Summer holidays are good for many things: sleeping in, time in the sun, and, for some people, writing. Nearly 200 years ago, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley used her summer travels to Switzerland to develop the idea that eventually became Frankenstein.

When it was first published anonymously in 1818, Frankenstein was greeted with less-than-enthusiastic reviews. More attention was devoted to speculation about the author’s identity than any evaluation of the text. The novel was reissued in 1831 with Shelley’s name on the cover page, and now Frankenstein stands with Dracula as one of literature’s most influential monsters. A University of Pennsylvania study identified at least 74 film adaptations of Shelley’s character between 1910-1994.

Shelley imagined her character as the ultimate incarnation of the medically unbelievable, and during the early days of the 19th and even 20th centuries, he probably was. However, science and technology are anything but static, and in 2009 when it comes to jaw-dropping tales of medicine, I can’t help but think that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

During my first week as the medical student on the gynecology-oncology service, I wasn’t supposed to be daydreaming in the OR. Most of the time, the medical student experience involves standing, for hours at a time, cutting sutures, suctioning blood and who-knows-what-else, and always retracting, holding the instruments that keep organs and tissue out of the way so the operating surgeons can see what they are doing. It’s exhausting, so on this particular day, I couldn’t believe my good fortune when I was offered a chair. “Sit here,” my resident told me. “There won’t be anything for you to do since they’re using the robot.”

“The robot?” I thought. “Does the patient know about this?” When the surgery began, my right-brain couldn’t banish the thought of Frankenstein, even as my left brain leaned forward for a better view. Laparoscopic surgery—operating through tiny incisions in the body, with the help of a fiber optic camera that displays the view from within—has become more and more common as medical technology has become more sophisticated. Twenty years ago, removing a gallbladder left a ten inch scar.  During my surgery rotation, I scrubbed in on just such a cholecystectomy, and it left the patient with just a pair of one centimeter incisions on her abdomen and a scar buried in her belly button. So I was used to surgery that involved staring at a TV screen and manipulating very tiny and very expensive gadgets. Yet even with laparoscopy, a real surgeon still has to manipulate the tools.

Then I met the Da Vinci surgical robot, the next iteration of surgical innovation and perhaps a marker for the future of medicine. The problem with laparoscopy is that it forces surgeons to operate in 2-D, confined to the view on the screen. When the Da Vinci is used to operate, the surgeon controls the robot, and the robot controls all of the surgical tools inside of the patient. To operate the robot (and the second generation Da Vinci at our hospital has four arms), the surgeon sits in the corner of the OR, staring through a console that uses the video from the robot cameras to create a 3-D image of the view from inside the patient. Each of the arms moves by flipping a toggle, manipulating hand grips, or pushing pedals with one’s feet. I’m not sure who came up with the concept of the surgical robot, but I suspect it was someone who played a lot of video games as a child (and maybe as an adult…) The best surgeons can precisely control the smallest movements of their fingers, but the robot bests even the most skilled humans, because in translating motion from the console to the mechanical arms, even the most minute of tremors are eliminated.

Watching this for the first time, it was hard not to feel that I’d stepped into an alternate reality. There was the patient, draped like usual, but instead of being surrounded by the surgical team, she was enveloped by the metal arms of a multi-million-dollar robot that vaguely resembled a giant octopus. The anesthesiologist was the only person anywhere near the patient, because the rest of the surgical team was huddled around the screens scattered throughout the OR, eyes darting from the view inside the patient’s abdomen to the robot’s console in the corner, where our attending was pulling on levers, moving his feet, and pressing his face into the eyepieces with all the enthusiasm of the most devoted video gamer. Except he was a surgeon. In the OR. In the midst of dissecting out metastasized ovarian cancer from the surface of a patient’s abdominal blood vessels.

When he stepped away from the console to answer a page, I took the opportunity to sneak a view through the eyepieces. I held my breath as I stared at the view through the console—an intact abdominal cavity from the inside, complete with peristalsing intestines, pulsing aorta, and glistening strands of yellowish abdominal fat.

