I met Erica Jong today.

It wasn’t supposed to happen. Meeting her required a special ticket — something handed out in limited quantities about 6 hours before I arrived. But there are very few chances in a writer’s life for even the possibility of conversation with an author they adore, and so I stood in line for table 18 without a golden ticket. Okay, maybe I just stood next to the line and bit my nails and let others pass by, hoping they’d acknowledge the look of desperation on my face. And when that obviously didn’t work, I worked up the nerve to ask strangers if they had extras (they didn’t), debated flirting with the ticket-checkers (I’d just embarrass myself), and finally, upon realizing I had competition with Jong-lovers as eager and as ticketless as myself, declared it a hopeless cause.

But because I am a lucky girl and because the literary gods were looking down on me in my moment of resignation, a lady came around the back of the line and said, “would anyone like my ticket?” and minutes later, I was having a conversation with a woman who has inspired and influenced my work, whose words I have read over and over and over again, whose eternal belief in the guilt-free female writer has kept my passion afloat. She was sincere and lovely and everything I imagined, and while I didn’t get to ask the 10,000 questions I had in mind, I was able to share with her how much Fear of Flying and Seducing the Demon and How To Save Your Own Life meant to me. And that alone was a powerful reminder to keep writing, writing, writing because some day someone might agonize over a little yellow ticket just to say those things to me...