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I like to talk when I run
. During races, I talk to other runners. After my dad died, in 2010, I talked to him. Sometimes I talk to myself, or into my phone when I want to remember something important. I almost always talk to my dogs. Lately, I’ve been talking to Sharon.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know it was so hard, Sharon,” I said out loud as I ran the other morning. I was talking about book publicity, which I’ve been doing a lot of lately, but I was also talking about suffering.
Sharon was my publicist for my first book, Running Home. She worked at Random House and was a few years younger than me. I met her in person only once, at a cafe called Norma’s in New York City, in 2019, shortly before my book launch. She had short reddish hair, clipped close to her head, and lived in the suburbs with her two children, who were a few years younger than mine. She smiled easily and had a lot of energy, like me, and loved running. We had eggs and avocados for lunch and talked strategy; I’d been a book publicist once, years earlier, and I recognized something of myself in her.
In October 2020, my editor emailed me to tell me that Sharon was leaving Random House. She’d had a recurrence of breast cancer, and she was going home to be with her family in the time she had left. I was alone at a writing residency near Abiquiu, New Mexico, when I got the news. I was so shocked I had to sit down. In the year and a half Sharon and I had worked together, I never knew she had cancer.
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