I think it was one of those moments where do I say what I am or do I say what I want to be? At that moment, I was trying to and wanting to be a writer, and I just remember that moment felt so fraught because I was about to go in for this major surgery and I had to say that thing aloud. They ask you, what do you do? What do you like? I told them, I’m a writer. I changed a few things, but when they were wheeling me into the operating theater, you know, they make small talk with you. I will say this is actually in the book, and I kind of repurposed it for the story. So I mean, I hate to not be able to to offer clear cut answers to what was happening, but that is definitely a moment in my life where those kind of conditions kind of all came together to give me the sense of the time that I had. Then shortly after I went for that surgery, as my body was healing, it started to resolve. So I went in and they went in through my back with a camera, and they couldn’t find anything. The only way to do that was major surgery. It couldn’t be looked at casually and they didn’t know what it was or whether it was anything to worry about, but with everything that was happening we decided to look into it. I want to take an aside and say that I found out much later after the fact that Nabokov had a similar shadow in a similar place that haunted him for his entire life, but I had a shadow between my lungs and behind my heart. It was winter or maybe late fall by the time I went for an MRI for imaging to try and figure out what was happening, and they found the shadow. I just remember that feeling gasping for air. I’m alive and really, truly most myself, and it felt so strange that the season that I love the most was exacerbating this thing that was going on in my body. I still remember the way that came up against that summer in D.C. So there’s a lot happening and a lot that I think my body was responding to, but I actually had major thoracic surgery. I should also say that it happened around the time when my brother, who is terminally ill, moved back in with my family because he could no longer take care of himself. Raven Leilani: I absolutely don’t think it’s a coincidence that happens sort of around the same time I was trying to uproot my whole life and make a go of writing.
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