You just have to say the thing.

What she made me do, in the fourth month, was the only assignment I have ever hated.

She made me write down the sentence — Gertrude’s sentence, the exact words — and then, underneath it, write down every piece of evidence I had ever had for it.

The list was empty.

There was nothing to write.

In nine years I had never once acquired a single fact in support of a belief that had organized my entire interior life.

“So where did it live?” she asked me.