When I first read The Golden Notebook, I was in fact a free woman. I was twenty-one years old, a college dropout living in a little house on the wild coast of New South Wales. I had ended up in the faraway antipodes for reasons I didn’t really understand. Okay, I followed a boy there—a relationship that didn’t work out. Now I had a tiny room to myself and I worked in a warehouse and aside from that I spent my time drinking beer, going to punk rock shows, hopping trains, and reading. Reading was my vocation, if a vocation is what you do when you are left entirely to your own devices.

I liked massive books then—like many free people, I found myself confronted with a string of empty days, and the longer a book kept me occupied, the better. The Golden Notebook was picked at least in part for its size, after a long bout with Anna Karenina. The problems faced by Anna Wulf were unknown to me; these were problems that had to do with commitments—to a child, to a politics, to a future. I was committed only to the pleasure of the day. But I chimed to the idea of freedom, and I could feel I was doing it wrong. Freedom, I intuited, ought to have higher stakes, and much much greater rewards than all the time in the world to read fat novels and steal a ride on a train to a rock show in the sticks somewhere.

In other words, my luck, in Marfa, was very good. I had everything I could possibly want: a beautiful house, a stipend for food, all the time and sunshine I could ask for. Even so, I never quite relaxed. The self I was asked to be there was janky and uncomfortable.

Marfa was confusing. I didn’t know what I was, exactly. I became a non-wife, a non-mother.

I had become a taker; something other than a mother; a person with self-ness. In Marfa, I was taken care of so I could be a pure writer, full of torments and crazes, up till four a.m. if need be, drooping over my enchiladas the next day at lunch, wrung out by the sheer exhaustion of being my writer self. I discovered I liked my empty life, my empty hours. For the first time since I was a kid, I watched a square of sunshine make its way across the floor.

By the time I had the courage to think of myself as an artist—had the courage even to ask these questions—I already was in possession of two very adorable and needy children, and abandoning them was a non-option as far as I was concerned. So I wasn’t taking notes on Joni putting her baby up for adoption—but I was noting the savagery with which she proceeded, the difficulty, the non-caring. I needed the model of her, the blazing comet trail of her life as an artist, the heat of which maybe came at least in part from the fact that she’d already given up the thing that women are never supposed to give up. I read her story, and I was galvanized. To do what, I did not know. But I was learning, once again, that a savage drive to vindication was one and the same as making art. For me.