“Writing a book is like giving birth to a grotesque human being—but through the process you are murdered, a puerpueral fever, and then afterwards you are frothy and amesiac and do not know your way home. Finishing a book is like being paralyzed, and needing to learn again how to accept fluids, to cognate again, to walk and talk. I am experiencing a sort of aphonia, like Anna O. Some form of apoplexia.”