On Easter Sunday, although I had no idea what the day represented, I held egg hunts in our yard, hiding treasures for myself. At Christmastime, I stopped lamenting that we didn’t have stockings to hang from the chimney with care. Instead, at age 12, I bought red felt and rickrack and ribbon, got out my mother’s ancient Singer sewing machine and sewed up six of them (three for those who lived under our roof, three more for hoped-for guests).

Even then, like Harold, I was determined to fill my empty page.

“After he had sailed long enough, Harold made land without much trouble.”

We moved around. I went to high school in Ohio, in California and in Massachusetts. If I had to identify a single recurring theme of my upbringing, it would be my yearning for community. I always wanted more people at the dinner table. I wanted to feel I was part of something bigger, that I belonged. I hungered to believe things would be all right, but I was nagged by the idea that unless I was ever-vigilant, they wouldn’t be.

I fell in love for the first time when I was a college junior. Peter was an enthusiastic student of gnosticism, the esoteric religious movement that teaches that humans have a divine spark trapped in a material world created by an imperfect deity. I can’t say that Peter’s interest in mysticism was all that won me over, but the curiosity that fueled it and the confidence with which he pursued it were irresistible. He believed in something beyond himself. I loved that.

I may have been godless, but I didn’t want the men I dated to be too.

“So he left the path for a shortcut across a field. And the moon went with him.”

After graduation, I was lucky enough to win a coveted one-year apprenticeship with New York Times columnist James Reston. Halfway through my year, as was the custom, I began looking for my replacement. That’s when I met Jim. He was whip-smart and a fierce believer in the power of the printed word. But his heart was never fuller than when he was in the woods. When we first started dating, I asked him if he believed in God. He told me he foundGod in nature: on a ski slope, on a remote hiking trail, anywhere the silence was broken only by wind through pine needles. That was a deity I could understand.

Five years after Jim replaced me as Reston’s assistant, we got married. For reasons of proximity, not theology, the ceremony was held in a Presbyterian church. Jim had been raised Episcopalian. We’d chosen this church, with its lavender stained glass windows and white clapboard steeple, because it was next door to a bed-and- breakfast that my mother and stepfather had opened in northern Marin. (Yes, my mother had finally married her boyfriend.)

When I walked down the aisle, my father on one arm, my stepfather on the other, I felt utterly joyful, certain that I was feeling one of the most powerful forms of devotion: true love. With Jim, I felt sure I belonged.

After the ceremony, the guests gathered under a tent overlooking a golden field dotted with dark green oak trees and grazing sheep. A rock and roll band played from the back of a flatbed trailer. It seemed that every person who loved each of us was there, eating grilled oysters and toasting the vows we’d just exchanged—to love, cherish, honor and forgive—with Champagne.

In my mind, the bride wore purple.

“And there wasn’t any other side of the mountain. He was falling, in thin air.”

Reading those lines today summons the moment, 11 years ago, when I realized I was about to get a divorce.

The arc leading up to Harold’s fall is the same as what precipitated mine: the desire to fix things, the hope that through hard work I could fix things, and the heartbreaking understanding that I couldn’t. Watching my marriage end was like falling on my head.

What to say about the things that drove us apart? Lack of communication, professional competition and the refusal to get help were only some of the factors. I’m not the first, I know, to subconsciously seek to address the problems of my childhood in my marriage. Looking back, I see how I strived to create a relationship for which I had no real model. That my divorce came right after the birth of our son, Jack—the most important thing either of us will ever have a part in—was especially crushing. After a lifetime built on an unspoken but fierce vow that I would never repeat the cycle of a child torn between two divorced parents, I was doing just that.

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