Finished but not done.

On what it feels like to actually finish a book.

I am thinking about how life is a series of Venn diagrams, how we circle back and over the places and people we have been, seeing them out the window as we double back on ourselves. Every time I am in Idaho, it is as if two versions of myself become one single version. Perhaps this is what people mean when they say something is in alignment—the deep empty vistas, the endless sagebrush, and evenings that hang on like an old love. There is a promise here that feels nearly realized.

In this circle, I am sitting at dinner with a dear old friend who I have been writing alongside for the better part of the past decade. We meet every time I come to Idaho, and over cold beers on hot patios we hash out “where we’re at” in the marathon that is writing a novel. We unload, we compare, we inspire, we plot, we advise, and then we get back to work. All of this happens in the same town where I moved twelve years ago to pursue a writing life in the MFA program where we met. All of this also in the same town where I fell in love with the boy from Montana and truly met myself for the first time. Where I then also returned to years later and met my husband on a street corner. Where I also come every year to spend the summer. All of this in one place. I did not know one place could hold so much.

So, here we are now, my stomach growing to the edges of my dress, pregnant with the daughter that I have wanted just as desperately as I have wanted this book. (That is a sentence that perhaps could only make sense to a writer.) Here we are, and both of us are finished with said novels. The impossible made possible. The definition of stone by stone—it adds up. Here we are with gorgeous, glittering, full-of-promise manuscripts that are being read by, and gold-seal approved by, other writers we admire. She has read mine and slides the manuscript across the table and tells me, in what may be the most earnest Midwest tone, “I am so, so proud of you.” To this I have a singular thought: if this is the best part, then I am okay with that.

We spend the dinner hashing out the ways in which, of course, the manuscript could be tighter, better, and sing louder. We do this just as we used to ten years ago in basement bars over cheap beer and Jameson. We riff ideas and quote lines and laugh and scheme and agree when one shines a so-clear light on the work. One of the most important relationships we can have in life as an artist is with someone you can sit across from, who sees you truly and takes you seriously enough to tell you the truth—and someone you can do this for in return. And here we are. Life circles around and picks itself up just as it was before. It may have taken us a decade, but here we are, exactly as we always wished to be.

As the night moves on, we walk to the Egyptian Theatre, where I once saw Cheryl Strayed read—so young I literally absorbed every word into my very skin. This theater is hallowed ground in this town for me, something magnetic when the lights go down. We saw Gillian Welch play, and from the third row I closed my eyes and listened to the soundtrack of my life from those early years in Idaho—thinking of my first apartment, with the windows open and the smell of rain, and the deep loneliness and the intensity with which I wrote and cut my teeth. I felt what I was so sure were the first butterfly movements of my daughter inside of me when she picked up the harmonica. I used to ride my bike through the dark, empty streets of town, leaving class and the bar inspired and drunk, blasting “Miss Ohio.”

The serendipitous event of her playing in town on the very evening we met to discuss my book is just one of those things where the universe winks at you to remind you there is goodness and magic—and that art is to be taken very seriously. That every now and then, for a moment at least, we can have everything we ever wanted. And that if this is the best part, I am okay with that too.