In the spring of 2013, I had this notion to write a book where I broke all the rules regarding point of view, but still created a compelling and cohesive narrative. I figured I could do that if I kept the plot super simple. The protagonist, Leda, must travel from point A to point B—and like Odysseus, stuff happens along the way. But I would write the story from the protagonist’s point of view, the author’s point of view, and a third person narrator as well. I was interested in both the intersections and the disruptions:

The seatbelt signs are on, like a constellation over everyone’s head. It is a sleek piece of machinery cutting through the night sky and the winter storm, just skirting the edges of a crescent moon. Almost ready to crash into the Pleiades. Or Orion. Barely visible from the cloud cover—which extends two hundred miles north and south. But still nothing can be stopped in its trajectory. Not this plane, not even the woman sitting in Aisle H, seat 589. She believes that this started with a phone call when she walked out of the deli yesterday. She believes that it started when it was snowing this morning in Brooklyn, waiting for her car to arrive, but the truth is, this journey began a long time ago.

I’ve belonged to Fictionaut, an online community, for about six years. I’ve met some great writers there. It’s like a more intimate version of Wattpad, it’s not open to the public, and members are invited. I posted the first 300 words in the spring. It got 447 views, six favs, and eight comments. Bill Yarrow wrote, “Very Robbe-Grillet, and that is high praise.” I researched everything I could find on Robbe-Grillet, and bought a couple of his books. In other sections I posted, Carol Reid loved the way the narrative telescoped down into each moment. Sam Rasnake liked the “sky-scape,” George Korolog enjoyed “the conjunction of airplanes, metaphysics and the ethics of mortality,” and Beate Sigriddaughter said the writing is marvelously breathless. In all, I workshopped six sections, 10,000 words, and with each round of comments from my peers, I discovered the heart of the book. I moved away from posting excerpts for review and finished the first draft of How to Travel with Your Demons in the summer.

When I finished the first novel I would publish, I showed it to my husband. He’s also a writer. I first fell in love with him through the obliquely romantic critiques he wrote for my short stories when we were both students in the same graduate fiction workshop—critiques that started with epigraphs from Kant or definitions of Zeno’s arrow. Which is to say: I care what he thought. I was nervous.
“I finished your book,” he said one morning about two days after I gave him the manuscript.

I wanted the speed with which he read it to mean something, but the truth is that it was a very short novel and he’s a very early riser. I waited. Maybe I lifted my eyebrows, but mostly I waited what seemed like a very long time.

“You write very clearly,” he said. And that was all he said then.

Clarity is a desirable trait in prose, but I had been hoping for a word more along the lines of beautiful or moving or great, perhaps even perfect. I can hold a grudge, and more than a decade later I’m not above retelling this story when we argue or I’m just trying to get my way. I can be funny and self-deprecating; usually when I tell this story it’s a comedy and not a drama.

When I see a link to a story called something like “Ten Reasons Not to Date a Writer,” I always click the bait. I read and nod. Yes, we’ll see your most person experiences as material and, yes, we’re always criticizing the narrative structures of movies you’re enjoying. Put two writers together in a romantic relationship, and it can be a cesspool of subject theft, insecurity, and jealousy. The divorces are often ugly—all the more so for their brilliant articulation and even more so when they’re chronicled in print.