yell or whisper. And then time goes on, and other people weigh in. You take edits, incorporate feedback: you have a little bit less control. You come up with marketing copy, review cover designs: your opinion matters, but it’s just one among many. You send early copies to booksellers and the media: you would like to think that all of them will love the book, but they won’t. By the time the book hits shelves, you are starting to see that your role in the process is pretty much finished. You are there to talk to people, to answer questions, to support the story you have written. But you are no longer steering this ship.

This lack of control! It’s a lesson I have been fated to learn over and over, in every arena of life. I find that it’s usually easier for me to accept my lack of control when my life is relatively quiet; when my routine is stable and predictable. I can sit there, sipping my morning coffee, enjoying the afterglow of meditation, and think: oh, yes, look how evolved I am. But this (and it’s taken me a while to realize this) is entirely false. I’m congratulating myself for something supremely easy. Of course I can be calm, cool, and collected when life is calm, cool, and collected. It’s when life becomes a proper shitstorm that the difficulty makes itself known.

It reminds me of something I heard on a podcast this morning. Everyone on the internet is reading , and while I haven’t read it yet (I almost certainly will), I’m listening to and she highlighted this observation of his: “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.�

Your third novel isn’t as sexy as your first. You lack that cherubic newborn glow; you no longer embody such limitless potential. Schrodinger’s box has been opened; the Debut Author is discovered to be just a regular old author after all. But there are many, many, many ways in which the third novel experience is better than the first. I have a better grasp of my systems. I know which will help me through this time, and which will only hurt me.

What hurts: reading your Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ and Amazon reviews. There is no upside to this. Louder for the people in the back: there is no upside to this. What hurts: comparing your book to the other books that published in the same week or month. Thinking to yourself: if only, if only. If only you had gotten that review, been featured on that show, gotten this or that celebrity to post about it. Would those things have changed the trajectory of your book? Quite possibly yes. But did those things happen? No. And did anyone ever tell you that were entitled to those things? Was there some legally binding contract that guaranteed those outcomes? Also no. Can you feel a little sad about the fact that your dreams didn’t come true? Sure. You’re only human. But you are not meant to stay in that sadness for too long.

What helps: finding the people with whom you can tell the truth. Despite working in book publishing for many years, it took me a little while to find a community of writer-friends. But now they are extremely dear to me. They are my soulmates, each and every one of them. We take walks together (in-person if they live in New York, on the phone if they »å´Ç²Ô’t), criss-crossing Central Park, setting a quick pace, getting the blood pumping. We gossip a little, but mostly we talk about the hard stuff. If something is making you feel tender, or fragile, or afraid, or disappointed, then you have one task: to pay attention to that feeling. There is knowledge within that feeling. Your heart is trying to tell you something. But rarely can you decipher the heart’s tricky language on your own. So you walk and talk with your trusted soulmate friends, and you speak to them in that tricky language of your heart, and most of the time, they hear what you cannot hear. Your awareness of the problem also contains the seeds of a solution.

And then you also do the basic things! The things so ordinary you almost overlook them. For me this means regular daily exercise. Whether running, or Pelotoning, or walking, or yoga, what matters is the movement. It also means baking cookies. It means meditating every morning. It means singing along to the Beatles while making my coffee, and tearing up every time I hear Let It Be. It means saying no to certain plans in order to have enough quiet time, to have those nights when I wear pajamas and unplug myself from the world. But balanced against that last imperative is something just as important; probably the most important thing on this list. To keep myself sane, I cannot suddenly start to think that this is MY moment, that the people in my life are suddenly orbiting around ME. Because I feel most myself—the best version of myself—when I find ways to serve my friends, my family, the people in my community. This service comes in all forms. It can mean texting a friend to say that, hey, this old song made me think of you; it can mean cooking or doing the dishes for a person you love; it can mean volunteering for the nearby soup kitchen; it can mean taking the time to ask how a stranger is doing, and slowing down enough to actually listen, and to listen for as long as they would like to talk. These things remind me that, as long-awaited as this publication might be, in this moment, I am still just plain old Anna. I am still a mere planet circling the sun.

After an extended hiatus for the holidays, over these last few weeks I’ve been falling back in love with a running routine. It feels good. Most mornings I rely on the Nike Run Club app. The knowledge that I’ll have (LOVE YOU, Coach Bennett) chatting in my ear makes it a little easier to get myself out the door. Coach Bennett is constantly giving you these little tips and tricks, and like he always says: This is about running. This is not about running. The same goes for everything I just said above. Every lesson I learn, every tidbit I glean. This is about writing. This is not about writing.

