Eyes downcast, fidgeting, silence. Or maybe it’s not as bad in English. I don’t know. More silence. But don’t think about it too much.

It was finally mine. For a few days I rejoiced and just stared at it on my shelf, as if it were some magical object that was best observed but barely handled. And it sat there for years. Having possession of it finally made it less desirable; knowing at any moment I could go there made it less illicit.

That was my first phase. My second phase was the one in which I wanted to read it but just couldn’t. It was no doubt the superstition about suicide. In my early twenties, I grew more and more depressive—suicide became less dazzling, more haunting—and the book felt like a loaded gun in an unlocked cabinet, as it sat there, gathering dust, unfiled, flat, virginal, in opposition to the other lovingly aged books on my bookshelf. I never took it with me to college, never took it anywhere. Periodically I would think about it and think about approaching it, but again, like something that had the power to kill or at least curse me, I stayed away. I was waiting for an era where my magical thinking would look as absurd as my father’s did to me in my sunnier youth.

It took beginning my own novel to go there. The long form, it has always seemed to me, has the power to really shelter you, keep you covered and protected for several years, and so in that era, for the first time in my life, I experienced no fear. I didn’t have confidence either, but at least I didn’t have fear. I finally picked up the book, once in my parent’s home again, and read it fast, all the way through in one sitting, as if the words were on fire, as if it would burn me if I lingered too long, the magical thinking not altogether dust just yet.

But that was only part of it. The other part was simply the content. It was the most disturbing thing I had read (and I had read many disturbing things by then; I was deeply attracted to them, in fact). But this made me feel sick for days. I thought about announcing anemically at dinner that after fifteen years of wondering, I finally knew. I had read it. But I couldn’t bring it up. I never told anyone I had read it.

I started to feel spiritless, to put it euphemistically, once the novel was done. Several brushes with bad luck had collided to create a most calcified dolor, so potent that nothing scared me, not depression, not death, nothing. In searching for my novel’s epigraph, my mind turned to, appropriately, The Blind Owl. I picked one: “I thought to myself: if it’s true that every person has a star in the sky, mine must be distant, dim, and absurd. Perhaps I never had a star.” It was in many ways an epigraph that did not suit my novel, but it certainly suited me at the moment. The most dismal side of me could think of no other author, no other work, to jinx myself with.

And then the part of me that believed I would get over this wanted everyone to know about this breathtaking novel that had, over many personal peaks and valleys, grown to mean the world to me.

And here I am again, still wishing that on everyone who has yet to touch these pages. In reading it again and again over the years, I have become more and more immune to its horror and more and more ensorcelled by its masterfulness.