In the winter of 2001, I had the foreknowledge that no remedy would come, and it was agonizing. I became unable to eat food, so instead I was drinking two two-liter bottles of Sprite per day, which is approximately the right number of calories to consume but not an ideal nutrition strategy.

I remember coming home from work and lying on the peeling linoleum floor of what had been our kitchen, and looking through the Sprite bottle at the green parabolic rectangle of the kitchen window. I watched the bubbles inside the bottle clinging to the bottom, trying to hold on, but inevitably floating up to the top. I thought about how I couldn’t think. I felt the pain pressing in on me, like it was an atmosphere. All I wanted was to be separated from the pain, to be free from it.

Eventually, a day came when I could not pick myself up off that linoleum floor, and I spent a very long Sunday thinking about all the ways that the situation might resolve itself. That evening, thank God, I called my parents, and, thank God, they answered.

My parents are busy people with demanding lives who lived fifteen hundred miles away from Chicago. And they were at my apartment within twelve hours of that phone call.

A plan formed quickly. I would leave my job, go home to Florida, get into daily counseling or possibly inpatient treatment. They packed up my apartment. My ex kindly agreed to take the cat. The only thing left was to quit my job.

I loved working at Booklist, and I loved my coworkers, but I also knew that my life was in danger. I tearfully told my supervisor that I had to quit, and after giving me a hug as I cried, he told me to talk to the magazine’s publisher, Bill Ott.

I thought of Bill as a character out of a noir mystery novel. His incisive wit is both thrilling and intimidating. When I went into his office, he was surrounded by proof pages of the magazine, and he didn’t look up until I closed the door. I told him that something was wrong with my head, that I hadn’t eaten solid food in a couple of weeks, and that I was quitting to move home to Florida with my parents.

He was silent for a long time after I finished. Bill is a master of pauses. And then at last he said, “Ah, why don’t you just go home for a few weeks and see how you feel.”

And I said, “But you’ll need someone to do my job.”

Again, he paused. “Don’t take this the wrong way, kid, but I think we’ll get by.”

At one point that afternoon I started throwing up—excessive Sprite consumption, maybe—and when I came back to my desk to finish packing up my belongings, there was a note from Bill. I still have it. It reads:

John, I stopped by to say goodbye. Hope all goes well and you’re back here in two weeks with an appetite that would put a longshoreman to shame. Now more than ever: Watch Harvey. –Bill