India, June 7 -- 1After your first book of personal essays (One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter) was published in 2017, you married your long-term boyfriend, moved to New York, learnt of your husband's affair, got divorced, lost your job, and your mother was diagnosed with cancer. You signed the book deal seven years ago, before the events it is about unfolded. What was the book originally going to be about? It was supposed to be a collection of essays about the utility and futility of conflict. You're already laughing because you can imagine me banging my head against a wall like, "Why can't I write this book about fighting?" And meanwhile, my marriage is on fire. You marry someone, and then the pandemic happens, and you're like, "Hey, who the hell is this?" And so, I was trying to write this conflict book, and I just couldn't do it because everything was hard, and I was struggling to see the value of conflict. I had always felt like protest worked. And then you watch Trump steamroll, the first time, through the American government. I was just disillusioned. I would send passages to my book editor and she'd say, "This is bad. No." It wasn't really until my ex and I separated and I was in my own apartment that I started being told, "Yes, this is good." The day he and I broke up, I was like, "Oh. Oh, I see." It really was like a cloud lifted. I didn't know what I needed to say, but it was very clear that this was going to be a book about the collapse of what I thought was a fundamental truth. 2While I was reading this book, I thought I was getting a sense of all the reasons for your divorce: the pandemic, the stress. I was startled when I got to the part where you discovered he had been cheating on you for five years. Why did you decide to withhold this until so much later in the book? I felt like if I told the audience, at the very beginning of the book, that my white ex-husband cheated on me with a white woman, no one was going to be able to read anything after that! It's not important to me, but it was important to the narrative. I was hiding from myself within the relationship. Then I felt like I was being hidden through this strange relationship with this woman. Even her confronting me about it and telling me the information felt like a way to obfuscate my existence in it. I really resent non-fiction books that don't tell you what happened... I promised you a story. I'm also not embarrassed by any of this. I didn't do it. I'm a passenger on a lot of this. 3How did therapy help with the writing process? Every writer should be in therapy. I do not trust an essayist who does not go to therapy. I went so much. Divorce -- any breakup -- f**ks with your sense of reality. It was so necessary. Everybody should be in therapy....