I finally picked up Fear and Trembling when I was maybe twenty-five and living in New York. I had a lot of free hours to read at the time, and I was in the mood for existentialism - I'd lately experienced one of the radical life upheavals that tend to happen when you're twenty-five. Instead of getting engaged, my boyfriends of five years and I had broken up and moved out, and my future, my home life, my social circle, my reading, my time were up for reinvention. I quit my job and moved uptown and started going to classes with people who worked for hours on a single sentence and talked about devoting themselves to catching inspiration and channeling it into book form. I'd been working a corporate job; now I had a friend who put on a three-piece suit before sitting down at his desk to write, out of respect for the Muse. In a span of eighteen months, my life had grown unrecognizable.

I was happy and I was also burning up with questions, walking around New York, looking for a sign. [...] I waited for the real moment when I'd know what to build a life on and how to be. It didn't come. I looked around: most people seemed to be waiting, too, though they rarely used terms like "epiphany" or "conviction". I waited some more.