Eleonora started working when the publishing industry was mid-crisis, but she never allowed herself to be infected by its pervasive cynicism. At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, salaries were dropping rather than rising, counter to the expectations instilled by her middle-class upbringing. Eleonora didn’t let the recession downsize the joy she felt in becoming one of the people able to choose which writers—whose manuscripts were piled up around the office and her apartment, gathering dust and making her sneeze—got to be called authors.

I’m using the past tense here, even though as I write, she’s still an editor. The books she’s worked on for a new publishing house continue to arrive at my door (packaged and stamped by a publicity department that has no idea that she and I were, until recently, whatever it was we were for each other for almost three years), but Eleonora and I are no longer on speaking terms.

She compromises less on her new books than when she worked with me. She continues to hone that ideal of hers, the vision she first had one morning in 2003 when an important writer, head shaved, wearing a fishing jacket, speaking to Eleonora’s Italian class, revealed not only that he was friends with their teacher (their teacher, who wore pantsuits to school and left her hair gray), but that every time he had “around fifty pages ready to go”—what a marvelous image, a real, if unpublished, book—he’d print them out and bring them to their teacher, his friend, so she could “pick them apart.” “With what color pen—red or blue?” one of Eleonora’s classmates asked. It was winter, the overhead fluorescent lights were on and out the window, the cold cotton of fog was enveloping the trees one by one. And their teacher pulled a college textbook off a shelf, an anthology of contemporary Italian literature that included a piece by this author.