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Yesterday Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, a good and wise friend, wrote to say that Hiroshima in the Morning: A Memory, will be published by the Feminist Press in September 2010 in the big book fall of their 40th anniversary year.

Hiroshima is Reiko's book, a book about being a daughter, a mother, and a wife during an almost year of travel. In 2001, Reiko, a New Yorker who had grown up in Hawaii, spent eight months in Japan interviewing the survivors of atomic bombings. She was away from her husband and children during the 911 attacks. That year away, she has written, on her web site, "fueled a new way of thinking about memory and truth and narrative," and Hiroshima is the book that has emerged from all that thinking. I've had the pleasure of reading this book throughout its incantation and making, and I am overjoyed for her that the Feminist Press will release it into the world.

Congratulations, dear Reiko.

As I walked the Penn campus on Monday I was struck by images of endings. This is a close-up of a campus information kiosk—all the advertisements, slogans, promises, queries snatched out from the rust-grip of staples. Come January, it will all be new again.

Here, in between corporate projects and Christmas shopping, between the tree I haven't gotten yet and the countless gifts I have, I am at work on a final round of edits for my adult novel. Come Monday, the book will be ready for prime time, which is to say, for its submission to editors. There's no telling what will happen after that. All I can say for certain is this: Rahna Reiko Rizzuto read it closely, and so did my agent, Amy Rennert. This book is already far better for the time they took with it—for the questions they asked, for the themes they parsed, for the way they told the story back to me.

When a really fine reader takes a really close look at the work you have been doing—when she takes the time to say, Have you considered this? Could you clarify that?—your only response can and must be to pay attention. To get out of whatever mind space you've been in and to see the book as your reader has seen it.

That's what I've been doing these past many days—reviewing my novel for adults through the lens of my dear friend, who took the time to read it so closely. Her deep enthusiasm for this book has been a powerful tonic following a long, cloistered, knotty, lonesome spell of working within a framework that I could barely explain, or defend. (Indeed, I hardly tried.) Her eye for the small stray detail or the rattling inconsistency, the possible time shift or the unintended red herring has been spot on. Lately, working through my friend's edits in the very early hours, I've had the strange sensation of someone working near. I have been steeped in unloneliness.

I was cleaning the glass in my office, for friends were coming. I turned, and there on the yellow-orange wall behind my desk was the shadow blur of the glasses I need to keep my life in focus.

Today I print my novel. Tomorrow I read it. Later in the week I send it to Reiko.

Sometimes things just hit you—obvious aspects of yourself, known territories, that suddenly swoon large in your own self-opinion. Last night, watching the crowd gather at the bookstore, watching that community of authors engender and inspire that community of listeners, I was smacked about inside my head with this commonplace observation: I really am an outsider. I really do live on margins. The center of things eludes me.

Genetics? Circumstance? I do not know. I know only that my life as a writer is fueled almost entirely by correspondence (the essential literary back and forth with Jay Kirk, Buzz Bissinger, Reiko Rizzuto, Ivy Goodman, Kate Moses, Anna Lefler, Alyson Hagy) and the very rare phone call, not by gathering. That I write my books alone, extraordinarily so. That I miss the trends because I haven't been out among those trading news about them. That the few times that I have been out in person doing book-related things over these past many years is primarily because of one person, Elizabeth Mosier, who made it possible for me to join Patricia Hampl (one of my favorite memoirists) for dinner one evening, who drove me to Swarthmore to see Elizabeth Strout (another heroine), and who was the reason I ventured out last night to see writers who were very much worth the effort.

I have squeezed this writing life into the dark. I have made certain that it didn't interfere with the family dinner hour or the client expectation. I have gone off writing these books in my head without stopping to consider: Will they sell? Are they of the now? Will they find their readers? I have bludgeoned out this path for books, but it's a small path—whacked away and narrow.

Is that the way? Is this the way? Last night I had my doubts.

Joseph Dorazio, a poet and friend, alerted me to a recent Wall Street Journal article titled "A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight" (Robert Lee Holz, Science Journal, June 19, 2009). There's an emerging science of epiphany, apparently. There's proof that daydreaming matters.

"Sudden insights," Holz tells us, "are the culmination of an intense and complex series of brain states that require more neural resources than methodical reasoning. People who solve problems through insight generate different patterns of brain waves than those who solve problems analytically."

Eureka moments, Holz reports, are accompanied by "a distinctive flash of gamma waves emanating from the brain's right hemisphere, which is involved in handling associations and assembling elements of a problem." Moreover, in EEG-assisted research scientists have seen that "that tell-tale burst of gamma waves was almost always preceded by a change in alpha brain-wave intensity in the visual cortex, which controls what we see. They took it as evidence that the brain was dampening the neurons there similar to the way we consciously close our eyes to concentrate."

Well, now, I like this, and Joseph knew that I would. I like it because in my memoir, Seeing Past Z, I made a long argument for the value of daydreaming—for giving kids room to imagine. I like it because I spent much of yesterday blanketed into a couch, trying to see the next scene in the novel I am writing. My thoughts were uncontainable. I could not keep them tethered. They wound in and out of the sound of rain, through conversations I'd been having, through images of my past, through the old newspaper stories I've lately been reading. Anyone trying to measure my thought's progress would have given up and left me for useless (I was about to do the same, just ask Reiko, who rescued me with a mid-daydreaming email) when, all of a sudden, I had a breakthrough on the novel I am writing. I felt the bright burst of gamma waves.

