Even if you believe that reading about other people’s tragedies is good for, I don’t know, some vague thing we call “empathy,” it’s not clear that such empathy flows naturally out of a play or novel or film.

Isma, or Ismene in the Sophocles, is usually more of a foil than a frame, but by opening with the grounded older sister, Shamsie casts the moral terms of her Antigone first through the lens of sibling love and sacrifice.

If you’ve surprised yourself––if you’ve tapped into “crazy stuff that can’t be planned” as you channel your narrator––then you leave an imprint of that surprise on the page for your reader.

That day, a portal seemed to open that would take me into a new reality. Of course, I was recently accustomed to looking for portals into new realities.

It is in finding delight after despair that Gay’s essays find their force.

I see now that this is not just an allegory. It is also a story, plain and straight, of how disease can ravage our best laid plans.