Katie Roiphe

Updated at 3:45 p.m. ET on May 20, 2024
One day the French writer Colombe Schneck, a total stranger, came to my house. She was a friend of a friend who lived in Paris, and it had somehow been arranged that she would drop by. The afternoon was gray and drizzly, and I felt slightly awkward about having this visitor I had never met coming to my house. But then she walked in, brisk, at ease. I liked her immediately. We launched right into big subjects; there was no chatter or small talk.

Janet Malcolm once emailed to tell me she found an introduction I had written for my book on writers’ deaths, which included my own thoughts on a childhood illness, to be “surprising” but “powerful.” I understood this to be her diplomatic way of referring to the possibly showy or undignified decision to put myself into a book that was otherwise a work of biography and journalism. I think she was telling me she was surprised that she liked it.