One of my children told me recently that he couldn’t ever be a reviewer — of books, art, restaurants, or a sports columnist — because he didn’t want to hurt people’s feelings. (Never mind that just a few weeks before, he gave a dramatic reading of my book’s one-star reviews while I cooked dinner. Ha. Oh yes, ha.)

Of course empathy is a good thing to encourage in kids. But the more I thought about my son’s aversion to critiquing, the more I wondered what it said about his comfort expressing opinion. Sometimes when I ask him to make a preference — choose this favorite over that one, or explain what he doesn’t like and why — he acts like he’d rather pull out a fingernail and dip it in ink quill-style, and write, Just because.

There are outlets for sharing opinions today on just about everything. Anyone with an email address and a wire in the wall can broadcast his or her views on literature or Lysol, and they can also go off on virulent diatribes about total strangers — their appearance and their lifestyle choices, things that have nothing to do with the thing being critiqued. Every frustrated person who’s ever felt disenfranchised, maybe their teachers never listened or their mother never loved them, can bullhorn their power to the world. My kids have seen me blindsided by a few weirdly personal attacks. But I don’t want it to inhibit them from learning to put their own views out there.

There are useful and appropriate ways of expressing your opinion, and there are troll ways. But that’s not what I’m talking about here: I’m talking about encouraging young people to have their say in a constructive way with relevant details, even if it means overcoming fear that the person whose work they’re critiquing might see it and be quietly hurt, or loudly disagree.

I visited my son’s English class recently, because his teacher asked me to speak with the studentsabout creative writing. They don’t know this yet, but their projects are leading up toward workshopping one another’s work in memoir. I’m curious to learn whether they’ll sign their names to their critiques of one another’s writing. I can see the benefits of doing it — the sensitivity encouraged, the accountability demanded. But I can also see the usefulness of giving the students free rein to explore their reactions to a piece of writing without being paralyzed by the social pressure that is so acute in middle school. Will the critiqued person hold a personal grudge? Will the critic go too easy, afraid of social repercussions?

Still, even as I write that, I know which way I lean. That it’s important to put your name to something, to express it constructively and be willing to stand up to those who might disagree. It takes a certain bravery to state your opinion and put your signature to it. Not a lot of bravery needed to anonymously slam someone’s creativity, or make personal judgments that go beyond the page.

As the writer, this is the risk you take in creating something: you are putting yourself out there. You’re putting your little soapbox up in Speaker’s Corner, telling the truth as you see it, and others can call you out on what they think is baloney or shallow or inauthentic. And when you’re the reviewer, you’re more or less doing the same thing.

I talk a good game here, but in truth, I am very squirmy about commenting on others’ work. It would be hard for me to ever review another author’s book. I get an all-day stomachache when I think I’ve hurt someone, or been misunderstood. But I’m trying to do it more in a variety of arenas. Stating your opinion is an important skill I want my children to have, and I’m trying to model it.

Criticism, learning to give and take it graciously, is part of being human. Having to state your case persuasively is instructive; it shows your mind to yourself, and teaches you what you really think. If you don’t back up your case  enough, academia will deduct points for being vague, and when you do it in life, people will think you’re wishy-washy. Friends who want substantive feedback on things — it could be a short story or a resume cover letter or an outfit — will respect you and seek your opinion if they know you’re honest. More, if you’re honest with care.

From time to time I give my kids something we call “school of mom” homework (no, I don’t homeschool), usually on a slow bickery summer day. The idea is, Do this offbeat educational exercise, and we all win a cool scavenger hunt or field trip. I’ve decided to ask the older three (the ones who can read and write) to pick a book they’ve read recently in which something bothered them, and write short thoughts explaining why.

I’m looking forward to hearing their reasoning, the things they’d suggest: Will it be something toothless like, “the dog should have been smaller and less mean,” or something more substantive like, “it doesn’t make sense to me that this character would have made this choice?”

Afterward, I might ask if they would have written it any differently if they had to sign their name and if they knew knew the author would see it. For example, if we decided to mail the letters to the authors, or post the comments on an online book community site. And if they say they would have written it differently — well, I guess that’s the money lesson, the why.

I’m curious: What ways can you think of to encourage children to voice their views in a bold but thoughtful way?

Nestled next to an orange lettuce  was a bouquet of  vegetable berries, clusters of vines dripping with different colored berries, translucent with liquid inside like a snow globe.

Each colored berry held an intense extract of vegetable: crimson for red pepper, pale green cucumber, orange for carrot, light brown for butternut squash. They were rich and beautiful and I knew how each one would taste, how it would explode in my mouth like a gel capsule of vitamin E.

I imagined sprinkling them fresh on top of tacos, as we do shredded lettuce or diced tomatoes, and it struck me as the most brilliant discovery in the agricultural world. 

I actually woke up disappointed they don’t exist.

Or do settings set the mood?

I’m not being cute, in a chicken-and-egg sort of way. Clearly in some books the environment and dwellings play just a bit part, while in others they cast such a spell you couldn’t imagine the story anywhere else.

I’ve been thinking about this since I was asked to give a talk at an architectural design firm linking the way writers build environments to suit their characters, not altogether unlike how architects and decorators customize environments to suit their characters.

