Once I ran away from my boyfriend to a hotel. I wouldn’t let my friends tell him where I was, and between baths I made calls to those in the know to find out what his reaction was and how it was progressing. There were some strains in our relationship, but mostly I thought that running away was a dramatically artistic thing to do. I planned to work every moment on a passionately intense but enigmatic story I was writing about my sexual and emotional history. I ended up taking ten baths in thirty-six hours before I got bored and went home. That was the only time I took so many baths that I didn’t want to take any more. If communications technology had developed then to where it is now, I would have been able to take the phone with me to the bathroom, and my ten baths might have become one very long one. I wasn’t hungry. I couldn’t sleep. Taking a bath and talking on the phone fulfilled all of my physical needs, as they have so many times since. — Jane Smiley, excerpt from Home: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own, edited by Sharon Sloan Fiffer and Steve Fiffer (read for free)
