It would be easy to portray Irene as my savior. But a woman who saves someone is a woman who winds up punished on the following page; the role of savior that men apply to women in some narrative form is our wooden horse, concealing our desire to penetrate and destroy.

But if she doesn’t save or damn someone, what does a woman do on a page written by a man? This is what I’m trying to find out. If she doesn’t save or damn someone, maybe this female character wanders, appears, and disappears. Until, perhaps, I’m truly attached to them and stop feeling that they’re only floating shadows …

After all, in the real world, a woman appears and disappears and wanders with the same moral freedom as a man. No—better—if she contains this freedom within herself, if she doesn’t buckle to the model that insists she either save or damn someone, then nothing prevents her from moving about according to her own principles. Then we start to tell the story of her life and discover we’re asking her what she does, who she belongs to, while the son gets to enter and exit the father-narrator’s house as he sees fit. But what does a woman become if we treat her like a man, or like someone else, neither man nor woman?

The woman caught in our prose net is fixed to the paper with a pin. What’s she free to do, now that I’ve pinned her in my display case, along with the others?

Her flight is so light, I’m not sure how to trap it under glass, to preserve that grace, or my impression of that grace.

I can’t recall reading a novel by a woman, I mean a real author, that uses a man as a deus ex machina. Real male authors, on the other hand, are always using women. I know I’ve helped a lot of people, like my sister did for me: I’ve called a young, introverted writer to tell him he was good, that sooner or later, he’d get published; I’ve sent out email recommendations for people when I was the only one who could get them that dream job. But I’d never see a character like me treated as a savior in a woman’s novel. There’s everything residing in the person giving you a hand: affection, manipulation, calculation, compulsion … If a woman knows how to listen and is generous with her own money, why then must she wind up being either a savior or, ironically, a temptress?

I have to do for my sister what I’ve done for myself: allow her the privilege of being a person. Appearing, disappearing, minding her own business, showing sudden affection, boarding a plane without telling me, sneaking all my cereal at night, making me look like an idiot in front of her girlfriend because I’m being pedantic.