I want to be extremely clear about that, because these stories always end with the woman becoming successful, and it does the reader a disservice.

I make between four and nine thousand dollars a year from illustration.

I still work full-time as an accountant and I intend to for another twenty years.

There is no version of this in which the art became the answer.

What it became was mine.

Which is a smaller thing and a much better one.

Part Fourteen: What Happened to Them

People always want this part, and I always give it reluctantly, because I have come to distrust the appetite for it.