“Is that what you want to do with your life?” he asked. “Like, edit? Or assist editors? Ferry P. Diddy up the elevator?”

“I guess,” I said. “At one point I think I wanted to be a writer. I write things for the Internet sometimes. I realize that doesn’t really count.”

“I’m always trying to write things, but I never get past the first paragraph. I have no discipline.”

“Oh!” I said. “Once this really intense dude from the Church of Scientology was mad about how he’d been portrayed in one of my boss’s books, and he showed up at the office and, like, wouldn’t leave.”

“Now that’s fucking cool,” he said. I smiled and cleared my throat as Mark blew in and glared at me for fraternizing with the talent.

The genius did love to read. He was currently midway through No Logo by Naomi Klein, and had as a result duct-taped over what few corporate logos remained on his threadbare clothes. (He was also in the process of watching every Kurosawa film ever made, in chronological order, and planned to move on to Sergio Leone next. Autodidacticism was, by the way, such a Schillerian-genius quality.) We exchanged books—he gave me Garth Ennis’s brilliant Preacher graphic novels, and I, at this point having looped all the way around to self-parody, brought him Kafka’s Complete Stories.

“I had a pretty tough time getting through the ‘Penal Colony’ one,” he confessed. Not because it was too violent, though. Because it was “kind of boring.”

“How can you say that? That story is gripping from the first word to the last.”

The first time we ever socialized away from backstage was the wrap party, where we ignored everyone else and afterward shared a cab to our respective homes—mine a studio near Lincoln Center whose four walls I could touch at once, his a one-bedroom on the East Side, whose rent was financed by his acting jobs: a Lifetime movie; a tiny role in an upcoming film where Harrison Ford was the Russian captain of a submarine and for authenticity spoke English in a thick Russian accent; an episode, need it even be said, of Law & Order. Everyone in the cast and crew of Berlin saw us get into a cab together and assumed certain things—but, in fact, what was happening was an actual, multifaceted, honest friendship.

All right, this was primarily because the genius hadn’t been interested in me romantically. Instead, he was trying to date the girl who’d played his sister in the Lifetime movie, but she had a boyfriend, and it was all very John Hughes (whose films I much preferred to Kurosawa’s). She was sleekly coiffed and lithe as a gazelle, and had been nominated for a Golden Globe; I was a stumpy-legged fake dramaturge with a haircut I gave myself. She was in magazines and on the side of buses; I read magazines and took the bus. I was perfectly aware that Molly Ringwald ends up with Blaine, and Duckie is forever doomed to staring sexlessly in the mirror at his own awesome hat. But you know what? I’m here to tell you that sometimes Duckie does get Molly Ringwald, even if Duckie is a thick-stemmed twenty-five-year-old female dramaturge and Molly Ringwald is a much better-looking male actor on television. For as it happened, one night, as we splayed on his futon (as friends), stuffed full of gummi frogs we’d procured from the bodega next door (as friends), after spending the earlier part of the evening smoking weak New York pot (as friends) through an apple bong (which we’d carved as friends), he grabbed my head and planted one right on me. “Say something German,” he said. “Anything.”

“Uh,” I said. “Warum? Was soll ich sagen? Ich weiß nicht, was du willst.”

“God, that’s so fucking sexy,” he said.

“Uh,” I continued, paragon of articulate bilingualism that I was, “I just told you I, like, didn’t know what you wanted.”

“Who the fuck cares?” he said. “It sounds hot. Say something else.”

Two weeks later, the lease on my miniature studio was up and my career as an unpaid dramaturge meant I lacked the means to afford its rent anymore. He suggested I move in, and we lived together for half of George W. Bush’s first term and a good portion of his second.

My new actor boyfriend took great pleasure in introducing me to his friends as “a German-speaking writer.” And, in the spirit of Kafka’s Trial and the endless hermeneutics of “Before the Law,” that was both true and false at the same time. I certainly spoke German better than, say, someone who doesn’t speak it at all, and I certainly put pen to paper on a regular basis (or, at any rate, finger to keyboard, enough to develop carpal tunnel syndrome), but in the years following my B.A., I didn’t get much published (except on the Internet, which barely counted), and my German weakened and then atrophied like the leg muscles of someone who’s been in traction for a year.

