Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.

I had to detach myself from myself, if that makes any sense, to conjure an authentic first-person voice. In that sense, it was similar to writing a first-person novel. But I was writing about real people, not fictional ones - myself, my family, my friends and boyfriends and ex-husband, and that was extremely tricky.

Now that I no longer feel lonely, and now that my own past feels resolved in a whole new and very deep way, I am excited to write about the real world, to stay in it. Fiction is an escape, a parallel life, and it was a powerful source of comfort for me when my own life was raw and uncomfortable. I don't feel the burning need to disappear into a fictional character these days.

Sometimes I think of blogging as finger exercises for a violinist; sometimes I think of it as mulching a garden. It is incredibly useful and helpful to my "real" writing.

Turning the blog into a book was extremely difficult, a tremendous amount of sustained, hard work. Blogging is easy; writing a book is difficult.

My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.