In the nearly two centuries since Mary Shelley used a fictional creation to wonder about the limits of human technology, the challenges posed by what we can do versus what we should do have only become more complicated. Advances in science and their corresponding applications to medical practice have created ethical quandaries that would have been considered science fiction in the not-so-distant past. At the same time, sometimes technology can also be used to great benefit. As I watched the arms of the Da Vinci twist and turn, seemingly in control of the entire procedure, I couldn’t shake the thought that somehow it just didn’t seem normal for a four-hour surgery to proceed without the surgeon ever touching the patient.

I went on rounds later in the day, and visited the patient. I was anticipating her post-op state to be as bad as that of ovarian cancer patients who have undergone traditional open laparotomies, in which their abdomen is incised from pubic bones to sternum.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“Oh I’m just fine!” she said, almost cheerfully, alert and clear-eyed from her bed. “How are you?”

I have to conclude that whether or not something is “normal” isn’t the best test of technology. If technology can sometimes be monstrous, it can also at times be magical. Remember: Frankenstein was the scientist, not the monster.

Among the many simple and useful features of Wikipedia are its categories. At the bottom of an article, you’ll find a listing of categories relating to the article in question. Here’s what the VQR category list looks like:

Clear and direct, these listings form the taxonomies that galvanize Wikipedia’s disparate content into related, structured groups. Combined with the numerous links embedded in each article, Wikipedia becomes a rooted system of interconnected pieces, a crudely scaffolded, ever expanding knowledge bank. Categories allow a user to easily bore down into a particular subset of a large area of concern. Studying anarchists? You can begin with the anarchism page, move on to anarchism theorists, Russian anarchists, fictional anarchists, and end on postanarchists (although, in reality, the end to Wikipedia browsing is only one’s patience—such chains of linkage and association are potentially endless).

The potential downside of these categories, like any effort at classification, is that articles will end up in groups where they don’t belong, or that by being granted a particular categorization, an implicit political or moral judgment is being made, perhaps one that the subject would wish to refute. Some of the categories are irritatingly broad in design: does W.H. Auden’s page need to include a link to the 1907 births category, with more than 2,000 entries? Or the 1,000 Guggenheim Fellows? On the other hand, does lumping him in with gay writers, LGBT people from England, and LGBT writers from the United Kingdom—all categories at the bottom of his Wikipedia page—convey a kind of callousness towards sexual orientation, as if it were merely a box to be checked on a form, rather than a complicated, sensitive, personal determination? Of course, this sort of discussion depends on whom we’re considering. Cary Grant, whose Wikipedia page contains a section discussing rumors of his sexual orientation, and who once sued Chevy Chase for slander after Chase joked on TV that Grant was gay, is not categorized as a gay or LGBT actor— nor is he categorized as a heterosexual one.

It is difficult to navigate this line between utility and obsessive completeness, between distinguishing individuals from the deafening mass of Wikipedia content and finding the linkages that make for useful, engaging, appropriate connections. Despite its morose nature, I’ve long found fascinating the Wikipedia category on writers who committed suicide (285, according to the site). Considered on its own, it may be called an odd object of interest, but then again, the subject of writers and mental illness is a weighty and thoroughly researched one. And I suppose that distinction reflects the libertarian impulses underlying Wikipedia’s philosophy: information should be available, accurate, thorough, and free; and one person’s interest may be abhorrent or boring to another, but it should be available all the same. There may be someone out there who has pored over the pages contained within Hairdressers and barbers who have committed suicide (2 listings), while another plumbs through the 3,499 names of people born in 1928, never quite knowing what she will find, nor what she’s looking for.

In 1925, when editor James Southall Wilson was searching for big names for VQR’s inaugural issue, he could not have found any name bigger than Luigi Pirandello. Though the Italian writer had already published a number of novels and plays and dozens of volumes of short stories, poetry, and essays, he was just then experiencing his first large-scale success with Six Characters in Search of an Author. The play caused a riot at its initial performance in Rome in 1921—with the audience chanting “madhouse” and “buffoon”—because of its shocking structure and subject, but it soon became an international success with productions in every major European city as well as New York, Tokyo, and Buenos Aires. The play would become hugely influential in modern theatre, at one point being called “the major single subversive moment in the history of modern theatre.” Pirandello’s affront to the dominant naturalist theater profoundly altered the course of French theater in particular and anticipated the theatrical innovations of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Edward Albee, and others. He would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 for his “bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage.”