I remember the trepidation I felt when I first began writing fiction after 15 years in narrative journalism. How do writers create people, and place them in made-up settings that supposedly complement their idiosyncrasies? I could no longer fall back on the excuse, Well, facts are facts, this is just the way it is, to defend writing, say, that a man lived with 50 cats in a house painted black. The entire package of a character’s life had to be believable, and I had to design it that way. Truth was relative; truth was what rang true to the imagination and intuition, not what was backed up by data to be given to the fact-checking department.

I thought of the novels whose distinctive settings stayed with me, years after reading the book, for being not just unforgettable, but critical in molding their characters. Environments that were epic not just because they were vividly drawn, but because they represented very specific emotional landscapes, sometimes packed into very small spaces.

There’s the bare, claustrophobic cottage of Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, a novel about a mid-life couple who relocated to a rural Alaska farm and found themselves a prisoner of the land, their infertility, and possibly their imagination. There is the brutal Mississippi farm in Hillary Jordan’s Mudbound, a World War II-era outpost of segregation, loneliness, and violence. And of course the tiny shed that comprised the entire universe for a 5 year old boy in Emma Donogue’s ROOM — right down to Wardrobe capital W, just like a character — because he’d been born there, a product of rape and captivity.

But for this interior-design reception, I suspected they wanted nitty-gritty of interiors, not just general architecture. Details about possessions and habits to show how well people are in sync with the way they’re living, or out of it. Houses are a goldmine of this, of course. The details we’re showcasing in our homes create the face we think we’re showing the world. But the cracks in the wall, the chinks in the armor, provide more telling glimpses of who we really are.

For example, what might each of these environments tell you about their owners?

* The meticulous professional who lives alone in a minimalistic condo, but the basement looks like an outtake of Hoarders.

* The woman who goes to great lengths to create a state-of-the-art kitchen, but six months later, has never used her red-enamel 9-burner designer stove.

* The librarian whose home has bookshelves are organized by color — not by content, or author — or whose shelves filled more with knickknacks than actual books.

* A Victorian antique home whose formal foyer is littered with shoes, boots, snowpants, hats, mittens — no proper mudroom or closet equipped to handle them.* Were the homeowners too lazy, the reader wonders, too busy, too cheap or too unimaginative to customize the house in a way that would work better for them? Or had they suddenly inherited a pack of children from a deceased relative?

In journalism these idiosyncrasies are called facts. In forensics and other sciences, they’re called data. In fiction, we call them telling details — visual or behavioral nuggets that speak volumes about a character.

For realtors or interior decorators trying to help homeowners, these clues are evidence of a problem begging for a solution. For authors it’s the same thing, but from the opposite side: Writers know the problem from the getgo, and eventually, the solution. But we have to cough up the telling details to back it up — the Hoarders basement, the unused gourmet stove — that make the characters and storyline feel authentic.

For a family in crisis, the home gives it away in a million small ways. In my novel there’s a scene where a woman visits a widower and his children — the family of her close friend who’d died a year ago. The kitchen shelves, which used to be perfectly lined with cookbooks and framed photographs, are now piles of junk-mail catalogs, kid art and mismatched Tupperware. In the family room, once a paean to Pottery Barn organization, nothing is collected in its wall unit of miniature bins any longer. The family-room detritus flows into what used to be a formal living room, like water finding its natural level. Because this is a man who no longer has use for such distinctions between rooms.

In the first draft I might well have added something like, “He was just trying to hold it together day by day and raise his family without his wife.“

But you don’t need that sentence if the details say it for you: puzzle pieces wedged under corners of the rug and falling into heating ducts, the wall-unit organizers with nothing left inside to organize. You don’t even want that sentence, “He was just trying to…”, now that you’ve built this room for readers to read like tea leaves.

Spoon-feeding the information that way, compared to the compliment of trusting them to intuit it, would be like an insult to their intelligence. And no fact-checking department can protect you from that.

My mother waited in a corner chair. I was late, but she wasn’t disappointed. It had been a long time since I’d come to visit, but she was just glad I’d made the time. Everyone should be so lucky to have someone who thinks so well of them and forgives their limitations, even when they don’t do the things they ought to.

I was on my way to a book event for my novel, taking me through the town where my 93-year-old grandmother lived in a nursing home. My mother was coming for the reading, but she would have come with me to visit her mother-in-law anyway. It’s her maternal buffering reflex.

I have limited experience with dementia, and I’ve been told my grandmother is becoming increasingly agitated by small things. She likes dessert rather than dinner, sometimes tv over talking, and doesn’t like to be pressured on the things she no longer remembers, which is most everything. I knew she wouldn’t recognize me, and I wouldn’t press for it. I was there to give her a lovely half hour with a pleasant, if forgettable, young woman around her granddaughter’s age.

I brought flowers and a photograph of my five kids, a simple prop because most people enjoy the smiling faces of young children. She wanted to know which ones behaved and which ones caused trouble, and I narrated the circle of faces like I was telling a story. Then I told her I remembered visiting her house when I was a child (though I worried this hint of familiarity might distress her), and that I’d enjoyed playing hide-and-seek in her upstairs closet.

“That was a big closet,” she said, to my mother’s surprise. This might have been a spark of recall, or a throwaway comment disguised as one. My grandmother has been savvy for years about hiding the shortcomings of her memory.

Memory is a funny and fleeting thing, bobbing out of reach like an inaccessible sea creature. We’ve all read the studies about sensory triggers, the memories brought on by a few bars of music or wafting perfume. For me, the smell of an old, dry, wood structure puts me back in my grandparents’ garage filled with equipment from my grandfather’s metal company, and evokes a spirit of exploration of old things not meant for children. The songs “Proud Mary” and “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” still bring up the dark comfort of a motel lounge just off a midwestern interstate, where we were stranded during a snowstorm in the late 1970s. Oddly, it’s a warm memory, relief and safety in an exotic setting reconfirming a child’s belief that her parents can take care of anything nature dishes out.

