IN SCHOOL, THE TEACHER HELD A COMPOsition of mine up to the class when I was eight years old and said, “This little girl is going to be a writer.” At home—where Marx, socialism, and the international working class were articles of faith—my mother pressed my upper arm between two fingers and said, “Never forget where you come from.” Both events were formative. I grew passionate over writing, and the political-ness of life was never lost on me. In my youth these twin influences made me suffer. I thought them hopelessly oppositional, and was tormented by the suspicion that ultimately I need choose one way of knowing the world over the other. It was literature that spoke most thrillingly to what I was already beginning to call “the human condition,” but when social injustice stared me in the face it was easy enough to trade in emotional nuance for doctrinaire simplicity. So one day it was exciting to say to myself, “The only reality is the system”; the next, I’d pick up Anna Karenina, and the sole reality of the system would do a slow dissolve.

Suddenly, literature, politics, and analysis came together, and I began to think more inclusively about the emotional imprisonment of mind and spirit to which all human beings are heir. In the course of analytic time, it became apparent that—with or without the burden of social justice—the effort required to attain any semblance of inner freedom was extraordinary. Great literature, I then realized, is a record not of the achievement, but of the effort.