At the height of his fame, Pirandello published an explanatory note on the play in the Italian magazine Comoedia. This note became the preface to the play’s 1925 edition and appeared for the first time in English in VQR. Entitled “Pirandello Confesses . . . : Why and How He Wrote ‘Six Characters in Search of an Author,’” the piece offers an interesting analogy for imagination. Pirandello writes that his characters come to him through his maid, Fantasia, who “persists in bringing back with her the most disgruntled beings imaginable and filling up my house with them.” Usually, he incorporates these characters into his writing, but he rejects these six particular characters because they lack the universality he requires of subjects. He says in jest, “I have already tormented my readers with hundreds and hundreds of stories [. . .] Why should I bother them with an account of these six unfortunates, and their wretched plight?” Though he rejects these characters, they continue to plead with him to write their story until finally he decides to “represent this unique situation—an author refusing to accept certain characters born of his imagination, while the characters themselves obstinately refuse to be shut out from the world of art, once they have received this gift of life.” Thus, Six Characters in Search of an Author was conceived as an act of writing as exorcism: a final effort to get rid of the rejected characters that haunt him.

Today, Pirandello’s piece in VQR offers valuable insight into his perception of his masterwork. Ann Hallamore Caesar, in her critical study Characters and Authors in Luigi Pirandello (Oxford, 1998), makes the curious observation that, in the essay, Pirandello seems to be distancing himself from his play at the very height of its popularity. His analogy for imagination releases the author from responsibility for creating the characters, and he vigorously denies any resemblance between himself and the character known as The Father. Both of these maneuvers come in addition to the distancing techniques built into Six Characters: the characters are first and foremost rejected characters, and the play-within-a-play structure manages to further separate the author from the sexual transgression that motivates the innermost play.

But why would Pirandello wish to distance himself from his most successful work? Caesar points out the uncomfortable parallel between the six characters’ drama—in which the family reacts to the knowledge that the father has inadvertently purchased sex from his step-daughter—and Pirandello’s own family situation. At the time Pirandello was first visited by the now-notorious six characters, his wife began exhibiting a type of schizophrenia that caused her to become convinced that her husband and daughter were having an affair. These accusations of incest, though unfounded, traumatized the family: his daughter attempted suicide, his wife was committed to a facility, and Pirandello retreated to his writing. If Pirandello distanced himself from his play, perhaps he only meant to distance himself from painful memories of the play’s inspiration: his own family disintegrating because of an alleged sexual scandal.

Whatever Pirandello’s motivations for writing the piece—whether he wanted to protect himself from unflattering comparisons to his traumatized characters or address critics’ and audiences’ misinterpretation of his play—it remains a useful tool for understanding Six Characters and other works such as So It Is (If You Think So) and Henry IV. Though “[t]he mystery of artistic creation” may indeed be “the same mystery as natural birth,” Pirandello attempts here to dispel the mystery, to lay bare the cogs and gears of one artist’s imagination.

• Read “Pirandello Confesses . . .” from the Spring 1925 issue of VQR.

“Every writer is born to write one story,” Wallace Stegner once said during an interview. In his case, that story was rich enough to generate over a dozen novels—including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Angle of Repose—as well as fifty-eight short stories, one memoir, two biographies, two histories, and innumerable essays. Stegner’s story—of ambition and violence in the American west, families bound and divided, and our own messy American history—hasn’t ceased to be relevant, beautiful, and penetrating.

Wallace Stegner was born in 1909 on his grandfather’s farm in Lake Mills, Iowa, but Stegner’s father soon took his family west. And that time out west would inform Stegner’s sense of self and his writing for the remainder of his life:

I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from. I’ve got an exaggerated sense of place . . . my personal experiences are all I surely know, and those experiences are very likely to be rooted in places.