But I’ve never read anything about the power of words to evoke memory. People talk about rereading beloved books, and many say they experience a new dimension and appreciation each time. Some say poetry, prayer and mantras offer fresh calm and perspective. But that isn’t the same thing as memory, either.

Can words live in corners of our minds the way scent and sounds do, certain verses linked to specific experiences in our past? Can prose evoke nostalgia for period in time — the people we used to be, the people we used to know?

Maybe. My mother vividly recalls some lengthy nursery-rhyme poem she used to read me during potty training, something about a kitty sailing the ocean blue. She’s still sad when I admit I don’t remember it as she does. My other grandmother used to recite Longfellow’s The Wreck of the Hesperus, a poem she’d had to memorize in school. But I don’t know whether in her mind the verses evoked grammar school in the 1920s. All I remember is the way she’d said I looked like that after playing too long in the woods — the wreck of the Hesperus.

The nursing home visit with my grandmother went so well that I returned a few weeks later with my two youngest sons, ages 3 and 5. It was a rainy Friday morning the week before Christmas. The elevator doors opened on the third floor, and I saw it through my boys’ eyes: The hallway plain as a boiler room, high narrow walls painted grayish mauve, with exposed pipes at the top. Residents in wheelchairs lined the narrow hall, many dozing with gaping mouths. A few reached out to touch the boys as they walked by, which unnerved them as if furniture had moved. I pulled them close and helped them wave and say hello as we passed, hoping they saw the happy responses they elicited in the residents and not just their jarring appearance.

My grandmother was as motionless as the others, but she didn’t perk up when we came near. I asked if we could sit with her awhile, and she said that would be fine, that she didn’t care either way.

We ate cookies we’d brought her and showed her family pictures, and every so often she’d turn to one of the boys as if noticing him for the first time. “Well, aren’t you a handsome and well behaved fellow. What’s your name?” Or, “Oh hello there. You look a bit like this fellow over here.”

I’d also brought a copy of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas in case the boys got bored, and the 5 year old asked me to read it. As I began, my grandmother leaned forward in her wheelchair, so I included her in the audience. I didn’t change my singsongy cadence, though it felt insulting to read in a childlike manner to a woman who’d been a Second Lieutenant nurse in World War II, raised four children and run a pharmacy. The book had beautiful silhouette pop-up images, and she touched the cut-out figures through windows and doors. Then she joined me reciting parts of the poem.

“His eyes how they twinkled! His dimples how merry!” She was delighted, almost giddy. “His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!” The print was tiny; she couldn’t have made out the words on the page.

What part of the brain contains the verses of old poems and stories?

What if words — like scent and taste and music — could be a conduit to a whole range of recognition and emotions, to a place where familiar faces and names still live, just waiting for the right verses to pull them up? Was she remembering having it read to her as a child, or reading it to my father ? Was there a chance that in that moment, she linked me to him and my children to me, a daisy chain of words and identity?

I started thinking about the books I could bring next time, poetry and essays I loved that might lead us to some new place, a limbo bridging strangers to fondness. But the truth was, she wasn’t a reader. If words mattered, I suspected it would have to be because they were familiar and beloved to the listener, not just the person reading them. If the words did not matter, then what counted was the warmth of a friendly face, reading. Which was lovely, but a different thing from evoking memory.

Before we left she let me take a photo of her with the little boys, even though she’s never liked to have her picture taken and doesn’t smile much. In it she’s  leaning toward the 3 year old, struggling to understand what on earth he’s saying (as we all often do), but with a visible half smile in profile.

If this were an essay in Reader’s Digest, it would end with my grandmother saying my name as we hugged goodbye. But it isn’t, and she didn’t.

Still, when I kissed the top of her head and asked if we could come back, she smiled and said yes, that would be fine, that would be nice, yes.

A week after I wrote this essay and originally posted it on Beyond the Margins, my grandmother passed away. Rest in peace, beautiful lady who accomplished so much. 

Wanda Ziebutski Bernier and Paul Armand Bernier

The something old was my re-read of an old favorite, Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. This was my third time, occasioned by an invitation from my local indie bookstore to lead a book club on my favorite novel. Crossing to Safety is the story of two couples, their lifelong marriages and friendship, and it takes a clear-eyed look at how our strengths and foibles become more forgiving and more brittle over the decades. It’s brilliant, more so each time I read it. This time I treasured the voice and dry humor of the narrator poking fun at the champagne bubbliness of his own youth — hoo hoo, ha ha — naïve to the hardship up ahead.

Something new was The Light Between Oceans, a summer debut by Australian writer   M.L. Stedman. I’ve been a bit of a zealot for this book while on book tour and probably should be on commission, because when I give my elevator pitch, the audience sighs with that reader-hunger that must be appeased. I tell them this: It’s set on a tiny island in 1920s Australia, and its sole inhabitants—a lighthouse keeper and his wife—have been unable to have children. One day a rowboat washes ashore with a dead man and a live baby. What to do? Report the child, or raise her as their own? The decision the couple makes that day reverberates through the decades, and through the lives of others. It’s the kind of novel I love because it involves a moral choice where there is no clear right or wrong, no clear path of lesser harm.

