As I write this, I am sitting on a train at 10:30 p.m. wishing I were in my bed. I have had about 10 hours of sleep altogether over the last three days and after my first glass of wine in a week or more this evening while dining with friends, I am ready to drift off. I am writing to stay awake (and thus will probably drone you into sleep).

I spent the morning trying to keep AJ from tearing the house apart. His ear is feeling better and he�s got cabin fever, the result of two whole days in the house. After finally corralling him for long enough to get him dressed, we made it to the library, grocery store and a blissfully underpopulated playgroup meeting before heading home for lunch and a nap for one of us. While he slept under his dad�s watch, I slipped out to the train station.

After yesterday�s paper run-through, I was feeling a little discouraged about revamping my paper. Frankly, I�m kind of tired of looking at it. But I got a second wind today and managed to make some headway as the suburban landscape rolled past my window. I had a pleasant stroll through the city and reglamorized myself with a haircut before heading out on my very serious clothes shopping mission, where I spent an alarming amount of money on a suit. I�m trying not to call it an interview suit, because that would require that I think about the fact that I may actually find myself in a job interview two weeks from now. As tired as I am of thinking about my paper, it is at least completely under my control. The job situation is not.

I have always assumed I would be a working mother. When I left my job to stay home with AJ, there was never any question in my mind that I would be returning to my work, nor any question that that was what I wanted to do. Part of me is excited at rejoining an adult world. But at the same time, I am having a hard time envisioning myself there. I looked in the mirror at myself in the suit and I looked like a stranger. This suit is ill suited to my current world.

I am not nervous about interviews per se. I usually enjoy them and I tend to be rather good at them in general. But of course, I have never done an academic interview. My usual methods of preparation are failing me. Part of the graduate student�s acolyte role is self-deprecation. How then to make the move to confidence? I do not find the individual tasks of my work particularly difficult � teaching, research, writing � although they are certainly challenging in a positive sense. I get positive feedback. But somewhere along the line I have lost my faith in my own convictions. Is this mere jitters? Or a crisis of faith?

Fortunately, I was able to quell my concerns this evening, first with a horrifying charge on my credit card and second, and more resoundingly, with an evening with friends at my book group.

Tonight�s meeting was at M�s house, a full floor apartment in one of those small coops in the jewel-encrusted portion of Chicago�s Gold Coast east of the Magnificent Mile where uniformed operators escort you on elevators that stop in the apartment foyer. We had a guest speaker tonight, a first for us. A friend of several of our bookgroup members, who hosts a radio interview program had recently interviewed Edwin P. Jones, the author of our current book The Known World. As we dined on elegant hors d�oeuvres we listened to our guest tell us the fascinating story of Jones� life, of the arduous process of getting him to reveal himself, of his dogged denial of research in the ostensibly historical novel. I have not finished the book. Thus far, it seems remarkable not for its language but for its original structure and compelling material. The book is dense in characters and plot, and thus almost impossible to discuss thoroughly in a single session. There was much to say of interest.

The title �The Known World� refers to a map, the description of one person�s sense of what the world is. The slaves in the novel know only what they can see. Their known world ends at the borders of the plantation on which they labor. They are limited by their perceptions, saved only by a woman who is a visionary or insane or both who views the world as if from above, sliding away toward the margins. The unusual voice, with the added information of the author�s biographical detail, lends the story the weight of all of the history of slavery as perceived by one man and described in his fictional account. It feels highly personal.

Right now my own Known World is limited to the borders of my small town, expanded by a thread-like link of the winding train line to the city, a line that disappears if I don�t redraw it regularly. But soon, I think, I need to attempt to draw a new map. I�m hoping I have the vision to pull it off.

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