From our walk this morning in Central Park. The first snow of the season! I love that feeling: the fresh start, the blank slate.

Tis the season for New Years resolutions, so on that note, let me tell you about something RADICAL I just did. You know about inbox zero? Surely you know one of those people, or maybe you are one of those people, or maybe you aspire to be one of those people. I fall into the latter category. I’ve never actually achieved that level of Nirvana, but I’ve probably gotten as close as having a mere twenty-ish emails in my inbox.

I’m not that great at making official To Do lists, so instead I treat my inbox as my To Do list. If there isn’t an email in there to remind me, then honestly, I probably won’t do it. One result of this is that I send a lot of emails to myself, with shouty subject lines like PAY GARAGE BILL!!!! Another result of this is my perpetual inability to achieve inbox zero, because there are always things I have to do, and I refuse to use those clever features like “Snoozeâ€� or “Add to Tasksâ€� because, on some essential level, I »å´Ç²Ô’t really trust the technology. (I recognize this is a problem, but that’s a post for another day.) But that’s not really what’s been clogging up my inbox for years on end. It isn’t the Actual Work I’ve neglected, or important tasks that have fallen by the wayside. Rather, it’s a bunch of articles. Like, a lot of articles. All of which have been sent to me by my friends and family, and which I’ve kept visible in my inbox because they look genuinely interesting, and which I would no doubt enjoy reading (these are people whose taste I trust) but which I’ve just â€� never gotten around to reading.

When I say years, I mean it. The newest email in my inbox, number 1 of 33, was received at 12:48 p.m. today. The oldest email in my inbox, number 33 of 33, was received at 12:31 p.m. on August 8, 2015. Subject line: The Mob’s IT Department. I am sure that this is a very good article. But I am taking today to admit—to finally, publicly, get this off my chest!—that I am probably never going to read it. I received that email more than six years ago. I was still in my twenties; still working full-time in publishing; still living above the piano bar. Obama was still president! Good grief. I let that article, and myriad others, sit in my inbox through the entire duration of the Trump administration. That is actually insane. For every single day of the Trump administration, I opened my inbox and looked at these same subject lines. The Mob’s IT Department. The War Against Pope Francis. Why the World’s Recycling System Stopped Working. From Crayons to Chemo, He’s Back By Her Side.

Andrew asks me why I do this to myself. Doesn’t it bother you? Doesn’t it drive you crazy? Well, yes, it does. And that’s the point! I left those emails in my inbox as reminders to myself, as entries on my to-do list. I was going to read them eventually! I suppose I had this idea that someday, my Future Self would be sitting at her laptop, ready to take a midday break from writing, and would think, with calm tranquility, Why »å´Ç²Ô’t I read one of those articles?, and would click on one of those long-neglected links, and would settle in (probably while sipping a hot cup of tea), and finally, finally learn about the war against Pope Francis. But six years later, I can tell you â€� that’s never how it went. My writing breaks usually consist of going to the New York Times, scrolling through the homepage for five seconds, feeling vaguely stressed and vaguely bored, going to Instagram, scrolling for a minute, feeling vaguely guilty and vaguely bored, reaching for my tea, realizing the tea is cold, giving up, standing up, going to the kitchen for a snack instead.

It’s 2022. It’s time for some radical honesty. I’ve realized that I’m never going to become that Future Self. I am going to remain my Present Self, the one whose brain is usually too fried from the day’s work to read any articles that require more than the bare minimum of effort. The one who prefers to spend her lunch break watching cooking videos on Youtube, or looking at unrealistic houses on Zillow. Which leads to this decision: I’ve created a folder in my email to house all those unread articles. The folder is called, very cleverly, “Articles.� My inbox shrank by thirty percent in two seconds! Amazing. Inbox zero, I can practically taste it. And, yes, I created this folder while recognizing that I am probably never (almost certainly never) going to open that folder and actually read these pieces. I should stop lying to myself and just admit that. Make a clean sweep and delete them entirely. But for some reason, I can’t get there quite yet. Radical honesty �. kind of. Baby steps, people. No one said change was easy.

**

Speaking of it being 2022: this is the year that is coming out! The new year has given me a good kick in the pants, and I’m gearing up for publication day on February 15. I’ve updated my website () with event listings, with possibly more to come. The pandemic means we’re having to be a little bit play-it-by-ear, but as of now (I think) the plan is for the New York and Philadelphia events to be in-person (and simultaneously livestreamed), and the DC and Connecticut events to be virtual.