Borrowed is a bit of a stretch, but work with me here. My pediatrician told me recently about a little-known and out-of-print children’s novella by Faulkner called The Wishing Tree. My first thought was, What would Faulkner have to say to kids? That when you mimic the help, it’s important to get the dialect right? That you shouldn’t drink while doing your homework, only after you’re done?

Intrigued, I tracked down a used copy online. The Alice-in-Wonderlandesque story is in classic Faulker terroritory, a sloshing bouillabaisse of race, relationships and social class but served up in kiddie bowls. It hints at many of the themes and characters to come in his later work, The Sound and the Fury, which I borrowed from the library to refresh my memory. The strong doomed sister. The disgruntled black maid carrying the weight of the world and none of the family’s respect. The menacing jaybirds, always swooping. No Dick and Jane.

I decided to read The Wishing Tree to my kids anyway and they loved it, along with the controversial way it found its way to publication some 40 years after it was written: First as a gift to an eight-year-old girl whose mom he wanted to marry, then to three other kids, including a girl dying of cancer. Each thought he’d written it only for him or her, and were in for a rude awakening when the first girl published it after Faulkner’s death.

Blue is how Salvage the Bones made me feel, the blue of neglected children and spurned love and rushing hurricane stormwater before it goes brown in its race through dirt lots of Mississippi. This is the Katrina most people didn’t hear about, put to merciless fiction by Jesmyn Ward. In her hands, four siblings’ fierce bickery loyalty is the closest thing to unconditional love, and a teen’s dedication to his fighter of a pit bull and her pups is as close as it gets to salvation.

This audiobook kicked my tail clear from Kansas City to Minneapolis to Chicago, where I bought a paper copy to finish on the flight home. Because I love a book that beats me up a little, makes the monkey mind sit still and show respect.

At a recent visit to my children’s pediatrician, the doctor asked, “Have you ever read your kids that children’s book by Faulkner?” He said he read it to his kids a lot when they were younger, that it was their birthday treat.

This prescriptive advice wasn’t as random as it sounds. The pediatrician and I tend to talk books (while my children roll their eyes), especially since my first novel came out a few months ago.

I didn’t know Faulkner had written a children’s book. The doctor looked pleased to have stumped me. He pulled out his prescription pad and wrote The Wishing Tree plus WILLIAM FAULKNER, in case I forgot. This is a man who knows the fate of vague notes stuffed in diaper bags.

What, I wondered, would Faulkner have to say to kids? That when you mimic the help, it’s important to get the dialect right? That you shouldn’t drink while doing your homework, only after you’re done?

In academic journals, The Wishing Tree is described as Alice in Wonderlandesque, aimed at kids ages 8-11. It was originally written in 1927 but not published by Random House until 1964, when one of the children for whom it had been handmade offered it for publication (more later on the awkwardness of this). It had been out of print for years, but there were used copies online in middling condition for $30-$50.

I tweeted about my curiosity a few times, and someone replied with a tip on a used copy: a former library book, first printing, $3.99 plus shipping. I felt like I’d found a triceratops fossil in a Cracker Jack box.

To be honest, it was more about my intrigue than any conviction my kids would enjoy it. Fast-paced contemporary books, full of suspense and the bells and whistles of modern fantasy, have left them lukewarm to quieter classics with antiquated language. And then there was the question of whether it would even be appropriate for them. Several articles proposed that The Wishing Tree was in some ways a training-wheels version of Faulker’s famous and famously difficult later novel, The Sound and the Fury, which itself was no Dick and Jane. The strong, doomed sister. The disgruntled black maid carrying the weight of the world and none of the family’s respect. The menacing jaybirds, always swooping. The castrated bellowing family idiot. All of it a big sloshing bouillabaisse of race, sex and social class.

Little in Faulker’s other work suggested childsplay, either. As I Lay Dying is essentially a road trip with a mother’s stinking corpse backwards in her pine box, approximately 5,000 narrators, and one chapter that just reads, “My mother is a fish.” Light in August has an adulterous, frustrated, menopausal, religious extremist who makes her lover get on his knees and pray at gunpoint. Well, before she gets murdered off.

The Wishing Tree arrived, and I read it in an hour. No Dick, no Jane.

In a nutshell, it’s about a girl who wakes on her birthday to find a strange boy in her room, and embarks on an adventure with him in search of “the wishing tree.” While on their quest, she and others learn about the responsibility of choosing their wishes carefully. Along the way there’s a little violence, more than a little marital hostility, a flourish of swordplay, and a toddler whose cruelty is met with swift surreal punishment. There’s an eccentric cast of extras: a surly maid who rediscovers her runaway soldier of a husband, and a poor-white-trash old man, and his wife chasing him with a rolling pin. Fair enough. We’re in vintage Southern storytelling terrain here, Faulkner real estate, early and always.

The story’s end climbs out of the rabbit hole and back to reality, with a moral lesson and a tragic subtext. Choose your wishes unselfishly, and your birthday is a playground of opportunity. Except that the child of the birthday dreamscape happens to be seriously ill, so her hope for a playground on next year’s birthday is far from a given.

Sad, sure. But this isn’t verboten terrain. Children’s books are full of sickly and dying kids, from Little Women to The Velveteen Rabbit and The Bridge of Terabithia. If I decided not to read them the Faulkner, it wasn’t the sick child I was protecting them from. But I wasn’t sure yet what I was protecting them from.