Sure, when I first moved to New York after graduation in 1998, I’d attempted to keep up my fluency in creative ways. At that editorial-assistant job, for example, I took it upon myself to compose a fax in German to Leni Riefenstahl. Not at random, mind you; she’d published a photo book with my boss, a notoriously mercurial editor with an impressive Rolodex. When he wasn’t directing me to type out correspondence to Johnny Rotten, however, he was yelling at me in a way even Germans had never prepared me for. He was so legendary for intemperance, in fact, that I started journaling my various indignities (sort of like how the philosopher G. E. Moore kept a diary specifically dedicated to the different ways in which Ludwig Wittgenstein hurt his feelings). Anyway, Leni Riefenstahl never faxed back, and until Berlin, I went about systematically forgetting my German as I purged my wardrobe of its jubilant Eurotrash brights.

The closest I came to interacting with the German canon was the tattoo I’d gotten at a dingy parlor by the Lorimer Street L train station in Williamsburg, after moving there in 1999 in a desperate flight from a terrible relationship with a manipulative dick I met two weeks after graduating from college, whose eighteen months of manipulative dickishness does not merit description. To celebrate my exit, I wanted an indelible marker. In the manner of Kafka’s very not-boring “Penal Colony,” I wanted the truth of it not simply to be understood with words. I wanted to feel it, as the Officer says to the Explorer in Kafka’s story, with my wounds. This desire culminated in the procurement of a single, two-inch-high tattoo on what seemed at the time the unusual and sensual location of my middle-lower back. It was so small that the visibly annoyed artist—who scoffed No when I asked if he wanted to know the significance behind the design, which I created myself by Xeroxing a page out of The Castle at 1,000 percent—could only charge the shop minimum of fifty dollars. It took three-quarters of an episode of The Simpsons to complete, and hurt slightly more than an aggressive teeth cleaning. It consisted only of a single letter and a single piece of punctuation, made to look as if it had been stamped on with a dirty typewriter key: K. It would be the closest I’d come to thinking seriously about German literature until several years (and a much better boyfriend) later.

Never once did I think about keeping up with my German—language, literature, anything—in graduate school, because graduate school had never been part of my plan—well, real graduate school. As another measure of post-relationship-with-the-dickish-guy independence, and primarily because he had “forbidden” me to do something so stupid, I laid out many thousands of borrowed dollars to get an M.F.A. in fiction writing, occupying two evenings a week for two years feeling deeply misunderstood as a group of my peers indulgently discussed my thinly veiled autobiography. Then, after Berlin wrapped and I was shacking up with the kind, generous, and blessedly not emotionally abusive actor, I’d even parlayed that M.F.A. into a quick and depressing semester teaching Business Communications (a.k.a. remedial composition) at an unaccredited secretarial school in New Jersey. But four months spent grading on the PATH train and collapsing every night at nine thirty was enough of a detour into the hallowed halls of academe for me. My parents, two disgruntled English Ph.D.s, certainly agreed.

“Just get famous doing something and get an honorary doctorate,” scoffed Sharon Schuman when I told her I’d absconded from the secretarial school. “It worked for Dan Quayle.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m going to take this job I just got offered at Dance Teacher magazine, otherwise known as a surefire route to fame, so I guess you must be very proud.”

In college, I had openly mocked friends who wasted a perfectly good Saturday of hungover pizza to sit for the GRE on purpose. I didn’t need grad school. I’d be doing just fine in the real world of Dance Teacher magazine, thank you very much—where, it turned out, all anyone wanted to talk about was carbohydrates, and I was abjectly miserable.

Thanks to my actor boyfriend, at least, I’d managed a convenient financial workaround to the incommensurability of twenty-eight-thousand-dollar salaries with a culture where that is how much people spend for their nanny’s Pilates instruction—that is, he allowed me to live rent-free, after landing a lead role in a very funny (and underappreciated) movie I’ll call Four Dipshits Go Abroad. And he also worked in an all-expense-paid trip to visit him on the set—which was in Prague, which according to my 1995 artisanal travel journal was my very favorite place in the world. I hadn’t yet earned my annual one-week vacation at Dance Teacher, but I talked my boss into letting me go anyway under the pretense that it was a networking trip for the magazine.

