Back home, I got to work on another rewrite. Deborah got to work, too, coming home each night with pages she'd marked up on the train. Her notes were about fleshing out the world of the story, digging deeper into the characters, raising the level of the language—things any good writer knows any good story must have, but that I needed her push to do. Pages flew between us as the book went from copy edit to proofs to second proofs. By Christmas, she'd gone through the manuscript three times, making painstaking comments on every page.

Somewhere along the line, the book came together. Scenes came into focus. The narrator finally found his voice. And by the time I turned in my last batch of revisions just after New Year's, the novel had become the piece of fiction I'm proudest of.

"It's surprisingly not bad," Deborah said, with a smile.

--Will Allison in Slate on being edited by his wife.