One night soon after, school was declared canceled the next day due to bad weather, and the kids were in a mood to break from routine. I sat the older four in the living room, and like some Marmee in the dim light, began to read.

I set it up by telling them the controversy about how the book came to be published, some 40 years after it was written. “Here’s a book by a famous man who wrote it as a gift to an eight year old girl whose mom he wanted to marry,” I said. “Only he didn’t tell her that he also gave it to another girl, a friend’s daughter who was dying of cancer. And then he gave it to two other kids. Each of them thought he’d written it only for them, and were in for a surprise when the first girl published it, and the three others thought they owned the rights.”

My kids were wide-eyed. Regifting and lying? This they could all understand at ages 11, 10, 7 and 5. So uncool. So snagged.

And then we read. Straight, all the way through, 90 minutes. Whenever I stopped to call it a night, they insisted I keep going. When I read the dialogue for the black maid, they asked, Why are you talking like that, and, Why is she hanging around with the kids all the time instead of the parents? They wanted to know why the maid was so mean to the old white trash guy, and to her husband who came back after running away to the war. And they wanted to know why the old guy’s wife always hitting him with a rolling pin. We talked, in kid-speak, about the South and the 1920s, about socioeconomic discrimination, stereotyping, and horizontal violence.

“Some people aren’t sure this is okay as a kids’ book,” I told them. “Why do you think it might not be?”

My 11-year-old son said something to the effect of, There are a lot of things that aren’t the way we talk today or treat people today, and maybe they don’t want it to set a bad example. And my 10-year-old said, Or maybe in some places they still do treat people that way. My seven year old said, What way? And the five-year-old, Can you stop talking and just read?

It was fascinating to see what caught them up in the book, and what caught them up short. At the end they were full of literal questions, preoccupied with the mechanics of dream travel and the inconsistency of making wishes that came true sometimes, but not always. If it had been Alice in Wonderland, they wouldn’t have been bothered by the talking rabbit. They would have been hung up on how the Cheshire cat’s smile could take up so much of his face and whether that made it harder to swallow and why he could still be fat and get up the tree. They were accustomed to books about fantasy; students at sorcery school could ride brooms, after all.

But they were also accustomed to thorough editing for consistency, which might not be something given a posthumous Faulkner. To my kids, if a broom could fly one minute, there’d better be a damn good reason it couldn’t fly the next. The things that didn’t make sense made The Wishing Tree nonsense to them. But it was fun nonsense. Even while they furrowed their brows, they were entertained.

They called it the best late-story-night ever. And then they argued that if this was a rare book, how would we decide which one of them would get to keep it for their kids? Maybe it would be most fair to come up with a schedule to divide it monthly. But how did 12 months divide evenly among five kids? And so on.

So literal they are. And I realized they might need not just more Faulkner in their lives, but more Alice in Wonderland.

Originally written for Beyond the Margins and Salon. 

My book’s launch party felt a little like a wedding. Well, one where my five children had already been born, and were racing around jacked up on chocolate-dipped strawberries.

The bash was in an old brownstone in Boston. There was a long brass bar and passed hors d’oeuvres, a few speeches, some roasting. I read a bit from the first chapter in front of friends who appreciated the efforts it had taken to get there, and teetered in lemon-yellow shoes more than a few inches beyond my comfort zone. (My fear and secret thrill: I’ll never be able to chase the kids in these.)

In the past 10 years of my writing life, I’d gone from being a magazine journalist and mother of one to being a sometime-freelancer and mother of five. That evening of the launch party felt like a line of demarcation down my life: who I was before, and who I was becoming. Here I was burning rubber in my Sienna minivan. Just look at that S car go.

Shortly after the launch party we got an au pair for the summer, and I started traveling for readings at bookstores. It was both heady and humbling: One night an audience of 75 and the next just a few, including several who had to, because they worked there. Mornings, I’d get in a rental car and drive to bookstores that were not stocking my book in hopes they might give it, and me, a chance. My father asked in an email what it felt like to be on book tour. I told him that while one person did squeal excitedly to meet me (I’m pretty sure she mistook me for someone else), a lot of the time it felt like being a Fuller Brush salesman, hawking your wares stop by stop. Brushes you’d made yourself. Plucking one horsehair at a time from a pissed-off rodeo bronco.

The truth is, I love it. Pretty much every single bit. After a pretty intense diaper decade there is a sense of settling back into myself, with the miscellaneous scattered parts — personally, maternally, creatively, professionally — coming into alignment. I felt incredibly fortunate that all the years of of being the crazywoman writing in the attic have resulted in something I can hold in my hand, and share.

But with the sharing came traveling, time away from the kids and from a household that operated, on the best of days, like a catamaran flying a hull. I created this travel schedule myself, and had anticipated it for forever three months. The bigger trips shimmered on the calendar like tinsel and Easter grass. Why was I so excited? Did I think I was going to shed my momma skin and slip back into the days of my 20s professionalism, the independence and travel, the adult stimulation and recognition?

But to be honest, I had dreaded it, too. I imagined reading in a Chicago bookstore and receiving a call from a hospital back home. Or almost as bad, a simple text message that I’d failed to call in time before bed, and small people were sad. (Which happened.) My husband was able to come on several trips — my parents gave us babysitting as a Christmas present — which was wonderful. He’s my best supporter and critic, and things are just plain more fun with him around. It reminded me of the early years of marriage, zipping around at the top of our games.

