I HAD A LOT of trouble sleeping after my father died, but I didn’t experience this as grief. I thought of it as wakefulness, an inability to fall sleep that felt oddly reassuring to me, like the presence of an old friend. My first memory of being unable to sleep is of a summer house at the beach with big windows and many doors, too many doors to allow rest—I remember five of them, brightly colored, red and blue. My father would work during the week and come out on weekends, and I think my mother was made afraid by his absence, which means that I was afraid, too. And I think I was genuinely afraid that my mother might disappear as well; she had that kind of flickering attention that created a sense of flickering connection. I would lie in bed, nervous but unclear on why, and stare at the shadow of the au pair, who had to sit there in the dark, poor girl, till I fell asleep. Watching her, the way she folded her hands in her lap, I would try to think about all the doors in the house and imagine them all locked, so nobody could get out.