I stole the title for this posting from Joan Didion. One reason I stole it was that I like the brevity of the phrase: In Bed. There you have two short one-syllable words that share a precision, and the precision they share is this: here, now.

And, yes, I stole those two sentences, too, from another essay by Didion, called “Why I Write.”

Since I started teaching writing in 1994 I’ve asked students to do mimics. Students always look at little alarmed at the assignment, as though I am suggesting plagiarism. No, I say; it’s not the words themselves I want you to mimic, it’s the grammar, the syntax, the structure of a sentence. For verb, find another verb; for noun, find another noun, and so on.

Some students excel at the assignments and others flounder in the Russian-doll nesting of Didion’s clauses, the intricate fit of her subordination. (I always assign a long sentence; mimics work especially well in teaching writers to pay attention to every word when the mimic is a complex sentence.)

Didion’s essay “In Bed” is about her relationship to migraine, the peace she has made with the power that takes her over and sends her to bed with the drapes drawn, “insensible to the world around me.” It’s a truth she has to acknowledge about herself, a force with which she has to reckon.

This posting is about a different kind of physical state, the kind that starts with low-level sluggishness and joint aches and (for me) swollen glands on the sides of my neck. The kind that tells us we are coming down with something.

Flu, cold, what my mom used to call “a bug.” We get in bed. We lie on the couch. We resort to comfort foods. If we live alone, we despair that there is no one to cross the street and get apple sauce and Nyquil for us, so we put on our sweats and do it ourselves.

This is what happened to me as a girl, and still happens perhaps once a year to me as a woman. And I do now what I did then: comfort food, and books.

Three weeks ago, it happened. I had to cancel all my classes. I had no energy. It started with a sudden onslaught of fatigue and sore throat, and never got much worse—but it didn’t get better, either. I tossed and turned and stared at the wall opposite my bed. I read the newspaper—or about half a page of headlines—and put it aside.

It was a week after J. D. Salinger died, so I read the New Yorker commentary and revisited work I associate with high school. Not just because of the Catcher in the Rye’s place in Required High School Reading—long-sentence-lover that I am, I preferred The Scarlet Letter—but because of Nine Stories.

I first read Nine Stories between my junior and senior year, on a family vacation. I associate “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” with the elevator of the Halekulani hotel in Waikiki, both because I had the book with me on my way back up to the room after lying on the beach and because Seymour and Sybil meet and talk on the beach before Seymour goes back up to his Florida hotel room and shoots himself in the head.

To my sixteen-year-old sensibility, the story shocked and confused. And while, now that I’m forty-eight, I can imagine why a man—after a sweet and funny interaction with a little girl on the beach—would return to his hotel room where his wife lies sleeping and proceed to kill himself, the wallop of the story hasn’t diminished. Re-reading it not only showed me layers of meaning I’d missed at sixteen but revealed some of my sixteen-year-old self to myself: curious, naïve, drawn to what my mother called “intensity,” and very protected.

I re-read Catcher, too, and then I picked up a book a friend loaned me a few months ago, called Mister Pip. Written by Lloyd Jones, a New Zealander writer, the novel tells the story of an unnamed island in the Pacific from which all the white people have fled after war and revolt. One white man remains—the eccentric Mr. Watts—who proceeds to sweep out the ruined schoolhouse and teach the children by reading each day from Great Expectations.

Trouble ensues, and in a gripping and terrible series of scenes, raw violence rips apart the community and the life of the thirteen-year-old narrator, Mathilda. I won’t spoil the story—because I hope many of you find out for yourselves by reading Mister Pip—but, as in “Bananafish,” childhood imagination and whimsy run up against adult folly at the cost of human life.

For three days, while I continued accumulating wadded Kleenex and glasses of apple juice on the bedside table, those worlds—Seymour’s, Holden’s, Mathilda’s—captivated me. I think it’s the unfolding of a different world, the revelation that opens up when we can read 100 pages at a stretch, put the book down for a bowl of apple sauce or hour-long sleep, and then read another 100, that transports us in a way that ten pages before sleep every night can’t.

As a girl, I left my bed to travel, like the boy in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Land of Counterpane,” to faraway lands—whether the England of Victoria Holt’s Gothic romances or the Kansan prairie of the Ingalls family in the 1870s. As an “intense” teenager, I slathered myself in Bain de Soleil on Hawaiian sands and read of shell-shocked men unable to readjust to adult “sanity.”

And now, as a woman with a bad cold, I get to do it again. Here, now.