I learned this week that my essay “Alone With Our Thoughts” is listed as a Notable Essay in the 2026 edition of Best American Essays. The BAE editors review thousands of essays published in the U.S. every year and select 100 from which the year’s editor (M. Gessen this year) chooses those to be printed in full in the volume. The rest of the 100 are listed in the back of the book as Notable Essays.
This is the third time BAE has named one of my essays a Notable Essay. The other two were: “The Storycatcher” (published in Notre Dame Magazine) in 2018 and “A Gyroscope on the Island of Love” (published in Image) in 2013.
“Alone With Our Thoughts” was also published in Notre Dame Magazine–in their Summer 2025 issue. It talks about solitude, my time on the Greek island of Patmos, author Pico Iyer’s book Aflame, my book An Island to Myself, and how choosing to be alone has influenced both Iyer’s and my life.
Here’s an excerpt from the essay:
By the time I finished my book, An Island to Myself, which came out in May, I’d come to believe so fully in seeking solitude in a specific place — an island in Greece or a closet in your bedroom — that I’d added a subtitle: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life. Then, in one of those synchronistic moments that sometimes come when you embark on a new path, I learned that a writer I’d long admired, Pico Iyer, was about to publish a book called Aflame: Learning from Silence. According to the advertising copy, it was based on “more than one hundred retreats over the past three decades to a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California.” Iyer, it seemed, had his own Patmos.
Given the similarities in our subjects and the importance of place in both our experiences, I decided to contact Iyer to see if he’d be willing to blurb my book. I never got my blurb, but what came from that contact was much more valuable: a conversation between us about the benefits, dangers, meaning and purpose of spending time alone.
You can read the full essay here.
