This week I turned in the manuscript for my fourth book. It felt, like it usually does, both satisfying and nerve-wracking. This time it also felt—like it definitely hasn’t before—peaceful, knowing this thing is out of my brain and hands and hanging out with some other books on my editor’s desk. There is still work to do, I’m sure, once she reads it. But for now, I wait.

The first time I wrote a book this process felt much more violent. After I finished the last sentences of Girl at War, I lay down on the kitchen floor and cried. I was subletting an apartment in Brooklyn from a very tall gay couple who had built their own cabinets, which were fastened to the wall too high for me to reach. I remember lying there looking up at those useless cabinets and thinking how far away they felt, how far away everything felt, how maybe I had just done this big hard thing for no reason. (As an aside, crying at book’s end seems to be a bit of a rite of passage, or at least a common experience. Zadie Smith describes crying after finishing On Beauty; just this morning while I was writing to you I received my friend Emma’s (really good! subscribe!) newsletter about book journeys with a similar moment!)

Anyway, back in 2013, on the kitchen floor on S. 3rd St., my crying was kind of a mixed bag. I felt immense relief in having finally finished something, and in having exorcised this particular book about a traumatic subject, but I was also afraid. I had no agent or editor and didn’t know what to do next from a “business” perspective, and that was scary. I’d also felt as if I’d put every idea and nice turn of phrase I’d ever thought up into that book, and I had no idea whether or what I could write next, and that was scarier.