Much of Stegner’s writing grew out of his itinerant upbringing, a self-described “wandering childhood” that took him to North Dakota, Washington, Saskatchewan, Montana, Utah, Nevada, and California. In one of his first letters to VQR, he explained that he was “working on a novel of a picaresque nature based partially on the migration of my family through the Western U.S. and Canada.” Many of the stories he produced during this time were later put to use in that novel (The Big Rock Candy Mountain). Stegner was sensitive to the fact that he might be known as “that fellow who writes stories only about little boys in Saskatchewan,” but it was obvious from the beginning that there were greater tensions in his work, greater troubles in the world beyond a farm boy’s fear.

His writing first appeared in the pages of VQR in 1938, when he was a young college professor teaching in Wisconsin. In a book review that fall he wrote, “Somehow on the way to 1938, America has lost the knack of marching up the road to perfection by a series of regular steps.” Indeed, the country had been struggling through the Great Depression for the better part of a decade, and another world war was brewing overseas. No doubt Stegner, like all great writers, had his ear to the ground during these difficult times; his stories could not help but be influenced by these ponderous issues, often in intensely personal ways.

(more…)

Thomas Friedman had an interesting column in the New York Times on Sunday, titled “Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No.” His commentary touches on many of the most difficult questions currently facing American politicians and military strategists: what is happening in Afghanistan, what is our role in the process, and when is it time to leave?  Friedman is limited to the space of an op-ed and his words do take on a touch of the “look at me” tone that has previously been noted here, but in mentioning Greg Mortenson, Friedman leaves the reader with a reference to a nonfiction account of life along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan that is well worth a look.

Mortenson’s acclaimed memoir, Three Cups of Tea, has spent extensive time at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, in part because it is an unlikely story that seems more reminiscent of a Hollywood script than reality. In 1993—nearly a decade before September 11th brought the Taliban and al-Qaeda into the living rooms of America—Mortenson found himself in Pakistan on a mission to climb K2, in memory of a sister who had died recently, after a lifelong struggle with epilepsy.  Although not as high as Everest, K2 is considered to be a more challenging climb, and Mortenson almost didn’t survive, needing extensive time in a remote rural village to regain his health. While there, he was touched by the sight of village children playing with sticks in the dirt—there was no school in Korphe. In gratitude for their care during his recovery, Mortenson promised to return and build a school for the village. Thus began the odyssey that is the story of Three Cups of Tea.

Much of the book follows a familiar thread: with limited resources and financial backing, a stubborn American finds a way into remote village, gradually earns the trust of skeptical villagers, and helps build a school which opens to great excitement by previously skeptical villagers. By the end of the book, the stories are less gripping than they are at the beginning simply because they sound like something the reader has heard before. The risks that Mortenson takes (and continues to take in his real life) are not minimal: at one point he is kidnapped by the Taliban and only extreme good fortune keep him out of a shallow and unmarked grave in one of the world’s most inhospitable mountain ranges  Calling to mind A Mighty Heart, another outstanding memoir of one individual trying to make a difference, one could say that Greg Mortenson was lucky where Daniel Pearl was not.

It’s precisely the “can-you-believe-he-just-did-that” factor that makes Three Cups of Tea worth reading. To date, Mortenson has started over 90 schools in the rural areas along the Pakistani-Afghan border, and together these schools provide education to over 34,000 children, 24,000 of whom are girls. Amidst the volatility of international politics and the never-ending and at times hopeless situation that is reality in this part of the world, Mortenson’s life stands out. His book is required reading for senior members of the US military and units deploying to Afghanistan, and he has received the highest award for civil service that the government of Pakistan can bestow.  When one considers the countless children whose lives he has touched, it is impossible to measure the impact of this individual who saw a need and decided to do something about it. More information about Mortenson and his school-building efforts can be found at threecupsoftea.com.

And in the meantime, we must come back to Friedman’s question. Teacher, can we leave now?