The novel inched forward.

This coming week, on Tuesday, one of my very favorite authors, Colum McCann, is releasing his fifth novel, Let the Great World Spin. Few authors trust their imagination, their process, as thoroughly as the entirely lovable, provocatively talented McCann, and I urge you to visit his website so that you might learn about this book that soon the literarily privileged will be reading. There's a video of McCann talking process on his site (and on Amazon.com). He's the real thing—aching and wanting like the rest of us, but somehow always pushing through. He's a writer worth listening to.

For those of you who have never gone to a Rahna Reiko Rizzuto reading or enrolled in one of her classes, she's a knock-out green-eyed Italian/Irish-Japanese astrophysics-trained novelist/memoirist who was born in Honolulu and has made the world her home (and left the world with, among other things, Why She Left Us, the novel that won an American Book Award). She's also one of my dearest friends, and every now and then a package will arrive with Reiko's writing scrawled across the front. Saturday that happened. Inside was a book by Christian Peet, a story told through postcards titled Big American Trip. Yes. A story told through postcards. Angry, odd, fantastic comminiques that all add up to a singular voice that may be male, may be female, may be fiction, may be not.

Addressed to the Sweet Grass County Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Center in Big Timber, MT, for example, these words: "I do not wish that the world would go by. I do not wish to watch the world leave."

Reading through Trip yesterday afternoon, I thought of all the other deliberately odd books that have won my heart—the out-of-the-boxers that made me want to write a book like Flow, a river's autobiography, and that inspire the work I'm doing now. Carole Maso's Ava, for example—the final words of a dying woman, the unpieced fragments of a life. Michael Ondaatje's pseudo-biography of Buddy Bolden, Coming through Slaughter. John Berger's novel in unchronological letters, From A to X. Markus Zusak's Death-narrated The Book Thief. Richard Flanagan's Death of a River Guide. Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds. Alexansdar Hemon's The Lazarus Project. Forest Gander's As a Friend.

These books don't hew to the sound bite. These books dare. I've got an entire shelf of them here. I like sitting among them, breaking rules.

While waiting yesterday for a client call, I took The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol from its corner on my glass desk and read the final story, "The Overcoat." If it feels like "Bartleby the Scrivener" at first (with its particulate descriptions of the seemingly mundane), "The Overcoat" soon evolves into a smash-up of the horrifying and fantastic, as poor Akaky Akakievich, "a short, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, even with a somewhat nearsighted look, slightly bald in front, with wrinkles on both cheeks and a complexion that is known as hemorrhoidal" clerk who never wants for a thing, suddenly (and with good reason) wants for a new coat, which, after six months of near-joyous privation, he can afford to buy. Which, but of course, Akaky will soon lose.

"The Overcoat," written in the early 19th century, feels entirely post-modern, unconcerned with the traditional rules of storytelling, made eager and purposefully wild by its own tangents. It was the perfect thing to read during a wait-ful, clerky afternoon (though I'm going to hope my complexion never rose to the level of hemorrhoidal; I avoid mirrors; I wouldn't know), and as I read, I thought about how this story came to be in my hands in the first place. How the book itself was a gift from Ivy Goodman, a writer of surprising talents, whom I'd never have met had I not been asked to review her collection of short stories, A Chapter from Her Upbringing, eight years ago. She wrote a letter of thanks; we became enduring friends.

It has happened like that for me, many times. Being sent a book in the mail by, for example, Elizabeth Taylor at the Chicago Tribune, or John Prendergast at The Pennsylvania Gazette, or Kate Moses, formerly of Salon.com, and discovering, all of a sudden, an author who speaks to me so clearly from the page and emerges, one way or the other, as a lasting companion in this book life. Sy Montgomery and her pink dolphins (and tigers and bears and birds). Robb Forman Dew and her gorgeous, period novels. Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, whose essays I read long in advance of meeting her, and who is here, every day, in my life.

Books connect us, and not always in foreseeable fashion. So that now, whenever I think of Gogol, I will think of Ivy, and when I think of Ivy, I will think of her own power as a writer and a friend. And I will be grateful for the knots and strings that are yet becoming my life.

The birch in the back yard was a gift, ten years ago, from my parents. The brick walkway that leads to the front door was a gift, the last one from my mother. And this week, in between the rest of everything else, I was retracing the provenance of the hard metals and spark that I've carried forward, from girlhood until now.

I have been thinking, in other words, about the way things signify. About how often the objects in our lives are less about the things themselves—their utility, their value—and more about who we were at the time that they entered our lives, and who shapes our lives, and how memory waits for us in a quiet afternoon. Memory waits, and it lingers.

I'd bought myself a proper jewelry box, my first. I was putting my history in place. The ring I'd proudly acquired with the $35 dollars I'd earned one summer as a teen in South Carolina. The earrings my son brought home for Mother's Day. The ring I bought to remember my uncle by. The pearl that remembers Chicago. The tarnished silver from a friend who forgave me my decision. The ring I purchased one day, post-surgery, to prove to myself that I am a survivor, and the other ring, the one born of a poem. Reiko's Hawaii, in a pair of dangled fish. My brother's aquamarine. My own Seville, in tangled silver. My Barcelona, my San Miguel, my Nashville, my husband's exquisite taste in sapphire.

I have too much jewelry, I kept thinking, as I fit each piece into its velvet wedge. Too much, and I was almost in tears. But then the tears were for something else altogether—for lost time, for lost friends, for the liquid wash of was.