“I evolved emotionally throughout the whole course of writing this book. I started to write the proposal in 2010… I worked all that year through on the proposal, which became… Initially, it was full of anger and self-pity and fury at everybody who didn’t understand what I was going through, what my hearing loss was like. As I came to the point where I was ready to distribute the proposal, my agent said, ‘This is really great, I think you have a selling proposal here, but you gotta find a happy ending for this.’ So I thought really hard about this. What kind of happy ending is there to hearing loss?

But, actually, there is. I realized I had become much, much closer to my friends. I held everybody at bay for a long time because I couldn’t hear them, and I didn’t want to talk about it. Once I started to talk about it, my friendships just became much more intimate… My relationships with my family—my husband, my two now-grown children—had been very frayed by the fact that I couldn’t hear them and I was angry all the time. So as I put the book together, and over the next year and a half as I was writing it, I was also learning to hear better [with a cochlear implant]… So I was relearning to hear at the same time that I was learning to deal with my hearing loss, and I learned a lot about how many mistakes I had made and how bad it is for your own psyche and your physical and social and emotional well-being to deny hearing loss.”

“When Snowden came out, more than anything, it was really reassuring to me. Because all the things that he proved—the Verizon phone database, the PRISM program—were things that were basically known but not known, if that makes sense. So people who follow these issues… there had been enough hints and leaks and tips that these were going on that we all believed it was going on, but we felt like we were completely paranoid and crazy. So when he came with this, I thought, ‘Oh, thank God I’m not crazy, right? This is actually happening.’ So it was really helpful for me, for the book, because I had already chosen my topic… but, boy, did he reveal a lot more dragnets that we didn’t know about before.”