From the manuscript:
Time, that straight and patient line, has contorted itself into a looping scribble around her. She should worry, but doesn’t. Instead, she imagines herself beneath the surface of some vast sea — where she actually might be, she thinks, back in that world of atoms and star stuff she has left behind — where every stir of her muscles causes enormous, drowning waves somewhere far above her. Eleanor makes a concentrated effort to relax her body. After a time, her tightened muscles slacken like cut ropes. She wills herself not to blink. She does absolutely nothing. She gives in to the fall.
When I began Eleanor’s story, scribbling on the back of receipts and envelopes during a road trip in 2001, her tale was a very simple one. It would be the story of a girl whose faith is challenged. At the time, it mirrored my own struggle to rationalize a system of belief that I’d outgrown. For the first year, her story was as straightforward as it could be. In one early draft, I’m fairly sure I had her apprenticing in a nunnery and spooning ladles of stew at a shelter.
But it was beginning to become clear to me back then, and is far clearer to me now, that Eleanor’s story is a great deal bigger than that.
Her story retreats to the beginning and ends of time itself. She’s only just now starting to realize this.
It all starts with the voice.