“I’ll see if any of the stars were dancers. Maybe we can get a cover,” I lied.

When I arrived, I got a ride to the set in a chauffeured town car. That day, they were shooting in an abandoned Soviet army barracks outside of town that had been made to look even shittier to fill in for Bratislava (actually a lovely city, but hey). I shared the car with my boyfriend’s seventeen-year-old costar, who had been a professional actress since the age of four, was currently known worldwide for playing the younger sister of a famous, let’s say, zombie killer, and who, I learned in short order, hated the ethereally beautiful city’s cobblestones, spires, and mist-haunted alleys, gave exactly no shits about medieval, baroque, or Jugendstil architecture, and who had never heard of Franz Kafka. “I heard you love Prague,” she said by way of greeting.

“I do!” I said.

“Hmm,” she said, wrinkling her telegenic nose. “Can I ask why?”

I had never heard of anyone not liking Prague before, and I had also never had a conversation in a town car with someone famous before, so I went momentarily blank.

“Well,” I said, “it’s a wonderful city if you, um, like architecture. And literature. And art.”

“And cobblestones,” she said.

“Yes, and cobblestones.”

“I hate cobblestones,” she said. “My Jimmy Choos always get stuck in them.”

I looked down at my own shoes, grimy silver no-name flats from Urban Outfitters that had a hole in one of the soles.

“I miss L.A. so much,” she said, as she opened an envelope that contained the script for her next project and inhaled deeply. “Ah,” she said, “it still smells like L.A.!” This was meant as a compliment.

By the time I’d arrived in the Golden City—my boyfriend’s setup was a plush apartment at the InterContinental with twenty-four-hour room service and five-star gym access, so pretty much in Kafka’s old house—this teenager had established herself as the alpha of the set. But, lack of appreciation for medieval city planning aside, I thought she was sweet—plus, especially for her age, she was eerily prescient. For example, as we took turns bowling atrociously at a cast-and-crew party, she took me by the head and said: “You’re so pretty!” Granted, this was definitely said in a be nice to the nonthreatening fat girl sort of way. I was the heaviest I have ever been (when not also housing another human being), after many weeks working late into the night on deadline at Dance Teacher, shoving down potato-chip-crusted mac and cheese from Vynl diner at my desk. But still. A celebrity says you’re pretty and you say, “Thank you!”

Then she looked at me very seriously. “What do you want to do with your life?”

I reminded her that I was already an adult, and already doing things with my life. “I’m the associate editor of Dance Teacher magazine.”

She batted the words away as soon as they left my mouth. “No,” she said. “What do you really want to do?” I was left speechless by a child star who hated everything I loved (including, I suspected, my boyfriend).

On the plane back to the States, I got to thinking that she had a point. What was I doing with my life? When I wasn’t getting fat at Dance Teacher and piggybacking onto my boyfriend’s comparatively high-rolling lifestyle, I was moonlighting for an ad-reporting company, writing inane trivia questions about One Tree Hill to trick bored housewives into giving away their valuable demographic information. (By the way, I love One Tree Hill.) I’d finished my M.F.A. and was putting it to excellent use working seventy hours a week pummeling my mind into numbness.

The child star who said “literally” a lot was right, goddammit. I needed to make a change. After twenty-six years of insisting to anyone who would listen (and many who wouldn’t) that I was above studying and trying—that my natural “gifts,” whatever those were, required no effort-based bolstering—in preparation for my trip to the Prague set of Dipshits, I’d recently decided to start thumbing back through my German copies of Kafka for fun. To my shock, despite the fact that I hadn’t had a real German conversation in nearly a decade, I could more or less understand “Das Urteil” (“The Judgment”) in its entirety, from the first description of the spring day to the gross naked dad jumping up on the bed to last macabre quasi joke about “endless intercourse.”

