I met my husband while strategizing all night with a mutual friend over their lottery chance odds to get a book editor job at the Village Voice. Arguably every bit as life changing for me was the fact that after our friend somehow landed the job, they said, "Hey maybe you could write reviews for us?"
I was a graduate student in English, grinding out a theory-encrusted dissertation that even I didn't want to read. Those very first book reviews I did for the Voice made me feel as though I'd been roused from suspended animation and ushered into a world of light and color, where people mouthed off and enthused without first running their language through an academic deflavorizing machine.