But a funny thing happened once I got home and started doing the regional events this summer: I wanted my kids around, too.

I started feeling this way when some health issues hit my parents and father-in-law, and all three needed surgeries. Home didn’t feel like something that was functioning just fine back there. Home felt like something that needed to be in my back pocket, my tote bag, the train seat beside me.

The New York event was more fun with my two oldest along; they were wide-eyed at the hotel mini-bar candy, the Empire State Building, Amtrak’s café. The highlight of a reading on the Cape was my dinner date afterward, my four-year-old son who was so giddy about the high patio over the dunes that he dropped the ketchup bottle down into them. Ooops.

Back to the launch party, which I’d both hoped and feared would represent a yellow line through my life. Toward the end of the evening, as I sat signing books, my oldest child walked up. My 11 year old, my mature one. He interrupted my conversation with the publisher of a magazine where I’d once worked to hand me his stained napkin and empty kebab stick. “Here, Mom, I can’t find the garbage.”

Here Mom, I can’t find the garbage.

And that — along with the fact that after the party, I was squatting in those high yellow shoes to change a diaper — perfectly summed up the line of demarcation. Sure, there was travel, independence, adult stimulation and recognition, but mostly the change to my life was invisible. Because of course there’s no going back to that person in her 20s, and nothing had substantively changed in the watchworks of my life. Nor did I want it to.

The kids were clamoring for a new pet. A year earlier we’d said goodbye to our dog, and before that, the cat. In between was an unsuccessful series of hermit crabs. When each one crossed that proverbial rainbow bridge in the sand, we’d stood around its tiny hole in the ground and offered a tearful remembrance for little guy who never ever pinched, well, almost never.

The kids now wanted a dog, only I wasn’t up for it. I didn’t feel like going back down the pet road. I kind of didn’t want to go down the anything road. We had five children aged 2-10, and we’d had a few losses in addition to pets that left me feeling less than resilient. So I said no when my husband and kids wanted a giant Leonberger puppy. I said no to the rescue rabbit and chinchilla, no to the turtle, please no to the Christmas hamster. How about fish?

My husband was surprised: So, we’re not going to have pets anymore? But you were the one who raised all those crazy animals as a kid.

There’s a scene in my novel in which a woman sees her children touching baby rabbits in the bushes, and freezes in panic. On the island where they are vacationing there’d once been an outbreak of tularemia, a sometimes-lethal disease carried by rabbits. And though my main character isn’t ordinarily paranoid, it’s the summer following the September 11^th attacks, and she’s becoming unhinged in a million small ways.

Writing this fear hadn’t come naturally to me, because I spent much of my childhood loving and raising wild baby animals. Each spring, the wildlife rescue hospital where I volunteered would be inundated with orphaned and injured raccoons and squirrels. Junior staffers would bring them home to bottle feed them, wean them on fruit and dog food and, if we were lucky, keep them alive to be released in a park upstate. It was a formative experience, maybe the most significant one of my teen years.

But I’m not sure how I’d feel if one of my children wanted to do something like that, themselves. This occurred to me recently when my kids were aflutter over a baby bird we found on our driveway, so young it was still mostly bald, and we were trying to find something to do for it. I cupped it up gingerly while the kids dug up a syringe of water, a nest of grass, a worm. A neighbor came outside, visibly stunned to see us doing this. What about avian flu? She asked. I didn’t know. What about avian flu? After we did what we could for the bird, I made the kids wash up like Lady MacBeth.

I don’t have a medical bone in my body beyond the fact that, well, I have bones in my body. I don’t know if various animal and insect-borne diseases are on the rise, or if it just feels that way. But I do know a few things about anxious things: namely, that in the space between knowledge and confusion, paranoia blooms. When bovine spongiform encephalopathy (Mad Cow disease) was discovered in beef several years back, I was all too aware that this disease could lurk in any hamburger, could have migrated from the fields of Britain to Canada and the ranches stateside. For the better part of a year I wouldn’t buy beef for the kids unless, I decided, it was from one of those Canyon Ranchish ranches, the sort that fed their cattle hothouse-sprouted organic grass from fields sprinkled with pixie dust.

I don’t mean to be flippant about the disease, which is terrible — just about my knowledge and obsession, which were tiny and huge, respectively. Once I got it into my head that this was a potential area of danger for my family, I couldn’t ignore it. I’m not a germophobe, and I’ve always had a pretty high threshold for what I do not know and cannot control. But a little knowledge and a little control — well, that’s a dangerous thing. It suggests action is called for. I could have thrown myself into research: the exact fields identified to be infected with BSE and any Americans ever to have set foot there; the best retail outlets for the Canyon Ranchesque beef. But as a busy mother trying to triage her mental energy, I opted for the safe way out: I just said no.

OF MY BABY raccoons and squirrels, only half ever survived, maybe less. I had the worst success rate of the junior staffers because I took the hopeless cases. The babies with a wobbling not-rightness caused by some disease or other, and the ones brought in after dog attacks, their backs split open and writhing with the sorts of things that don’t belong there. I triumphed over the ones that did make it, each raccoon-puppy that ran from the crate toward the woods to (in my mind) the swelling strains of “Born Free.” But each time I’d come home from school and find a furry body lifeless and cool, I’d cry my heart out. Then I’d go out back to the woods behind our house with a large shovel, adding to my sad collection of small animal graves. Someday anthropologists are going to wonder what odd cult flourished in our leafy Connecticut suburb.