I’m incredibly honored to be sharing these events with such stellar writers: (February 15), (February 22), and (February 24). I would be so thrilled to see you there, whether in-person or virtually! The more the merrier. Most of these events will ask you to register in advance, so I encourage you to do that :)

This book has been a long time coming, and while this pre-publication stretch comes with some nerves, I am mostly just excited. Excited to share this story with you, to hear what you think, to introduce you to the characters who kept me company through the insane years we’ve been living through. We’re now less than six weeks away from publication, and the book is available for preorder (as hardcover, ebook, and audiobook) from , , , , , or . Thank you! I love you.

I’ve been meaning, for a while now, to tell you the story of how this blog came to be. Better late than never, right?

I got the idea last year, during that first pandemic fall of 2020, while Andrew and I were out in Montauk for October. We spent the month posted up in a ramshackle Airbnb, and it was a beautiful month (foliage, beach walks, farm stands) but summer was inarguably over, and by late October, it was way too cold for things like outdoor dining. In other words, the looming reality of that long Covid winter was starting to make itself known. During that time, I was working on my next novel. Andrew was working, too, but the rhythms of our days were very different. He spent the whole day in meetings, talking to other people, recreating the experience of an office on the computer screen. Writing a novel, on the other hand. It’s always been a very solitary endeavor. It’s just you, the page, the characters, for months or years at a time, and those characters never want to Zoom with you. To break up the solitude, when the weather cooperated, I would sometimes go to the cafe in town and work at one of their outdoor tables for a while. Exchanging a few words with the barista, overhearing other people’s conversations, it gave me just enough human interaction to allow me to feel human. But on rainy days, I worked at home. Those were exceptionally quiet days.

On a Friday at the end of one particularly rainy and housebound week, I had to bring our car to the garage in town to get the headlight fixed. The mechanic was a nice guy, and we got to chatting. We stood next to the car while he changed the bulb, and let me tell you, it was delightful. We spent five or ten minutes talking about nothing. The weather, the tourists, the price of real estate. Meaningless chitchat! I hadn’t realized how badly I’d been missing it! That night, as Andrew and I were driving back from dinner, I started telling him about my conversation with the mechanic. Here’s what he had to say about the deer problem! About the housing market! I was bouncy and animated, like a little kid back from her first day of kindergarten, bragging about her new friend. I could actually feel the delight coursing through my body. With a gentle and loving laugh, Andrew said: wow, this was really the highlight of your week, huh? And I laughed and said: yeah, it was!

And then I sat with that for a moment. And then this made me feel sort of depressed, and sad, and I began to cry.

In the days that followed, I allowed myself to feel (maybe for the first time since the pandemic had begun, seven months earlier) just how lonely and isolating this Covid thing really was. Even though I have a partner, and family, and friends, and I love them deeply—even with that, loneliness was still a real factor. I couldn’t snap my fingers and make Covid go away. But I also knew that I had to do something, I had to change something. I couldn’t sustain myself on those meager scraps. So what could I do? How could I, given the constrictions of the pandemic, bring back into my daily routine that necessary, heart-expanding experience of intersecting with other people’s lives?

That’s when I thought of the idea for this blog. Rarely am I seized with an idea that I know, with deep gut-level certainty, I must carry out. This was one of them. A few days after that encounter at the garage, I wrote my first blog post. It’s been one of the best things I’ve done for myself in the last year-plus. This blog has given me so much! Chances to verbalize these long-simmering thoughts, but more importantly: chances to exchange emails or texts or calls with old friends and new, to talk about books and food and TV shows, to reconnect with people thousands of miles away. It broke up the quiet. It kept me sane during that long Covid winter, during the shaky transitions of spring and summer. This writing is much more personal than anything I’ve done before; and I’ve loved it. I’ve found so much joy in it. In the end, I have loneliness to thank for pushing me into this discovery.

But that said—I haven’t written here in a while, not since Labor Day, and I think I know why that is. The fall of 2021 is very different from the fall of 2020. Things have gotten busier. I’m seeing people again. Lunches, dinners, coffees. Museums, movie theaters, parties. I run into friends on the street. I see people around the neighborhood. New York City is lively! The world has made herself visible again, and I am a part of that world. I feel enmeshed again in the slipstreams of other people’s lives (and my god, how grateful I am for that). We are a long ways yet from normal, but the small collisions of everyday life have been coming back.

