We love and care for oodles of people, but only a few of them, if they died, would make us believe we could not continue to live. Imagine if there were a boat upon which you could put only four people, and everyone else known and beloved to you would then cease to exist. Who would you put on that boat? It would be painful, but how quickly you would decide: You and you and you and you, get in. The rest of you, goodbye.

With fiction, it could be about anything. It just has to be good writing, like Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette," which I read recently. I want to forget I have a book in my hand.

I was amazed that what I needed to survive could be carried on my back. And, most surprising of all, that I could carry it.

It seemed to me the way it must feel to people who cut themselves on purpose. Not pretty, but clean. Not good, but void of regret. I was trying to heal. Trying to get the bad out of my system so I could be good again. To cure me of myself.

I'd finally come to understand what it had been: a yearning for a way out, when actually what I had wanted to find was a way in.

But if I could go back in time, I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here?

You can't replicate walking 94 days through the wilderness by yourself with a really heavy pack until you do it.