This time, with a little help from my yellowing compact Freshman Achievement Award dictionary, I didn’t just understand the story; I saw it. I saw Georg Bendemann’s blithe face as he finished a letter to his friend in Russia and went to check on his dad, totally unaware that this conversation would be his last on earth. I smelled the mustiness of Herr Bendemann’s room. I felt the sting (metaphorical though it was) of a father calling his son an “evil human being,” and then “sentencing” him to death. Sure, it hurt my noggin a little bit to squint through Kafka’s sometimes-endless sentence construction, where you have no idea what things are really about until, after what seem like endless clauses and commas, a verb is finally reached. But every time I read a passage, it was like I got … better at reading the one after it. Like, smarter or something. And it was challenging, sure—but that challenge was enjoyable. Wait, was I a book dork? I was a book dork. And I needed to own my book-dorkdom and do something befitting it. Something like, maybe, reading “Das Urteil” in a more institutional setting.

So I started researching graduate programs in the New York area—but most of them required the GRE. And I mean, math? I don’t want to be one of those I’m a woman and I’m bad at math women, because I was excellent at math in high school, but I hadn’t so much as thought about math since Dylan Gellner “helped” me with physics in high school (an excuse to go into his bedroom on school nights). But one graduate program in New York, a terminal M.A. in “Humanities and Social Thought” at NYU, merely “recommended” the GRE (Nein danke!), and the students seemed to be able to take any course they wanted across the entire university and call it a program. This program also—surprise of surprises—didn’t offer any financial aid. I said, Sign me up! More school! More student loans, please! They will be inconsequential, because my boyfriend is famous now and he will go from comparatively rich to rich-rich and pay everything off, because he is just that nice of a guy! I need more time with “Das Urteil,” and I need it now! I didn’t really know what people did with terminal M.A. degrees in Humanities and Social Thought, but I figured I’d sort it all out later when I was many thousands of dollars poorer, but a better humanist and social thinker.

I celebrated my acceptance to the program by quitting Dance Teacher and upping my hours as a professional TV watcher to near full-time. That way I’d have more time during the day to study, and to concentrate on taking the next step: applying for Ph.D. programs. What better way to cement the choice to go back to school than to make another choice to go to many, many more years of school? I mean, why not, right? (Besides the fact that I would, at last, have to take that fucking GRE.) Sure, it would mean an infinite amount of years outside of the workforce. But I had a plan. Even if my boyfriend didn’t pay off my student loans as a Flag Day present, I would surely regain solvency when my screenplay/novel/one-woman show/general creative-genius-whatever “hit.” I mean, sure, I wasn’t working on any of those things, but once I was free of the tyranny and vacuity of carbs conversations, it was only a matter of time.

I also applied to Ph.D. programs because of my favorite M.A. professor, Professor Singh, who taught a Theories of Citizenship course in which I had become acquainted with the political philosophy of a bunch of Germans: Kant, Hegel, Walter Benjamin, even Carl Schmitt, whose “paradox of sovereignty” so resembled the Bush Doctrine that the obscure philosopher, whose works were at the time largely unavailable in English, was enjoying a brief vogue. (This would result in a highly unfortunate crop of dissertations that would be irrelevant by the time they were defended in 2013, as opposed to most other dissertations, which are of utmost relevance.) Because of my recent adventures in Kafka reimmersion, I knew the original language all these Germans wrote in. And so, I figured that a Ph.D. in German was just the kind of obscure credential that would give a quirky future screenwriter/playwright/novelist/person-who-had-done-none-of-these-things just the kind of heady credentials she needed to distinguish herself from the hordes of other dubious hyphenates in a profession that I hadn’t invented yet. My knowledge of German, plus my legitimate interest in Walter Benjamin, G. W. F. Hegel, Jürgen Habermas, und so fort, made me an immediate favorite of Professor Singh, who heartily encouraged me to apply for real graduate school.

“You absolutely must go for a Ph.D.,” he said at his office hours one day, as I talked him into letting me write a paper about Walter Benjamin and “Before the Law” (I had impressed everyone in my class by being able to read this in the original). “You are made for this. Made for it.”

Nobody had ever said that about me before in relation to anything.

But five (or more) years of school—I couldn’t imagine how much that would cost.

“What do you mean, cost?” asked Professor Singh. “Ph.D.s are fully funded.”

Wait, five (or more) years where someone else would pay me to read Kafka all day?

“I mean, it’s not very much money,” Singh continued. “Pathetic pittance, really. And you have to teach a class.”