In the midst of those newborn months, I had a book coming out. It would be published when the baby was three months old. I usually described it as a book about drinking, though honestly it was a book about the only thing I ever wrote about: the great emptiness inside, the space I’d tried to fill with booze and sex and love and recovery and now, perhaps, with motherhood. The book was getting a lot of attention, which made me queasy—and also, like an addict, eager for more.