[...] The administration had conceded a great deal to the Right, but I knew that Lauren’s father would take it all back, if only he knew how many of us there were, there are, who were with him; if only, as I had sometimes felt with Lauren, he could convincingly be reassured. And as I began to submit articles to the liberal magazines in D.C. and New York, I tried, in every word I wrote, to reassure him.

I don’t know if it worked—that is to say, obviously it didn’t. But if he wasn’t reading, others were. I had tapped some kind of vein, and editors responded to the things I sent. Quickly I found some of the bitterness of my Harvard years dissipating, and the rest of it going straight into my prose. Everything I wrote then had a kind of glow—from a spark that I had hoped but did not know was in me—and it returned to me in print, or online (I had so many ideas that I started a blog at one of the liberal magazines), with an alienated majesty. It was a time of online love affairs and paper billionaries—a space of some sort had opened up in the universe, a distortion—and with my belief in my own moral purity, and in the destiny of Lauren’s father, I stepped right into it. I was big, for a while there—reading my e-mail each day was like watching a parade. People wrote e-mails of praise, e-mails with offers in them—people asked for advice, over e-mail. Oh, you should have seen my in-box!