Why I Wrote This

Ideas are cheap. Anyone can have one, in the shower, driving, standing in line at the bank. Having an idea costs nothing.

What costs is the other part: holding up something that doesn't exist yet, returning again and again to a place that hurts, keeping on when nobody is watching anymore. Nobody does that for a good idea. You do it for something else.

In my case it was a question. A single one, fairly uncomfortable, that had been circling me for years and that I couldn't answer by thinking it through:

"How well do we really know the people we let in?"

I'm not talking about distrust. I'm talking about something stranger and more common: that person you share years with, a table, secrets, and who one day does something that doesn't fit any version you had of them. And then you look back and find that the signs were all there, every one of them, and that you read them as something else. Not out of naivety. Because you needed to read them that way.

The years it stayed put away

That question stayed put away for a long time. I wrote its first lines years ago and then let it sleep, not quite knowing what to do with it. I'd come back now and then, look at it, close it again. I suppose I wasn't ready, or it wasn't. Some things need to stay still for a long while before they can be told.

When it finally let itself be written, I understood why it had waited so long. Ideas are thought through; questions like this one have to be inhabited. I couldn't solve it by turning it over in my head: I had to go inside and stay there long enough to understand why it hurt.

What's behind it

I don't know if I found the answer. I suspect there isn't one. But I stopped looking at the question from the outside, and that was already something.

That's all there is behind this book. No brilliant idea, no strategy. A question that wouldn't leave me alone, and a story as the only way to answer it.

If you've ever had a question like that, I think you'll recognize the terrain.

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