Journalism critics have long held that trend articles reflect the friends of editors more than society at large. If this truism is correct—as New York Magazine and Slate suggest—then a lot of editors’ friends have been preserving and canning this summer. The past two months have seen a bumper crop of trend pieces about the old and formerly untrendy practice of preserving the harvest. The pieces all wink at an understood distinction between trendy (read: high culture) urban canners and untrendy (read: low culture) rural canners. And unlike most trend pieces, they are particularly ambivalent about and sometimes even suspicious of the trend.

The New York Times started off the summer with this unsurprisingly New York- and Bay Area-centric trend piece on canning. “Preserving food,” NYT food writer Julia Moskin admits, “cannot be considered new and trendy, no matter how vigorously it’s rubbed with organic rosemary sprigs. But the recent revival of attention to it fits neatly into the modern renaissance of handcrafted food, heirloom agriculture, and using food in its season.”

The Washington Post followed with a story on the economics of canning and an inane companion piece called “Two Bloggers, One Hot Trend,” which follows two DC food bloggers on their virgin tomato canning expedition. “The process,” writes Kelly DiNardo, “took an entire weekend, coating the tan counters of their Adams Morgan kitchen with pools of sweet juice and resulting in 26 quarts of tomatoes they’re still eating their way through. Just recently, those tomatoes sated a craving for gazpacho.”

But the apex of the anxious canning-trend-story trend is Sarah Karnasiewicz’s piece in Salon. Critical of the DIY “professionals” who supposedly spear-headed the trend, and deeply suspicious of the argument that canning is cost-effective (perhaps it would be more cost effective if you didn’t buy your produce at the Fort Greene Farmers’ Market), Karnasiewicz saps the joy out of what might otherwise be good old-fashioned fun.

The bombs were falling when two VQR reporters made it through the Rafah Crossing and into the Gaza Strip. What they saw shocked them—cities destroyed, whole families killed, lives shattered. In documenting the aftermath of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, however, Elliott Woods and Asim Rafiqui did not want to simplify their reporting into snapshots of anonymous suffering. They stayed on for weeks, then months, getting to know the Palestinians there and gaining their trust.

At the same time, we commissioned additional pieces on neighboring Lebanon to investigate how this latest fighting fit into the context of the 2006 Lebanon War. What we discovered was a regional history of factionalized parties then physically separated by border fences and barbed wire in the name of maintaining peace. The reality, however, is that such separation seems instead to have fostered animosity and allowed each side to demonize the other. Collectively, these essays explore that Catch-22—and question the wisdom of repeating that strategy of division as we put up separation walls in preparation for our withdrawal from Iraq.

Our portfolio of work on this theme is the anchor for our Summer 2009 issue, and includes Tom Bissell’s “Looking for Judas,” Peter Lagerquist’s “Tracing Concrete,” Christopher Merrill’s “Relative Calm,” Michelle Orange’s “Beirut Rising,” Asim Rafiqui’s “Portraits of Survival,” and Elliott D. Woods’s “Hope’s Coffin.”

In addition to those featured pieces, we’ve got lots of fiction, poetry, and essays, including work by Chris Ware, Carl Phillips, and the late Mahmoud Darwish.

You can start with this issue when you subscribe, or you can buy a copy.

Evelyn Waugh worked as an apprentice to a cabinet-maker before he decided to follow in the footsteps of his older brother, Alec, and embark on a career in writing in the late 1920s. Soon after, he began producing books at a frenetic pace with his characteristic wit and social insight almost fully formed. His debut novel, Decline and Fall, appeared in 1928 and the next decade-and-a-half saw him publish nearly a book a year. He alternated between comic novels devoted to the lives of comfy-living Englishmen that built his reputation (and were plainly modeled after the work of P. G. Wodehouse) and travel memoirs of his trips to Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, and the West Indies, for which he was paid a healthy living wage (Waugh once wrote: “Though most of us would not write except for money, we would not write any differently for more money.”). His foreign excursions frequently informed his fiction. The settings of his stories and novels grew increasingly exotic—sometimes to good effect (Scoop, for example), while other times to the point of self-absorption. (Wodehouse, in a review of A Handful of Dust, wrote: “He goes to some blasted jungle or other and imagines that everybody will be interested in it.”)

