In "Thin Air," I look back at someone who worked for my family when I was a kid--someone who was murdered--and try to figure out what was really going on in her life, what everyone turned a blind eye to, what they just couldn't imagine being true. Sometimes we need decades to make certain connections--in this case, the ties that connect a parakeet named Ish Kabibble to our family's cleaning lady, Helen, and my discovery of what it really means to become a writer, whose stories we are called upon to tell, and why. 

I mention two stories you might want to look up, Gustave Falubert's "A Simple Heart" and Sherwood Anderson's "A Death in the Woods."