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the afternoon she’d called to say I needed to meet her in Union Square so she could introduce me to Werner at his reading. I could have given a thousand reasons why I didn’t want to go (that I had no interest in being whatever she thought a real writer was, that I hated poetry, that I hated when people enjoyed or pretended to enjoy poetry, that being around Harriet gave me the same tangled feeling I had while watching television shows about sharks) but it wouldn’t have mattered—when Harriet made a decision, she would practically burn down a forest to make sure it happened.
    You’re wasting your good years , she said. All that time you’ve spent writing for other people, you could be putting that energy into your own work. Tell your husband you’re quitting, that you need a year to write for yourself. You know he’ll be fine with it.
    She’d somehow read the story of mine that had been published many years ago in a literary journal a professor at Barnard had submitted it to without my permission, and she tracked down my email to say she was an editor and interested in my novel, as if everyone had one. I told her I didn’t have one and didn’t want one, that I was a staff writer for a soap opera, but Harriet is the kind of person who believes you can frighten genius out of a person and be thanked for finding it.
    How could that possibly ever be enough for you? You’re a real writer, not a soap opera writer.
    How was I supposed to feel about this? Because I was, in fact, a soap opera writer, and I was paid to do this and people followed the stories as if they were truth and those exaggerated lives were more real to some than anything actually real, so much so that whole magazines were devoted to this collective imagination. It had started as an in-between job, just a writer’s assistant, but when one of the producers impulsively fired half the staff, I was promoted and I began to enjoy how nothing was recognizable or familiar about the love triangles, rectangles, and octagons, the operatic scream-crying, the scorned lovers, double homicides, sudden, rare illnesses, demonic curses, and all brands of revenge. Ruby had always described it best: It’s how we outsource rage.
    I don’t want to feel literary , I told Harriet. I just want to feel useful.
    Listen, you’ll thank me for this later, believe me. I really do think that meeting Werner will be good for you. He always knows the right thing to say to a writer just starting out.
    Harriet, I’m not starting anything. I don’t want to write a book.
    I’m sure that will change , she said, and I wanted to say that it wouldn’t but she said, I’ll see you at six-thirty , and I am not the kind of person who can put myself between a person and her wants.
    In Harriet’s introduction she said something about how Werner’s poetry was the invention of a radical loneliness, a reinvention of life as we know it, and that was ridiculous, I knew, but who wouldn’t want life to be reinvented? I thought everyone would like that very much. Werner’s work was taught in universities, anthologized, published in magazines, and even reviewed in newspapers. Novelists and filmmakers cited him as a major influence and Mother even told me his poems made her cry for the first time in years, but I’d only read a poem or two and didn’t even try to try to like it.
    Once the reading was done, Harriet beelined to Werner, my wrist in her hand. She gave Werner a quick appraisal of the reading as he shrugged and said something lost to the din of the crowd.
    This is Elyria. She’s writing a very impressive novel .
    Well, if it’s impressive in its unfinished state it must be doubly impressive upon completion.
    His accent—half-German, half-Kiwi—sounded like it belonged to some long-past century.
    I’m certain it will be , Harriet said just as someone else caught her attention, and she was lost to a churn of people. Werner looked at me like he was waiting on some kind of