Most critics point to the confluence of the end of the Second World War and the publication of Brideshead Revisited—Waugh’s chronicle of British Army Captain Charles Ryder and his association with the tragic Marchmain family of Brideshead Manor—as the turning point in Waugh’s career: the pre-Brideshead comic Waugh was replaced by a post-Brideshead religious Waugh, whose worldview was rigorously shaped by his conversion to Catholicism and the dissolution of his first marriage. The author himself confirmed this view by calling Brideshead his “magnum opus” and by stating that it represented the end of his youth as a writer:

“I had found a much more abiding interest [then]—the English language. So in my future books there will be two things to make them unpopular: a preoccupation with style and the attempt to reproduce man more fully, which, to me, means only one thing, man in his relation to God.”

The truth, though, is that by 1945 Waugh had already been recognized as a master stylist for a decade or more. Graham Greene wrote that Waugh’s prose was “like the Mediterranean before the war, so clear you could see to the bottom.” To paint Waugh as two things and two things alone—the whimsical pre-Brideshead wag and the increasingly dour post-Brideshead preacher—is an oversimplification. Characters like Tony Last in A Handful of Dust, for example, or Adam Fenwick-Symes in Vile Bodies embody both the comic manners and the predilection for meditation that characterize the two Waughs. Brideshead Revisited, then, is more a literary culmination of Waugh’s attitudes on humanity, grace, and devotion than a bold demarcation between before and after.

Evelyn Waugh’s association with VQR began in the latter half of 1933, in the midst of one of the more prolific periods of his career. Waugh spent most of 1933 traveling abroad in South America, in what was then known as British Guiana (modern-day Suriname and northern Brazil). In August, his American representation, Brandt & Brandt, fed VQR editor Stringfellow Barr an “amusing and provocative” piece titled “Debunking the Bush,” in which Waugh playfully exposed the myths of exotic travel—that food tastes sweeter after a hiking a marathon through the jungle, that true freedom is only found in the wild and that the best sleep can only be had when the body is tired from a hard day’s labor. Barr liked the essay immediately and accepted it for publication in the Winter 1934 issue, contingent upon a change of title. Waugh acceded to this request, and the essay was renamed “The Rough Life.” At that time, Barr noted that it was a light essay, but not “too light for filling.” This assertion holds true today; “The Rough Life,” is not the most acerbic piece of prose Waugh ever published—it is roundly ignored in the myriad collections of Waugh’s essays—but it does have its share of well-turned comic phrases. Its humor comes mainly from Waugh’s outsider status to the “cult of roughing it,” as a mannered Englishman hardly belongs in the wilds of South America, and the manner in which he indignantly questions those who think that life in the bush is at all idyllic.

There is a minor controversy surrounding the publication of “The Rough Life” that has only now come to light. When Stringfellow Barr accepted the essay for publication, he wanted to be certain that VQR was the first periodical to publish the essay in Europe or America. Brandt & Brandt assured Mr. Barr that the essay was not being published simultaneously overseas, and the matter was settled. Waugh’s article was published in January, 1934 alongside essays by former VQR editor James Southall Wilson and T. S. Eliot, among others. However, we now know that “The Rough Life” was published abroad simultaneously; it actually debuted in the Oxford & Cambridge Magazine under its original title “Debunking the Bush” in December 1933. Whether that fact ever came to light in the offices of the VQR is uncertain.

The Winter 1934 issue was the last under the editorial stewardship of Stringfellow Barr and although Barr wrote a long note to Waugh upon payment for “The Rough Life” that expressed optimism that the VQR would continue to publish his writing, Evelyn Waugh never again appeared in the pages of the Quarterly.

• View the original manuscript of “The Rough Life.” (Papers of the Virginia Quarterly Review, 1925-1935, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library)
• Read full text of “The Rough Life”

“Beirut Rising,” Michelle Orange’s contribution to VQR’s Summer 2009 issue, entertains with its amusing depiction of the Lebanese passion for plastic surgery, but the essay also penetrates deep into to the sadness at the city’s core. I recently corresponded with Orange to get her thoughts on Beirut’s political future, travel writing, and reporting in territory where journalists are suspect.

