I was hiking in the woods up here when I heard on the drive home that a person I knew a long time ago was about to release a book, a sequel to an earlier book. I was flung back to my experience as a writer for the magazine that he edited. His reputation was bad, one of those '80s-era men who saw any woman as prey no matter how inappropriate the situation. I received a dream assignment from him, which would have been a cover story. The subject was basically the end of the sexual revolution, an era I had lived through but sadly did not find anything revolutionary. There was just the expectation that you would sleep with someone no matter how brief the encounter; no one took you on dates, and when someone said anything vaguely romantic, it was a tool to achieve a goal of meaningless sex.

I’ve had a lot of roommates. The first one in college was so different than me it was almost comical. Waking up several hours before her first class, Lisa would wash and blow dry her hair, apply makeup, and dress in something she had chosen the night before. I either went to bed with wet hair, which was still damp in the morning, wore no makeup unless I was on a dating warpath, and dressed in whatever emerged from my closet. Lisa had moved in with two dozen frozen steak dinners but after they ran out, I discovered she couldn’t cook, I mean she really couldn’t cook. Once I asked her to boil water for pasta and she put a box of noodles into cold water and turned on the heat. I returned from a late class to find a ball of starch floating in a pot of water. Lisa wanted to marry a Jewish dentist. I wanted to live in sin with a gorgeous man.

I was newly divorced, sober, unemployed, and grieving. New York City should have felt hard, cold, and dangerous, but somehow it took me in. Like my ancestors fleeing the famine in Ireland and the millions escaping the pogroms, the genocide, the impossibility of their lives, I found refuge and community. Yes, it was hard at first, one bad job after another, one terrible apartment, isolation and envy of others’ wealth and success, but gradually the life there became my life. Through my horribly paid publishing job, all those church basements where I listened to the stories of addicts like me, and the relationships I had no business pursuing, I found a way to live. One morning, walking across Central Park as the mist faded from Sheep Meadow, I encountered a gigantic obelisk, Cleopatra’s Needle, deserted except for an unhoused man who gestured to me to come closer.