New Voices in Nonfiction was probably the last event in a book tour that started in Chicago more than three years ago. It was held on the campus of the University of Chicago, on the eighth floor of the Logan Center for the Arts, in a room with a view that stretched as far as Lake Michigan. My hosts were Dan Raeburn and Starsha Gill, and I shared the honors with Katie Bellamy Mitchell, who read her essay “Compartmentilization, or, Some Thoughts on Boxes.” Katie turns out to be a student of Laura Slatkin, who was my first professor of classical Greek at Columbia, thirty-odd years ago. Dan, the author of Vessels, has known my editor, Matt Weiland, since childhood, and he also knew my friend Lindsley Cameron Miyoshi, whose generosity in passing along a compliment was the catalyst for this whole episode: a lively spring evening in Hyde Park, celebrating the art of nonfiction, which is a pretty lame name for a dazzlingly wide and varied genre.

I got to have lunch with Carol Fisher Saller and a brace of other editors and marketers of the Chicago Manual of Style. The editor Mary Laur distributed Chinese fortune cookies with CMOS fortunes (“When in doubt, do not capitalize”). I came away with all kinds of great swag—pencils and buttons and, yes, a copy of the 17th edition of CMOS to carry back on the plane. Actually, I entrusted it to my friend Nancy Holyoke, who drove down from Wisconsin for the reading. My friend Kate Desjardins, an artist who teaches at U. Chicago (as I’ve learned to call it) and at the Art Institute of Chicago, works right in the building, so she came to the reading, and, the next day, we met up with her and her friend Susanna Coffey to see a bizarre show of work by Ivan Albright at the Art Institute (he painted the picture of Dorian Gray for the movie of Oscar Wilde’s story). Nancy and I stopped in the old library, now the Cultural Center, which has two rotundas made of Tiffany stained glass, and then met up with my high-school friend Patti Jewitt, who had driven to Chicago for Mother’s Day, and her daughter Shannon, and we all had dinner in Greektown, with a view of the Parthenon.

I have gotten pretty good at incorporating friends into my book tour!