I first read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina when I was fifteen. I had recently gotten spectacularly busted sneaking out of the house and “borrowing” the family car to go cruising around our tiny town of Paris, Tennessee, population 11,000 and Home of the World’s Biggest Fish Fry. I was grounded for three months with no TV, no boom box, and, to top it all off, my dad called the owner of the local McDonald’s and got me a job working the drive-thru.

My only source of pleasure while grounded was reading. My older sister Helen had just finished taking Russian Lit at Brown and sent me her copy of Anna Karenina with a note: “Everyone makes mistakes. Anna Karenina had it way worse.”

An 864-page book set in Russia was a little daunting, but with nothing else to do I figured I’d give it a shot. To say I loved Anna Karenina was an understatement. I devoured it, adoring the massive cast of characters and all the family dramas. As a teenage girl, my favorite story line, of course, was the doomed love affair between Anna and Count Vronsky, and I cried when she threw herself in front of the train because I knew Vronsky’s love for her was true, even if she couldn’t see it. Upon finishing Anna Karenina, I crowned it my new favorite book.

I read Anna Karenina for the second time fifteen years later when I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, married to my first husband, a doctor. With my husband working all the time, me desperately missing my friends and NYC, where I’d spent my entire twenties, I was in dire need of escapism. During my second reading, I was once again mesmerized. This time, however, I was not only taken with Anna and Vronsky’s romance, but with the Kitty and Levin love story and Dolly and Stiva’s marriage, as well.

Five years later, I was divorced and living in Los Angeles, working as a TV writer. Single again, I spent the Christmas holiday in Manhattan with my very strict Korean mother, who was still not happy with me over divorcing my perfect-in-her-eyes-only doctor husband. My mom had also read Anna Karenina twice (once in Korean and once in English), and she and I went to see the Keira Knightley film adaptation at the Ziegfeld Theater. Afterward, we walked back to the St. Regis hotel, where we had a heart-to-heart about the movie and the book. My mother and I rarely see eye to eye on anything (nor do we ever have heart-to-hearts), but this was one of the rare occasions where we found a tiny patch of common ground.