Hi, Joseph Fink here. Today is the day the book is out. You can hold it in your hands.

As a thank you for joining us on this road trip. I wanted to share with you here a short letter

to the reader I wrote a while back. It's not in the final version of the book, so call this a

little bonus thing, but I think it talks through a little bit of the mentality behind the writing.

This novel is the most personal thing I've ever written and I'm very proud of it. I'll be doing

in 18 City Booktour all over the country starting tonight in Brooklyn and tomorrow in DC.

These events are conversations with some of my favorite writers, followed by a reading,

followed by an audience Q&A, and then finally assigning. Most of these events are free or free with

the purchase of a book, so check out the schedule at Aliceisanddead.com. Okay, here's the letter to

the reader. Dear reader. In the summer that my wife and I began dating, I experienced my first

bout of crippling anxiety. I could hardly get out of bed. Air stopped working for me.

While people walked down the streets of Manhattan, blithely sucking in oxygen like it would never

go away. There I was, somehow drowning. Most women would have justifiably run, but my wife drove

out from New Jersey when I was having a particularly bad panic attack, bringing me a pile of comedy

DVDs, and a box of chocolate-covered strawberries. We took the bakery string from that box and tied

pieces of it around each other's wrists as a reminder of that moment of love before we had even

used the word. Almost a decade later, we still have matching bakery string around our wrists.

Don't worry, we do fresh ones occasionally. It's not the same ragged string from 2009.

These bouts of anxiety would come and go, sometimes completely overwhelming me, right up until I

finally allowed myself to write about the fear. First, I wrote the podcast Welcome to Night Vale,

a show in which I piled all of my doubts and anxieties and thoughts about mortality.

Then I wrote Alice isn't dead, where the main character suffers from anxiety, and not just

...