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the years is that every new idea eventually becomes the old idea. I made a pledge that I wouldn’t start the sexy new novel I imagined until I had finished the tired old warhorse I was dragging myself through at present. Keeping that pledge has always served me well. The part of my brain that makes art and the part that judges that art had to be separated. While I was writing, I was not allowed to judge. That was the law. It was the lesson I had been unable to learn back in Jane Cooper’s poetry class at Sarah Lawrence, but I was older now and it was high time.
    Not only did I learn how to write a novel in Provincetown; I found the perfect person to read it. Elizabeth McCracken was another of the writing fellows at the Work Center that season, and she lived three houses away from me. If I looked out my kitchen window, I could see whether her light was on. Sometimes you don’t realize what’s lacking in life until you find it. That was the way I felt about Elizabeth. I had plenty of friends, and a few extremely close friends, but I’d never had a true reader, someone who didn’t automatically love everything I did, someone whose criticism and praise were always thoughtful and consistent. She knew when to be tough and when to just be encouraging. She read everything I wrote and could say, You know, you’ve already done this too many times. (She recently told me to cut about ninety-five percent of the dream sequences in State of Wonder , pointing out that enough of my characters had received wise counsel from dead people in my books already.) Whatever I gave her, she read immediately, which is what every writer desperately wants, and she brought the full weight of her talent and intelligence to bear on all of it. I tried my best to do the same for her. Of course, we didn’t know it was going to be like this when we first met. We went for ice cream. We talked about books and movies, swapped magazines, got along. But two writers becoming friends pretty quickly get to a point where they’re going to have to read each other’s work. It’s nervous-making, because if you like the person but you don’t like her work, you know the friendship is going to go only so far. For Elizabeth and me, the moment of truth came about two weeks after we met—she gave me a story and I gave her the first chapter of my novel, and after we had read the pages, we went down to the Governor Bradford, one of the few bars in Provincetown that stayed open all winter, and talked the night away. We had so much to say, so much praise and advice, so many good ideas. We had found each other.
    Over the years I’ve come to realize that I write the book I want to read, the one I can’t find anywhere. I don’t sell my books before I finish them, and no one reads them while I’m writing them, except for Elizabeth. I write my books for myself, and for her. You might infer from this that our books and our writing processes are very much alike, but it isn’t the case at all. Not only is our work different, but how we work is incredibly different: I get everything set in my head and then I go, whereas Elizabeth will write her way into her characters’ world, trying out scenes, writing backstories she’ll never use. We marvel at each other’s process, and for me it’s a constant reminder that there isn’t one way to do this work. I love Elizabeth’s books, but the road she takes to get to them would kill me. 
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    PARADOXICALLY, a single winter day in Provincetown is somewhere between seventy and eighty hours long. I had never encountered such an overwhelming amount of silent, unstructured time. After years of saying I needed more freedom, I suddenly found that I needed more structure. My novel needed structure as well. Knowing I should write a long, beautiful description has never gotten me out of bed in the morning, which is probably why I never made it as a poet. The thing I relied on most heavily to get me up and typing was the power of plot.