The Architecture of Patience

The bottom drawer of my desk holds four dead drafts of the same novel. I keep them the way families keep photographs of stern ancestors — not for use, exactly, but because losing them would misrepresent how we got here. The oldest draft turned twelve this month. Some evenings I take it out and read a page and feel the particular vertigo of meeting myself at twenty-three, a man convinced that intensity could substitute for structure.

Twelve years teaches you…