For the first time in years, I was writing fiction—scenes with an artist father and his estranged teenage daughter. She was staying at his run-down house in the Texas desert. When she opened the fridge, I pictured the empty fridge in my father’s apartment. A prior version of me might have been entirely swallowed by the girl’s perspective, her resentment and desires, but now I found myself curious about both characters: the daughter’s discomfort at waking up in a bachelor’s house—quietly opening all the cupboards, not sure if there was anything to eat for breakfast—and her father’s anxious uncertainty. How much did he need to entertain her? Did he need to buy her tampons?

To lose time, to lose myself, to lose the tight orbit of my own looping thoughts, just for an afternoon—these were the things I’d once wanted from booze. But it was always writing that offered the purest version of this surrender.