The strangest gift my first writing teacher gave me was the door she opened — and the second strangest was the willingness to let me close it.

I was twenty. The book was called What Day Is This?. She said: I can get this published. I had no reason to disbelieve her. She had been a working writer; she had the connections; the manuscript, in her reading, was alive enough to find an audience. And she was right. It probably would have.

I said no anyway. Two reasons. First, the book wasn’t ready, and I knew it — there was a resonance I could hear in my head that I couldn’t yet get onto the page. Second, I had been watching what the media did to writers who got hit early, and I didn’t want to spend my twenties as a voice-of-a-generation case study.

I rewrote the book three or four times across the decades that followed. The resonance still isn’t quite there. But the choice not to publish at twenty has saved me from a lot of decisions I would have made badly with money I hadn’t yet earned.