My fourth book with was published in 2021: Difficult Joy. It is indeed a book of the pandemic era, about love and its vicissitudes.

With a few years distance on the pandemic, it seems the main change it wrought was to make the world feel even smaller, more connected. Conversations about the planetary community, long rooted in globalization discourse, have intensified. It’s true for my own work and I have noticed it among many others as well.

What I think this book, written over the course of the pandemic, intuited is that this sense of the planetary has changed the way we relate to each other. We will search for, hope for, test the authenticity of languages for connection and a common bond. Difficult Joy looks at art, religion, politics, history, education, family, intimacy — each seen through the prism of hope that we find our way to love that survives.