Right. So, it's now eight years. I've many, many notebooks, but what I see when I examine the notebooks now are phases of development toward the work I'm doing at present. I see it in embryonic stages early on, and I begin to see what I thought were simply notes, because they didn't resemble my earlier work, were, actually in early form, the work that I have now begun to do … the new work, in other words. I didn't recognize it at first. I thought it was failed old work.

Who afraid of Virginia Woolf? Not Erica Jong, who invokes Woolf's Orlando as an epigraph for Serenissima, in which Jessica Pruitt, jet-setting movie star (in Venice to judge a film festival) falls ill midway through the book (Liv Ullmann nurses her—"What are friends for?"), and travels backward in time to the 16th century. There she finds herself...