“Look, the childhood stuff was always there. I’d never dealt with it, and the one thing I realize now is… you just can’t run away from this stuff. You can’t go through that amount of trauma as a kid and just pretend everything’s fine and push it down and get what seems to be a normal job, have a normal relationship, and pretend everything’s okay.

It just—it doesn’t work. It comes out sideways, and… Because I never did any of the work around it and looked at it in detail, I ended up in real trouble, real quick… Several suicide attempts, nine months in various locked wards, and it was… it was really tough. It almost killed me.

But I got out the other side. And it took some time, but, again, thank God for music, because when I did get out, I had a piano. And the piano doesn’t talk back, and the piano doesn’t have bad side effects, and it doesn’t mess with your head too much, and it kind of kept me on an evenish keel.”

“I mean, I’m a huge reader of memoir; I’ve always loved it. I’m a huge admirer and student of the genre, but I had just had drilled into my skull at The New Yorker you don’t write I. And if you do, you’d better really earn every single one of those.

So it wasn’t my natural inclination to write something personal. That said, here I am in my personal life, just becoming totally obsessed by and immersed in French—and I’m eating and drinking and breathing and reading and sleeping and… not yet dreaming, but I’m totally into French, and I think as a writer, any time, you know, no matter how much you might think the spheres are going to remain separate…

I mean, I thought, you know, this has nothing to do with my work, this is something I’m doing for love… But once something grabs hold of your mind like that, I think as a writer it just inevitably spills over into what you’re doing professionally. And so the more I thought about it, incrementally, it became clear to me this story was so much richer if I explained why I cared about all this stuff, which was the very, very personal story.”