In hindsight, I’m surprised my parents agreed to let me do it. Certainly it was a learning experience, even if a tough one. There was teetery organic lesson to be had from each attempt and failure, each foster relationship with its decent odds of heartbreak, and though I didn’t think of it that way, my mother likely did. An acceptance of the cycle of life and the small part we play in it. Loving what’s before us right now needing help, doing the best we can in the moment. Saying yes to something that needs help and taking the risky emotional investment instead of taking the safe way out, with No.

Last summer, a high school friend who works in animal rescue in Brooklyn posted a facebook message: SIX PREEMIE KITTENS! HEALTHY BUT BEING KILLED TMRW ONLY BECAUSE THEY’RE TOO YOUNG TO BE ADOPTED! FOSTER FAMILY NEEDED FOR 3 WKS! Each hapless tiger-tabby baby had its own mug shot.

I still didn’t feel ready for pets, much less high risk ones, but the kids were apoplectic with desire. I told them about the hard work. The syringes of formula and the eyedroppers of medicine, and the stinky whelping box our mudroom would become. I told them that sometimes babies don’t make it. They made a sign for the car window for a drive Brooklyn, “The Great Kitten Rescue!” And I said yes.

When I was editing my manuscript for the umpteenth and final time, going back over those scenes of the mother with rabbit anxiety for emotional truth, I asked my own mother why she let me do it. Why she let me raise all those baby animals that might or might not have had rabies, or ebola virus, or might have left me emotionally paralyzed by the young intensity of nurturing and loss.

She shrugged.

It’s what you did; it was your thing, she said. All I had to do was say yes.

When my first novel came out two weeks ago, I had most of my ducks in a row. I’d arranged a book tour to places where I had the most friends and family. I’d written magazine articles related to my book, and planned a launch party. I bought a few dresses. Notecards sat in neat piles, waiting to be called into duties of gratitude.

But there was one area in which I really wasn’t well prepared, and it was sort of an important one. I hadn’t read my work aloud under pressure.

Over the years I’ve done public speaking, and used to appear on television a bit for my old job. I’ve even interviewed authors for a fun piece on how they became comfortable reading in front of a crowd. But read my own fiction? Out loud? That had only ever happened in the privacy of my shower-stall auditorium.

A few days before my book was to be released, I faced up the fact that this was a pretty big Achilles heel. So I sought out the toughest training ground I could think of, the crucible in which my fortitude would be forged. The harshest audience, the most easily bored and most vocal one I’d ever seen.

The Sisters of Charity Nursing Home.

My children play piano recitals there several times a year, and each time without fail, they’re heckled. At Easter, while my daughter plunked out a slow ballad from Titanic, a woman in the second row became increasingly agitated. She looked around for a friend to share her resentment, and finally just shared it with the room. “Who are these children,” she cried, “and what the hell are they doing in my kitchen??” I knew I had to read there.

It was a Friday afternoon, just after lunch but before naps or game time. The residents came into the Rec Room in singles and pairs, wheeled in by nurses. Fran, the activities director, told me how excited they were to hear me read from my novel. “Many of them like to read quite a bit. Or, used to.”

Fran introduced me, and I stood in front of the silent and still room. It was almost entirely filled with women in wheelchairs, crumpling grand dames and matriarchs who’d outlived most of their partners and contemporaries. About half of them looked up expectantly. The rest were slack-jawed and inattentive, asleep, or listening to their own internal monologues.

“Thank you for letting me come today,” I said, taking pains to speak very slowly, because as my mother reminds me, I’m guilty of speaking far too fast. “I’m excited to be here, because my children come here often to play piano for you, and you have been a very gracious audience for them. I’ve written a novel called The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D, and it’s about a woman who inherits her friend’s journals. I’d like to read to you from it a bit. This is the first book I’ve written, and I did it during nights and weekends while raising my family of five small kids. So this is a bit of a dream for me.” They stared.

I began with chapter one, a passage about a couple driving over the George Washington Bridge in which a woman is trying to conceal her bridge anxiety from her husband. I finished the first page without incident, and rounded the bend of the second. I sensed squirming in the upper left quadrant so I read a bit louder, slower. I read about a lost friend, and the nature of the two women’s friendship. I read about the odd intimacy formed among mothers who do not have much in common but the shared work of the children, day after day.

A woman in the second row jostled the shoulder of her friend and muttered dissatisfaction. I slowed it down even more, and read with more inflection. “What is she TALKING about?” I heard her say. I glanced up to see her friend shake her head. I decided I would finish the passage with the kind of animation I gave my children’s’ stories, even though it embarrassed me to read my work with the kind of gravitas of theater. If I bombed, at least the odds were good they’d never remember who I was.

“ ‘But that’s the thing about people who don’t fit in a box’,” I finished, one word at a time. “ ‘When they go missing, they are missing everywhere’.”

Further back in the room there was a bit of agitation. “Who IS she?” I heard. Someone with a walker headed for a forbidden door, and an alarm sounded. A nurse gently herded her back to the fold.

Fran stood. “Isn’t this nice? Nichole has come here to read to us from her very own book today. Do you know what her book is about?”

A woman in the front row, someone I knew was with me because of the intense eye contact she’d maintained, scrunched up her face. “NOOooo,” she said, in nearly a wail.

Fran changed course. “Maybe we can ask Nichole a few questions, like asking what it’s like to be a writer. Are there any other writers in your family, Nichole?” She had that encouraging look preschool teachers have with their students, willing them to answer a certain way and give them something to work with.

