I have mixed feelings about writing fiction. First, I have no formal training, other than a class I took as an undergraduate in college 40 years ago. Second, I understand non-fiction, which is journalism adjacent. Having been a PR person for decades, I feel comfortable with reportage, commentary, essays. Third, I feel grounded with non-fiction, because when I write an essay my job is to elucidate as clearly as I can a set of real facts and feelings on a specific timeline. Finding a jewel of clear truth while cutting away everything that dims it is a great pleasure as a writer.

But fiction? You make up absolutely everything. Will I ever feel like I’m any good at this??

I’ve written so much about loss – mostly because I’m trying to harvest the meaning of the most powerful experiences in my life. Some of my losses were visceral surprises, some echoed inside and opened ancient wounds. It’s those doubly powerful losses I had in mind as I wrote an essay called “A Brutal and Sacred Gift.” Here are the first few paragraphs…

In May I took my first real vacation since lockdown started in March 2020. I was in beautiful Park City with two dear friends, all of us vaccinated, floating in the hot tub after a hike, when I felt something strange, vaguely familiar and delicious.

Bear with me. I am now going to tell you a long, circuitous story with no clear ending. It’s about becoming “a writer.”

It was right around my 45th birthday (April 2008), that one of my BFFs took me for a birthday tarot reading with a guy named Howard, who studied the cards he laid out for me and said, “Your job is soul-destroying.”

“Why yes, Howard,” I said, trying not to laugh. ”It IS.”

Afterwards my friend asked me what I’d do if I left my career. A surprising answer bubbled up. “Well, I always thought I might write my memoir.” I think I first discarded that thought in college, but a few decades later I shrugged and thought, “Why not?”

“You should rewrite this as a novel.”

That’s what my father-in-law said when he read a very early draft of my memoir in 2009. I dismissed that idea out of hand, because fiction – that realm of Toni Morrison and Thomas Hardy – that was too heady for me. Crafting a whole world, with layers of themes and ideas, that feels like something for the Gods. Non-fiction, which is closer to journalism, closer to craft, anchored by facts and memories, has always felt so much more accessible and less scary for me.

“These times are riven with anxiety and uncertainty . . . Our trust in the future has lost its innocence. We know now that anything can happen, from one minute to the next.”

John O’Donohue, the poet, philosopher and scholar who died in 2008, wrote those sentences in 2003, in Beauty: The Invisible Embrace. But reading it now, in the Spring of 2021, feels eerie.