Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

Accustomed as I am to having to defend my interest in Fear of Flying, I'll state at the outset why I find it important. Sexual liberation was an essential partof the early women's movement, and Fear of Flying has been taken seriously, if not as "literature," as an expression of sexual liberation—most recently, by Susan Suleiman in...