I took a writing class with a novelist. On the first day she asked us to name one thing we were focusing on in our writing. One girl said she cared most about voice, that voice was all that mattered to her. Another spoke of humor, how she wanted her writing to be funny, and that she hoped the piece she would share that week was funny. I said something about wanting to hold an entire novel in my head, not the words but the feeling. And the girl to my left said she was working on a historical novel about a model, a very famous model, who married into royalty. And she wasn’t sure, she confided in us, if it was ok to do that, for her novel would bend away from history, or at least be a reimagining of it.

Now here’s the beautiful moment of that week. The novelist stopped her and said she should absolutely write it, and wait one moment. She pulled out her phone, and said here it is. The teacher had recently had a novel come out. And because she was a well-known novelist she received a review in the New York Times from an author commensurate to her ability, skill, fame. But the author, the novelist, who reviewed her novel, was in her 90s. And the review was critical and negative. For the novelist, our teacher, had written a novel about a man who had because of the times he had lived in (the first half of the twentieth century, America and Europe) kept his homosexuality a secret. So she had written a historical novel, exploring this man’s homosexuality, and the way it presented itself in WW2 France, working for an organisation that provided visas to get various artists, writers, painters out of the country and away from the Nazis.

She read a little bit of the critical review and then read another, a defense posted by a man who had recently won the Pulitzer prize for fiction. He defended her, he defended the novelist, the writer’s right to reimagine the past, to imagine the past, and to write about it. Now it was a lovely thing she did, to use her own life as an answer to that girl’s question. But it was something else too, an insight into the insecurity of a woman, who though not exactly famous, nor at the top of her profession (though she was certainly near the top), might rely so much on the warmth of her friends, of another novelist.

For the first time I felt I was part of a community.

Now is the second time.