Thirty-five years ago I was a staff writer for The New Yorker, and I was working on a biography of Oliver Sacks. I had about fifteen notebooks full of interviews. We were meeting for dinner two or three nights per week. But at some point he asked if I could leave out the fact that he was gay. And I couldn’t do it. His sexuality tied him up in knots. And I thought those knots helped explain why he became such an amazing neurologist. So I agreed to stop writing, but we remained good friends. Shortly before he died last year, he called me and asked me to finish the book. So I’m trying to figure out where to begin. Thirty years ago I was going 100 mph in an aircraft carrier, and I was asked to stop on a dime. Now I’ve got to figure out how to start it back up.

—an entry on Humans of New York