1. In “Beirut Rising,” you struggle with the question that everyone asks: “Why Beirut?” Now, more than a year after your trip there, is it clearer to you why you chose Beirut and what you hoped to observe there? And did you see what you expected?

The best answer I came up with is that I went to Beirut to figure out why I was in Beirut. Travel impulses are often mysterious; I’ve learned to just trust them. A few years ago I went to spend a month in the very south of Italy and attend a language school. I was there a week before I realized I had actually made the trip so I could try and track down the Calabrian village where my great-grandparents lived and solve the mystery behind my family’s name—I wound up writing about it for McSweeney’s. Initially I had a vague notion of researching a short story idea in Beirut, but ultimately, along with my friends and family and every single person I met in Lebanon, I was very confused about what I was doing and why I was there. Along with brute curiosity and a real need to confront and be immersed in something complex that had nothing to do with my own little life, it helped that I was shiftless enough to book a flight because I felt like it and had a couple of weeks free. What else does one do in January?

In a longer version of this essay I talk about the fact that Lebanon’s war, more than any other, is the one that I grew up with, the one I saw on the cover of magazines and on the news at night, and I think it took a very specific and yet nebulous place in the imagination of my generation. If you say the name to a lot of people my age, on this side of the world, their eyes will still widen: Beirut means bad. But in the mid-sixties my dad was offered his first teaching position at the American University of Beirut—it was considered a kind of swinging French playground—and Lebanon was, by several orders of magnitude, the most progressive and hopeful of the middle eastern countries. To think that I knew it only as a blighted place, if one that was reportedly experiencing a kind of renaissance and renewal before the latest war, seemed like a failure on my part. I thought it might be the best place to start trying to gain an understanding of the region. As for whether I saw what I expected, I was a pretty woefully clean slate—the only expectations I had were from the one or two people I knew who had been there in the last few years. And those were not met because the city was seized up with political and military tensions and this truly striking, abiding sadness. If anything I was more prepared for the former than the latter.

2. You describe being treated with suspicion throughout your stay in Beirut. As a journalist, how do you navigate such a situation to find people willing to give candid answers?

I think you develop an instinct by traveling alone, particularly as a woman traveling alone, about the people you encounter. You intuit how to defuse suspicion or have the good sense to just move along. The situation in Beirut was incredibly tense during the period when I was there, and the environment itself was harder to navigate—it was extremely disorienting—than the people, when I could actually find them. I was there as more of a sad person trying to get a grip than a journalist, though, and in speaking to the people I met I think my general harmlessness came through quickly, and my curiosity was recognized for what it was: a genuine desire to gain an understanding of what was happening.

If you have the luxury of time, you can build relationships just by showing up consistently, sticking around long enough for people to get a sense of you—going to the same restaurants and shops, chatting up the same fruit guy. I was also lucky to have a couple of contacts who were gracious enough to show a stranger around and facilitate introductions—being a known quantity always helps. In a general sense I think the amount of time I have spent traveling by myself has given me the ability to navigate both natural and unnatural suspicion, and that comes in handy as a journalist. I must admit, though, that by the end of my stay in Beirut the really bizarre, fraught, socially barren atmosphere had me deeply paranoid: I stopped taking pictures, I wouldn’t write in my notebook in public, I even started feeling weird about my hotel room.

3. Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated former prime minister, just became the new prime minister of Lebanon as his pro-western coalition recently gained a majority in parliament. Is this a hopeful sign for the future of Lebanese politics, or does it signal a period of increased tensions with Hezbollah?

It seems that it is both of those things. Though Harari campaigned on a call to disarm Hezbollah and possibly address the open wound that is the stalled Special Tribunal for Lebanon investigating the assassination of his father, his statements since the election are less direct. It is a positive sign that Saudi Arabia and Syria have apparently come to an agreement about the power structure in Lebanon, and that there is hope for a unified government, but it remains to be seen whether Hezbollah will retain its veto power—a huge and dangerous point of contention—and whether the parties will indeed work productively together in parliament. It was also a very close election, and the rising power and will of Hezbollah and Aoun’s Christian coalition should not be underestimated. To forget that would be to forget the brutal lesson of Rafik Hariri’s murder.

