Year: 1987
Situation/coordinates: While helping to foment the Communist revolution in Central America, the author, age eighteen, kept a record in several spiral-bound notebooks, from which she later lifted lines for inclusion in Revolution.
Venue: She wrote her entries while sitting on the ground outside her room at the hostel or on benches in the town plaza.
Witnesses: Her boyfriend sat a few feet away, often writing his own (sometimes contradictory) record.

Year: 1994 (The author’s first efforts at being a “writer.”)
Situation/coordinates: A (different) boyfriend and the author drove across the United States in search of a new place to live (reasons unclear, but have to do with the reception of a badly produced play written by the boyfriend).
Venue: She wrote in the mornings in motel rooms at the tiny desks or in the beds. During this time she wrote a story of thin autobiography that eventually became the chapter in the memoir titled “Peanut Butter.”
Witnesses: The boyfriend was usually nearby, asleep or doing something with the car.

Year: 1995
Situation/coordinates: The place the couple settled on turned out to be Birmingham, Alabama. The author wrote a story called “Bringing Bato,” not autobiography, but so full of autobiography as to be almost embarrassing. Passages now appear in the memoir.
Venue: The boyfriend and the author had desks lined up beside each other, and they’d both sit in the mornings and write before going to work. (This conjures up an image of calm domestic bliss that is so absurd and far from what was in fact happening, it almost looks like a lie, but it is the truth.)
Witnesses: It was during this time that the author began to “share” her work.

Year: 1999
Situation/coordinates: Inexplicably the author managed to get all the way through graduate school without writing a single new sentence that could be included in the memoir. But the year after she finished school, reinstalled in Chicago (again) (a study of the author’s life could be read as a series of mad attempts at escape from Chicago), the author began writing about the 1987 trip once more, drafts of scenes that would eventually wind up in the memoir.
Venue: She lived in Albany Park in a loud, mean apartment. She wrote in bed or on the floor.
Witnesses: None.

Years: 2000-2003 The horror years.
Situation/coordinates: In an effort to write a book and/or flee Chicago, the author went back and forth between Chicago and various spots in Central America and Cuba. She tried essays. She wrote articles and stories. She wrote many, many drafts of an autobiographical novel, sections of which she would later pillage for Revolution.
Venue: She wrote in notebooks in hot hostel rooms and on buses in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, and other countries. During one bizarre set of months she wrote in the middle of a rainforest on a table that a farmer she thought she might love had fashioned for her. While in Chicago she wrote in the mornings before work (horror work) at a desk, or in the middle of the night in bed (horror insomnia) in any one of several apartments. Sometimes she had her stuff in storage.
Witnesses: A variety of inconsiderate boyfriends.

Years: 2004-2005 Relative stability sets in.
Situation/coordinates: The author moved with a (different) boyfriend to Kansas.
Venue: She had TWO offices in Kansas, one for creative work, one for school and Internet. She wrote every day in her creative office, at a table belonging to someone who was now dead. She finished what by this time had become an utterly unreadable spy thriller set in Central America in the 80s. When her agent didn’t like it, the author gave up and quit being a writer.
Witnesses: Beleaguered boyfriend.

Year: 2006
Situation/coordinates: The author became a writer again and wrote her novel Vacation (in which somehow at the end of the book most of the characters wind up in Nicaragua or dead trying to get there).
Venue: She wrote the novel at a table on the 8^th floor of Bobst Library in New York, and also in the back room of a hundred-year-old house in Kansas.
Witnesses: New boyfriend.

Years: 2007-2008
Situation/coordinates: [deleted]
Venue: …writing in airports, writing in a rented room in Dumbo, writing on a piece of board in Pennsylvania…
Witnesses: Boyfriend, different boyfriend, husband.

Year: 2009
Situation/coordinates: The author had begun the memoir in 2008, in that fine line between marriage and divorce. In 2009 she moved to New Haven. She rented her uncle’s three-story condo—breathtaking, view over the river, high ceilings, fireplace that flipped on by a switch.
Venue: She had something like five offices, depending on how you were counting. 1. the attic, where the table looked out over the river, 2. the second-floor office, where the table looked out over the river, 3. the dining room, where the table looked out over the river, 4. the bed, 5. the other bed. There she finished Revolution.
Witnesses: Pleasant visiting boyfriend, appearing and disappearing.

Year: 2011
Situation/coordinates: The author currently lives in New York in a small two-room apartment.
Venue: Her office is one-third of the dining room table in a room which functions as everything except the bedroom and the boyfriend’s office—he does his writing at a desk a few inches from the bed.
Witnesses: The couple can close the door between them if they need to.

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Yes, it seems that God has gone and drown the earth again, forgot his promise not to (He’s always been a disappointment that way), but more than the story of Noah, the book evokes Adam and Eve, man and woman in love and in conflict, locked together alone for forty years. At heart the book is about the loneliness of love, how even in the deepest love you can’t really know your mate. Yet it may be that very not-knowing that binds us to the beloved, keeps us longing to be closer, always on the verge of understanding, always on the verge of confusion.

And it’s no surprise that Gordon Lish loved the book. It contains all the Lishian prescriptions with regard to sound and swerve, like take the sentence, “And no wonder, for what was then called land, that shambles, was a sorry surface unfit for the conduct of anything but a harrowing traffic.” [p. 15] Notice the repetition of consonants and vowels:

wonder/what/was/harrow
and/land/that/sham/ har/traff
was/sorry/sur/face
un/duct
fit/duct/fic

And notice the swerves, the way “that shambles” upsets the preceding word “land,” for example.

The weirdest part of it all for me is that I have actually met Mrs. Unguentine. I came across her in one of my more desperate, unfortunate equatorial wanderings. I thought I’d lost humanity altogether and then there she was. The barge had finally lodged into the sludge-swamp and stuck, stranding her there, half on land and half in sea. She came out to greet me. For a second, when I first saw her, I thought “Mrs. Howell!” and then when she called out to me, I thought “Nazi!” but then I knew who she was. So this was the sodden end of her sea journey. She had made the deck into a living room—stuffed chairs, doilies, all of it moldy and ruined in the tropical damp. Trunks full of faded gowns. But where was Unguentine? I wondered. I heard a clanging, from above or below. “My husband,” she said, and shrugged. Of course he was there, because that man, he could beat her, he could destroy what they both loved, he could keep silent for years, he could disappear from sight, jump into the sea, but one thing he could not do is desert her.

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• Rimas Uzgiris: The Last Book of Poetry I Loved, The Living Fire
• Molly O’Brien: The Last Book I Loved, White Teeth