Since Up in the Air first arrived in theaters in December, I have heard from readers around the country presuming that my life in some fashion resembles Ryan Bingham’s—the obsessively frequent flyer created by Walter Kirn for his terrific novel of the same name and brought to life on the screen by George Clooney.

It’s not that readers imagine for even a nanosecond that I am clicking shut my hotel room door with Vera Farmiga or that I have anywhere near the movie star flair (or leading man jaw) of Clooney.

It’s the reality that Ryan Bingham is so comfortable on airplanes, in airports, and on the road. As a touring novelist, last year I traveled at least 125,000 miles on two separate book tours and visited no fewer than 47 cities—some twice. On February 1, I leave on a book tour for my new novel, Secrets of Eden, and I won’t be home in Vermont until March 7.

But there the parallels between Bingham and me end. It’s not simply that I’m happily married and Bingham is not. It’s that Ryan Bingham’s life on the road is freakishly glamorous and somehow he manages to find that one Airbus with first class linking Wichita and Omaha. Like most touring novelists, I tend to live on 50- and 70-seat regional jets with seats the same size as the ones found around a kindergarten table.

When I was ten months old, my mother made an appointment with our ear doctor because she thought I was deaf. Hearing the story told for the first time to my husband recently, I was impressed by my mom’s verve as she relayed the family lore. Her eyes lit up telling of the placid way I’d stare into space when she tried to reason with me, how often I ignored my name being called.

A half-hour doctor’s visit revealed perfectly sound hearing in both my ears, and left only one explanation: at less than a year old, I was already selectively hearing my mother. (This is when my dad chimes in: “smart kid.”)

When people invoke the term “selective memory” or when my mother refers to my lifelong “selective hearing,” they’re referring to a way of tuning out what, for whatever reason, we don’t want to retain. Those terms get a bad rap, but I’d like to make a case for selective reading—tuning out or tuning up certain moments in a narrative—as a key to reading fiction.