Somebody’s going to write the Great Pandemic Novel. Why shouldn’t it be you?

My father used to tell me that “may you live in interesting times” was an ancient curse. As a little kid, that idea was simply puzzling. For anyone who has lived through any part of the past 20 years, though, it needs no explanation. And the past year, all by itself? Don’t get me started.

Embrace “me time” on a grand scale.

After years of happily solo city travel, it wasn’t until I decided to go to Vegas on my own that my friends put their collective foot down. “That’s weird,” one girlfriend gently informed me. “Nobody goes to Vegas all alone. I’m sure someone’s willing to go with you.”

Sure they would. That’s why I kept it quiet until it was too late for anyone to crash my one-woman party.

In my teens I thought I was an introvert, but in retrospect, I’m pretty sure I was just an extrovert with low self-esteem. I’ve…

This Is Us

My childhood library was a mile from our apartment, a route that took my mother and me across an overpass that ran through thick woods, down the quiet streets of a New Deal-built neighborhood with tiny rowhouses and an Art Deco movie theater in the town square. My mother didn’t drive, even though it was the early 1980s and every other mother did, so it was always a walk, pushing my little sister in an umbrella stroller. Whatever books I wanted to bring home, I would have to carry.

We made that walk frequently, and I had no way of…

The rooftops of New York City have long held a special magic for me. Back in 2011, when my first novel, The Kingdom of Childhood, was about to launch, I got invited to a book-industry party on the rooftop of a hotel on East 50th Street where I ran into Margaret Atwood. All debut authors feel a touch of imposter syndrome, but if you really want to feel a roaring, red-lining case of it, try being a mom from Maryland chatting up Margaret Atwood about your new novel while wearing a cocktail dress you picked up at TJ Maxx just…