In the fourth year, the business school required students to do a six-month placement abroad. While most of my classmates found internships at prestigious companies, I accepted a more modest job as assistant to Evelyn Warren, a New York feminist intellectual. Though she was eighty at the time, Warren was still giving lectures at universities all over the United States. She was extraordinarily brilliant but also autocratic and capricious, and she was constantly losing her temper. She took a liking to me, God knows why. Maybe because I didn’t react to her volatile moods, didn’t let her get to me. Though she did not think of herself as a substitute grandmother to me, she asked me to continue working for her after I completed my studies, and she helped me get a green card. This is how I came to work with her, living in a wing of her Upper East Side apartment.

During my free time—and I had a lot—I did the one thing that brought me calm: I wrote stories. Since I could not control my own life, I invented radiant worlds free of the fears that plagued me. There is such a thing as a magic wand—in my case, it took the form of a ballpoint pen. For a dollar fifty, I had access to a device that could transform reality, set it right, even refute it.

In 2000, I published my first novel, which, through word of mouth, made it onto the bestseller lists. I have written a dozen more since, and writing and promoting my novels has become my full-time job. Though my success was real enough, my family did not consider writing fiction a serious profession. “To think, we used to dream you’d grow up to be an engineer!” my father said once with his customary tact. Gradually, my visits to France became more infrequent, and these days they were confined to little more than a week spent there doing promotions and signings. I barely saw my older sister and brother. Marie had graduated from the École des Mines and now had an important job at the National Directorate of External Trade Statistics. I had no idea what she did, but it didn’t sound like much fun. As for Jérôme, he was the family hero—a pediatric surgeon who had been working in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake, coordinating operations with Doctors Without Borders.

2.

And then there was Maxime.