One day the French writer Colombe Schneck, a total stranger, came to my house. She was a friend of a friend who lived in Paris, and it had somehow been arranged that she would drop by. The afternoon was gray and drizzly, and I felt slightly awkward about having this visitor I had never met coming to my house. But then she walked in, brisk, at ease. I liked her immediately. We launched right into big subjects; there was no chatter or small talk. In her frank, spare style, with its transporting particulars, she told me an anecdote about a reluctant visit she had made to a writer acquaintance’s death bed in a Paris hospital that might have been the best story anyone has ever told me. It somehow straightened and reordered something inside me. Even though I am a writing professor, I had forgotten the power of stories to do this.
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