EMBRACE THE Conver

the Charleston Literary Festival has my life including deepening my interest in reading and igniting my curiosity about how books are written. Listening to our visiting authors discuss the process behind their work is such a privilege.

Iloved Lisa Taddeo’s conversation about writing entire books in coffee shops (Three Women), while Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War revealed that he doesn’t make an outline or even a draft, but rather just starts with the first sentence.

From the conversation with Tim Bouverie, a brilliant historian who couldn’t physically access the research archives needed for his book Appeasement (on Second World War Allied diplomacy) during COVID-19 closures, I learned that some of the best books could come from someone just acting on their personal interests. As a classical music lover since childhood, he decided to continue exploring that passion while his research was on hold. Every week he chose his current favorite classical piece, listened to dozens of different recordings of that same piece, and selected the one he liked best. Then he wrote a short essay about the composer and the context of the composition and included his favorite interpretation.

To spread a little joy during that dark time, Bouverie emailed his essays and suggested recordings to his friends, who enjoyed them so much they forwarded the email essays to their friends, and lo and behold, a treasure trove emerged. The popularity of his musical essays inspired his publisher to suggest he compose a book of his hundred favorite essays, which he did under the title Perfect Pitch: 100 pieces of classical music to bring joy, tears, solace, empathy, inspiration (& everything in between). Tim is not a musician or musicologist. Maybe that’s why I love this story—it came from his own personal interest, one he had cultivated since childhood. Occasionally I begin my day by reading one of his essays and playing his suggested recording. (Spotify has his playlist.)

All the Beauty in the World, a memoir from a former New Yorker staffer, Patrick Bringley, is so exquisite that I wish I could have written it myself. After his twenty-seven-year-old brother died of cancer, Bringley left his magazine job to become a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, colloquially called “The Met.” Bringley said he wanted “a job that required very little interaction with people,” and there, in the largest art museum in the Americas, he was able to have a different kind of conversation, standing stoically in the corner of those magnificent rooms for hours while grieving his brother and contemplating art and life.

Bringley’s story took me back to my own experiences at The Met—those I had twenty-five years ago during the dark days while my eldest son battled spinal cancer in New York City’s Sloan Kettering Memorial. I lived on a cot in his hospital room, and when I needed to step away, I would go to The Met, just blocks away on Fifth Avenue. That’s why I truly understand what Bringley meant when he said he needed to be left alone. While the art connected me to uncontrollable emotions because of what was going on in my life, I also felt safe and unnoticed in the museum. By some miracle, spending quiet time