**

That tiny little breakdown last October, after the car mechanic conversation (sidenote because, lol: that poor mechanic has no idea how much I still talk about him): the truth is that, pandemic or no pandemic, it probably would have come eventually. When I plunged into this full-time writing thing, I wasn’t just changing career tracks; I was changing the deepest rhythms and routines of my days. Even before we ever heard of this stupid virus, I was feeling those occasional bursts of loneliness, of realizing that staying inside and writing all day wasn’t going to be enough. Eventually I was going to have to address this. The pandemic merely accelerated it. But from the outset I’ve loved writing, and I’ve loved the freedom of it. I’ve never wanted to give that up. So it was going to be up to me—it was always going to be up to me—to figure out my own solution. My own apparatuses. It has taken me a while (over three years!) to find these. Not merely the apparatuses required for productivity, for writing and reading and other book-stuff, but also the apparatuses required for the fuller, harder-to-define experience of living.

This blog has been part of that. At the outset, this blog served a very specific purpose, i.e., to keep myself from crying in various Montauk parking lots. (I mean, you do have to laugh about this stuff. It’s FUNNY.) But I guess what I’m trying to say, in very long-winded fashion, is that I no longer need this blog to serve that specific purpose. I feel that, for the moment at least, I have figured out how to navigate that particular stretch of water. So this blog, then. I love having this outlet! I »å´Ç²Ô’t want to give it up. But now what shape does it take? I’ve been thinking about this. And part of the reason I haven’t written in a while is that â€� I »å´Ç²Ô’t know! I still »å´Ç²Ô’t know. And rather than trying to change this, to invent some arbitrary answer, I’d like to embrace the non-plan of this plan. To let it be a little lighter, a little freer, as we say goodbye to this marathon pandemic year.

Last month I watched the Beatles documentary Get Back (I am fully obsessed; if you haven’t watched it yet please do so immediately so that we can talk about it), and one of the things I loved best was watching them constantly play. Play in the way that little kids play. The Beatles were in that studio in order to write new songs and record a new album, but so much of the joyful creativity happened when they ·É±ð°ù±ð²Ô’t working. When they were just bullshitting, riffing, goofing off.

I write in order to think, and I share the writing in order to make the thought real. Your existence holds me accountable. So let’s consider this my jumpstart on 2022 resolutions. I am here, I am still here, and I have precisely zero answers, but so what! In 2022, I am finding the joy in this. I am going to let myself become whatever I need to become. Happy holidays, my friends. We made it. I’m so grateful for you. Have a safe, cozy end to the year. See you on the flipside.

Long walk-and-talks with friends: probably my number one pandemic coping strategy.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the differences between hope and distraction. Both can help us make it through the dim and dreary times. But they aren’t the same thing. This summer has been an object lesson in that difference.

I have pretty vivid memories of learning the good news about the vaccines, back in November 2020. We were down in Philadelphia for the week. I remember taking a rainy walk through the neighborhood, puddles collecting on the slate sidewalks, foliage luminous against the gray clouds. I was listening to the latest episode of The Daily, and listening to Michael Barbaro process, along with the rest of us, the numbers on Pfizer and Moderna. These vaccines ·É±ð°ù±ð²Ô’t just effective. They were mindblowingly effective, and there was more than one in the pipeline.

For all the vague formlessness of the last eighteen months, there are certain stark moments that cleave time into a clear Before and After. The George Floyd protests; the declaration of Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania; the insurrection at the capitol. And the good news about the vaccines was, for me, one of those moments. Right then, right there, on that rainy walk down that quiet suburban street, was when I suddenly had permission to start thinking about the future again. I didn’t realize this within the moment itself, and I didn’t start acting on that permission right away. But I had it; and that, as a thing unto itself, was big! Life had felt muddy and uncertain for so long, but in a split second, that reality was reframed. My mind divides the pandemic into distinct phases, and when that good news about the vaccines arrived, I felt myself moving from Survival Mode into Hope Mode.

(Did I think about the future much, during Survival Mode? Surely I did. Surely, during that first stretch of Covid, I entertained the possibilities of what the coming weeks and months and years might look like, distracted myself with some form of daydreaming. But the thing is, I can’t remember any of it! Nothing stuck, because none of it was real, and as hard as I might try to convince myself otherwise, something in me knew better than that.)

By late April, I was fully vaccinated. May and June were months of exuberance. I had shifted out of Hope Mode and squarely into Living Mode. And living mode was wonderful. I didn’t require hope to get through the day. I could simply be in the moment. Dinner parties! Weekends with friends! Other unthinkable luxuries! It was so much fun. Did it feel tenuous, or fleeting? I »å´Ç²Ô’t know; honestly, I »å´Ç²Ô’t recall. I was too absorbed with the fullness of it.

