Daphne: I come from a modern orthodox Jewish background, emphasis on orthodox. I'm one of six siblings. We were completely observant, like not using lights on Shabbos, on Saturday. I kept thinking of the women in my parents' synagogue, which had been founded by my father, called Fifth Avenue Synagogue. I kept thinking, what are they going to make of this, the daughter of the founder? Most people, anyway, conflate the narrator and the character, especially if the writing is immediate which mine tends to be. No one's going to think, this isn't her, this Judith Stone is not Daphne Merkin. That truly stopped me. I just thought, I'm not up for the -- it was like my inner censor a hundred times over. I think some writers don't have such an inner censor. I have a large inner censor even though sometimes it doesn't seem that way because I write a lot personally and fairly candidly. Somehow, I just stopped it. My editor loved the book. At that time, it was called The Discovery of Sex. I paid back the advance. I'm recreating it a little. When I look back, I think a lot of it, I did keep. I made many, many changes and I wrote many more scenes, but some of the basic essence of the book was there then. I always think, then, it would've made me a best-selling -- but I wasn't prepared to publish it. I stopped. I put it away, went on to write a lot of journalism about everything from mattresses to profiles of Madonna and Cate Blanchett and Tom Stoppard.