In July 2019 I wrote an essay in an attempt to answer a question so awkward that it made me sweat. In March 2020, not long after the pandemic closed us in our homes, I revised it. This month, reflecting back on March 2020 and thinking about what’s ahead in 2022, I remembered this piece.

Here’s a flash version of my essay Alone. 

“Why didn’t you ever marry?” my dead fiancé’s son asked me, in a voice that sounded so much like his father’s I had trouble breathing. 

Are there lessons lurking in what we love? What we really love to read, to watch, to listen to? George Saunders thinks so.

In his excellent newsletter/community/gift to the world, Story Club, he recently wrote a post on influences. Not the influences that make us sound literary and educated and subtle, but our real influences. He says: “When you were between the ages of 5 and 10, what did you read/view/experience that made you crazy with delight?”

He invited everyone following his newsletter to note what we loved as a child, a teenager, as we became adults, in five-year increments. OK George, I’m in!

There are lots of things to love about San Francisco. We have amazing produce, gorgeous views, fantastic architecture. And San Francisco is a great place to be a budding writer. There is such a warm, welcoming literary community here. The writers I’ve met in San Francisco seem to want “writing” to do better, which means that if you’re a writer, they want you to do better too.

“A few hours in the ICU radically and rapidly resets your perspective. Seven years ago my biggest problem was a bad date. But now, as I held his warm, unresponsive hand, the monitors’ beeps circling us both, I knew that my life before today was just an extended adolescence.”

These are the first lines of my novel, at least in its current form (the second draft, waiting to be edited again and again and again).

Cloud Cuckoo Land, which instantly became one of my favorite novels when I read it in October, is a layered, moving story about the power of stories:

“ ‘I know why those librarians read the old stories to you,’ Rex says. ‘Because if it’s told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.’ ”

What’s the trap?

I’ve been thinking a lot about joy (and the lack of it) lately. In some ways, 2021 has felt harder than 2020. And yet . . .