And then, partway through July, something started to change. You probably felt it, too. (The warning signs were there much earlier, of course. I remember going to a volunteer shift in June, and someone was talking about her aunt, who was vaccinated and generally careful, but had a breakthrough case of Covid. She wasn’t hospitalized or anything, but it sure wasn’t pleasant. I remember thinking, at the time, well, yeah, but this is highly unusual thing, and I doubt I’ll hear of many more of these breakthroughs. Oh, Anna-of-June! How little you knew.) The writing was beginning to appear on the wall. But even as Delta entered the collective lexicon (joining the hallowed ranks of “fomites� and “mRNA� and “Fauci�), this weird semi-normal state still offered enough to distract me from the looming reality. In that second half of July, the calendar was filled with more dinners, more visits to see friends. I kept myself busy! I was in the final stretch of training for a half-marathon, which I ran in Central Park on August 1. Having that date on the calendar was a big, and blessed, source of distraction. I had my blinders on. It demanded my focus.

The focus was rewarded. I loved running the race; I hadn’t expected to enjoy it so much. I also hadn’t realized how much of a mental shift would occur, once it was behind me. My parents came down to the city for the half-marathon. After, Andrew and I drove with them back to Rhode Island. It was a mellow week, cooking dinner together, taking walks in the woods, swimming in the afternoon, watching the Olympics. It took me a minute to unwind from the intensity, as it always does. (Isn’t that the worst part of a week-long vacation? It’s only at the end of the week that you actually start to unwind.) But by the end of the week, along with the relaxation, I felt a certain � blue-ness. That’s the only way to describe it. I felt a little blue.

My first instinct is often to try and deduce an explanation (was it a post-race come-down? work-related stress?). But I have been learning, gradually, and with the help of some very wise guidance, that it’s better to just let the feeling be. You »å´Ç²Ô’t have to understand it, or try to fix it right away. It can just exist. I suspect that the blue-ness had been lurking for a little while, ever since the tide on Delta began to turn. There were enough distractions to keep it bay. But then, as they always do, the distractions eventually ran out.

Everything runs out eventually. That’s the thing about life, the bad of it, but also the good of it. I felt blue for a little while (mourning the plans that had to be shelved; mourning that feeling of unbridled optimism; little things in the grand scheme, but they have a way of adding up), but then the blue-ness passed, and I felt so much better. I felt better than I had felt, even, before the blue-ness. The end of distraction meant a kind of reconciliation with reality, and that reconciliation was, on some level, an enormous relief.

This past month of August felt different from June and July. The horizon grew close again, the way it had during so much of the pandemic. Here is my world. For the time being, it’s not the biggest world. There remain some restrictions. I think we’re probably entering yet another phase of the pandemic, where the vaccines have helped us achieve a certain baseline of safety, but it will never be perfectly safe, and this is okay—the fact of being alive means nothing is perfectly safe—but now we are navigating a gray space, and it’s important, in doing so, to listen very carefully to that inner voice. This requires a certain measure of quiet and stillness to come through. There can be a time and place for distraction, but not always, not everywhere.

I’m an optimist by nature. I’m always going to find things that give me hope. One source of hope, lately, has been stepping back and observing how friends and loved ones have weathered the last eighteen months. These people have been through some very hard times, many of them are still in the midst of those hard times, but they are learning from them. Even in this weird world, they are taking the reins of their own lives. They are figuring out what they need, and reconciling themselves to reality, with their eyes wide open. It’s an infinitely renewable resource, this human capacity for change. It is also, inherently, the ability to just keep going. To just. keep. fucking. going. I watch the people around me doing this, and it’s an infinite wellspring of hope, and it feels nothing like distraction, because this hope, actually, brings me right back to the awareness of where we are: back to the pandemic. The pandemic! Year two, or year two million, who can say.

Summer went fast, like it always does. I’m sad to say goodbye to August, my favorite month, the month of slow evenings and ripe tomatoes and empty streets. This last-week-before-Labor-Day is always a time of heightened, extra-palpable transition. In the park this morning I saw a high school track team out for a run, which I haven’t seen in months. Change is in the air; our second Covid fall is about to begin. I »å´Ç²Ô’t pretend to have the slightest clue of what it might bring, or how it might feel, but I’ve got my pencils sharpened. I’ve got the itch to turn on the oven again. I’ve got the people around me. And that, for now, is pretty wonderful.