4. Your work often deals with travel, most notably your epistolary travelogue The Sicily Papers (Hobart, 2006). How does travel inform writing?

Well, on a basic level it gives one a tale to tell, with a narrative framework in place—I went here, this happened, I left—that one can take or leave. I was struck in reading the letters of Graham Greene by his very early gravitation toward the literary synthesis of travel experiences: at age sixteen he wrote a letter to his mother from a Mediterranean cruise that was almost exclusively a description of his shipmates at a shared dinner table. He created characters and sketched a sort of chamber piece for her out of the unlikely configurations of people and place that travel creates. Those new arrangements, combined with the unfamiliar thrill of your surroundings, are very inspiring, they shake a writer out of complacency, she is forced to a heightened level of attention and the world is new again. You’re tested constantly, you get to see what you’re made of, you spend a lot of time literally trying to understand the people around you—in a way all of the metaphors of life are amplified—and then you grapple with a way to communicate what you have learned and seen and felt. I used to feel more at home or at peace among strangers, and I’m losing that, which is probably a good thing personally—there can be an unhappy measure of cultivating your “aloneness” to it—although not as great professionally. I think travel provides a particular frame for the question all good writing struggles to answer: What is it like to be here, to be human?

5. What are you currently reading?

I am making my way through The Bin Ladens by Steve Coll, and just finished Mary Karr’s new memoir, Lit. On the summer docket I’ve got some catching up to do on early James Salter and Joan Didion, Bill Wasik’s And Then There’s This, and I think it’s time to re-read Middlemarch, a book I loved so much in university I’d shove it up my shirt and take it to bed at night.

6. What are you working on now? Where are you traveling next?

My hope is to travel to Riyadh some time in the fall to write about the University for Women being built there now, and I’m toying with the idea of visiting a friend in China as part of my research for a book on the history and future of the family name.

I finished writing a novel yesterday. One would think these words would be followed by a string of slap-happy emoticons, or at least an exclamation point. One would think I should be celebrating, drinking fruity cocktails on a plane to Vegas or something along those lines. But alas, I’m not feeling much like exclamation points or fruity cocktails. Since fixing the last comma, spell-checking, and running my final word count (74,324) I’ve been feeling rather down. Partly it’s the feeling that the novel could still use work. (Until now, I never really understood Randall Jarrell’s definition of a novel as “A prose narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it.”) And partly it’s the fear of peddling my sweat-and-blood on the open market. But what’s really got me down is the thought that it’s over. After spending much of the past five years in a magical world of my own creation, I can’t go back.

Not sure where else to turn, I went to the internet, that vast enabler of hypochondriasis, and discovered that I am not alone in my struggle. Reflecting on his National Novel Writing Month experience, Jamie Grove described the condition thusly: “You’ve just spent days, weeks, months (even years) working through the pain and triumph of your story. The characters you created are no longer just ideas or names, they are family, friends, and lovers. They are a part of you, as inseparable from you as your own face. Yet, the story must end… The characters exit. The audience leaves the house. A single light shines on the empty stage. As silence descends, you are left alone in the theater of your mind.” Mystery writer Vickie Britton comforts recently-finished novelists with this nugget of wisdom: “The sadness you may be experiencing is justified. It is a natural part of letting go. Even though it may be a happy experience to finish or publish a book, along with the sense of accomplishment may be feelings of anxiety and lack of a goal or purpose.”

A number of other novel-writing bloggers link post-novel depression to postpartum depression. Such comparisons are inevitably hyperbolic. The completion of a novel is nowhere near as momentous as the birth of a child (though a novel usually has a longer gestation period) nor is it accompanied with massive physiological change. But in some ways, the pain and anxiety of separation is similar. I wouldn’t expect post-novel depression to make it into DSM V. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders doesn’t even list postpartum depression as a distinct condition. Without validation from the mental health establishment how are we to understand the sadness that accompanies the completion of a novel or any large creative project? In his essay “Why I Write” George Orwell observed: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” Perhaps our sadness is that demon clamoring for a new project.