That’s where I met her: a beloved girl with a gleam in her eye; there was a puppy’s meekness to her, a beauty like a faded leaf. Her legs were slender, athletic, and her outfits were neat and perfect, bomber jackets and fancy sneakers. We talked about these sneakers, and modernist novels, in one of our first conversations: I was teaching a class as a guest editor, and like her, was involved with someone. She was bright, and one day I passed her a story by a young female writer who interested me. “Why don’t you see if it needs any work?” I was curious to find out if she was any good, or if I’d only been charmed by her mannerisms, her clothes, her hair, and her voice. (It’s always bothered me that intellectual desire and physical desire are so similar that they incite misunderstandings: like anxiety and allergy, united by hydrocortisone.)

After Eleonora revised it, the story was accepted in one of Italy’s most important literary journals, and the day it came out, she invited me to have tea with her as a thank-you. She spoke in a different tone than usual—serious, stressed-out but not neurotic, and while she talked, I found myself thinking of the contrast Ibsen was going for in A Doll’s House between the Nora who tries to coax her husband and the Nora who signs loan notes behind his back to save her family. “I risked losing my mother for books,” Eleonora said to me, “and that period seemed endless. I didn’t have my mother, and I didn’t even really have literature. Since 2003”—and she emphasized the year like she must have done in a hundred grueling conversations—“I’ve been trying to become a part of literature.”

I told her that I found her devotion moving, and then she added: “I have to do it—I can’t give up now.”