Hello and welcome to navel-gazing, episode 9 of season 1.

Notebook 58, page 10, September 16th, 2021.

You don't measure your life the way you measure your writing.

Nan.

Nan is our youngest, who I encountered in the kitchen, fresh from the garret, where I had just

pawed through the box of notebooks for the first time, the exercise you experienced in episode

eight. I was lolling around with a head full of frothy ideas, trying to figure out just what to

make of that experience, lily padding through periods of my life on the orange carpet.

There had been something transporting, curiosity poking, inviting about the exercise.

There was something in this material. I should do something with whatever was there.

But what should I do?

It was in this frame that man discovered me. I unfolded the contents of my

thought and received this life advice. In retrospect, I'm surprised that any conversation took place

at all, let alone one sufficient to produce a quotation to be copied down into the notebook.

Nan, who at the time was 18, and a senior in high school, liked to be in those parts of the house,

which had, as their defining characteristic, their sole characteristic, really, was that they

were spaces in which Anne and I were not.

A sense of being alone that started this podcast in episode one to Nan would have been heaven.

I don't remember the scene in the kitchen precisely from September 2021, but my supposition is that when I

arrived, Nan had been preoccupied, uncaffeinated, focused on the promise of the coffee maker.

The kitchen is narrow, like a subway car.

But unlike a subway, the kitchen only has one exit.

...