A note about the work “In Defense of Aunt Léonie” from Jodie Noel Vinson for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2024 YEAR issue: If you knew me in my early twenties, we probably had a conversation about Proust. I spent nine months consumed by his novel In Search of Lost Time, which can sound snobbish or academic but for me was an immersive, intimate relationship, a beautiful secret I shared with others passionate about his prose, or who also harbored an obsession with the past. When I turned forty, I returned to Proust. I was at that time also returning to myself after living with chronic illness for three years. His book still had its hold on me, but I was noticing new things. This time around, my way into the novel was through the character of Léonie Octave. Like others, I had, on a first read, taken the aunt to be a comical hypochondriac, obsessed with her own suffering. Now, prone and pitiful on her sickbed, she appealed to my sympathy. What would happen, I wondered, if we were to take her complaints seriously: to start from a place of belief, rather than doubt? Where did that immediate impulse to disbelieve another person’s pain come from? These questions led me to read her character through a lens of compassion, humanity, and empathy, and, eventually, to write “In Defense of Aunt Léonie.”