“Not exactly. There aren’t other writers, but my grandfather had a very special typewriter.”

“Did you hear that?” Fran said. “She loved her grandfather very much. And he left her his special typewriter. Some of you have grandchildren you love very much, don’t you?”

At the word grandfather there was a perking up around the room.

“My grandfather had been a radio operator for the Merchant Marine in World War Two,” I continued. “He was on the last ship to be sunk after the war had technically ended, because the Germans in the U-boat didn’t know it. It happened right near here, right off the coast of Rhode Island.”

I heard noises of approval. People I’d thought were asleep were nodding, with me, instead of nodding off. “My husband was a radio operator,” said a woman with lively eyes and legs that ended below the knee. “He was on the aircraft carrier The Lexington. You should have seen the size of that ship.” Another woman started singing a war song softly, and her neighbor joined in. The room was coming alive like the swimming pool scene in the movie Coccoon.

We went on for some time this way, until Fran told me in was nearly time for the residents to head into Game Time. I finished up by explaining about the typewriter rescued from the sinking ship — that my grandfather left it to me instead of The Smithsonian when he saw I was heading toward becoming a writer.

As I left I walked across the front row to say a personal goodbye and clasp a few of the hands of those who’d been most engaged. A few volunteered their stories — loved ones lost in the war, lives pursued afterward — and I asked their names, knowing the value of being recognized as an individual who’d accomplished things. And I repeated my own name hoping after all that they might remember mine, too.

Four years had passed since the terrorist attacks, but the thoughts were still with me. In the midst of mundane activities, I’d find myself wondering the sort of things that aren’t polite to wonder alound. About her last thoughts. Who sat beside her on the plane, and what they said to one another. Whether she’d had time to cry.

I had always expressed myself through writing. I’d been a magazine writer for a decade, and I kept a journal to scratch the itch for anything more personal. But suddenly it wasn’t enough. As much as I love reading fiction, I’d never had an urge to write it, not even so much as a short story. Yet after I got home that rainy day and put the kids down to nap, I wrote a dream sequence about a woman imagining her friend’s last moments. Not on a flight that day, because that was too close to the bone. A generic plane crash, if such a thing can ever be generic.

It didn’t occur to me that this would be part of anything more than an unusual journal entry. But that raw spurt of writing would become chapter three of a novel, to be bought by Crown four years later, just before the birth of my fifth child.

We each have our own methods of catharsis, of letting the tapes finally spool themselves out. Some people establish charitable foundations, some plant memorial gardens, or throw themselves into athletic challenges. Some go quiet until the tears run dry.  

Writing the novel was my way to make sense of the thoughts I couldn’t quite put a name to. I’d just had my third child, and after I’d tucked all three into bed at night I’d settle into writing this thing that was not a thing—not an article any magazine was paying me to write, so too indulgent a use of daytime sitter hours. But I kept writing, and the further I wrote, the more I shed anything that resembled my actual friend, her actual husband, their actual baby. The nameless piece of writing became peopled with strangers familiar only to me, driven by unique motivations, idiosyncrasies, pain, and joy. Most fiction writers I’ve come to know are propelled by “what-ifs,” and these were mine: What if someone who kept journals all her life died suddenly? What if the journals showed an interior life that was nothing like what her friends and family expected—including where she was really going when she died?

Fictionalizing the facts of the story freed me up to dig deep into emotion I could imagine, and expand upon in my characters. The widower, who receives consolatory lasagna when he’s seen mowing his lawn while his children play in the driveway, when all he wants to do is mow his own damn lawn like other fathers. The children, baffled by the suffocating kindness of strangers. The friend who inherits the journals, slowly becoming unhinged by the anxiety of parenting in a world where everything seems dangerous, and possible.

I set the story in 2002, so that my characters would be experiencing the same tenuous sense of safety I remembered. There was anthrax, and there was Mad Cow disease. There were bomb threats and fear of contaminated reservoirs. If the Ebola virus had arrived at a U.S. airport it would not have been surprising. Many of my friends felt the same way. We walked around numb, waiting.

Two days after the terrorist attacks, I spent the afternoon fielding media calls for my friend’s family. I developed a handful of quotes to focus on her life rather than on her inconceivable death — pithy sentences about her sense of humor and ridiculous laugh, her road races undertaken with a baby jogger, the way she’d navigated the challenges of returning to work after her maternity leave. I believe I even said she’d “hit her stride.” After I returned the last call I sank to the bedroom floor, nauseated by reducing a person to a sound bite. What would she have wanted said about her? I wondered. What would she have thought should be her legacy?

Interestingly, few of the newspapers or magazines mentioned her strong career in retail, beyond the fact that she’d been traveling on business that day. It struck me that in the end most of us will not be remembered for what we do, but for who we have been to others and for others—thoughtful friends, generous volunteers, dedicated advocates, supportive family members. But for some people who are passionate about their work, what they do might just be integral to who they are. That became something I wanted to explore in my novel, too.

I never thought of myself as someone who would write fiction, but now I can’t imagine myself without it. The older I get, the more people I meet who’ve taken on new challenges or changed direction, driven by some pivotal experience. It seems to me that in many kinds of healing there is an element of reach, of going beyond our comfort zone when it’s failing to provide comfort. That we don’t know what we’re capable of until we embrace something we never thought we could do, sometimes as an antidote to something we cannot bear.