“It doesn’t help that I have no address to guide us, only a pin of a nearby park and a picture of me and Baba standing outside the front door of her place when I was an awkward teenager, squinting into the sun.”

The writer on “likeable” women, loyal dogs, and the luck of “breaking out.”

I thought: I would never write a fictional scene like this, because it was too obvious—the art butting up against reality, as though my story held some kind of portentous power.