Joan Wickersham is the author of The News from Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story (Knopf, 2012) and The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), a National Book Award finalist. Her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, as well as many other publications, and she writes a regular op-ed column for The Boston Globe.