I thought I’d finished it in January, but a revision letter from my editor disabused me of that notion.

I revised all spring. I had a heavy speaking schedule, too, and jumping back and forth between the introspective world of writing and the extroverted world of speaking made me feel dislocated in the head.

But in June I finished again. Now we were at the line-editing step—a piece of cake. Usually.

This time, of course, not. I knew the last quarter of the book was missing something, and my editor knew it, and so I took another two and a half months to figure it out.

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