She quit and planned to live off her savings. She would write full time.

But after quitting, it proved difficult to make progress. Her hard drive was already a graveyard of unfinished and abandoned projects. Weeks passed, and she found she wasn’t getting much writing done. Instead, she sat on the floor for long stretches of time, alone in her flat. One day, during this period of paralysis and growing despair, she talked to her father in the United States. Over the long-distance line, he began hectoring her for not being sufficiently hopeful about her life—which, DeWitt told me, did little to kindle hope in her.

Her father had a unique talent, she recalled, of reminding you that— however depressed you might think you were— deeper basements of hopelessness were available to you. Nearing a new bottom, DeWitt reflected on the fact that you can’t pick your parents. Certainly, if she had ever been given the chance, she would have chosen someone different. Sitting on the floor of the flat, back against the wall, brooding on her miserable relationship with her father and the creative impasse she had reached, something was dislodged within her.

What would it mean, she wondered, for a child to select his father? It was “a completely preposterous idea,” but one that captured her, blooming in her mind, filling her with enthusiasm. What sort of adult would be a plausible candidate for surrogate fatherhood? What education might allow the child to make an informed decision? And at what age would this lucky child, on the one hand, be capable of making a serious choice while, on the other, be young enough to have that choice be meaningful? After all, the point of choosing one’s father should be, at the very least, to be raised by that father, to discover who you were, who you might become, through the medium of good parenting.