There was more. But in short, he pissed all over it. It was not that he disliked it. It was that he fucking hated it. I was taken aback—I had enjoyed the process of researching and writing the book. So, I had expected, a reader would too. No, Scott said, the way you’ve done this doesn’t work.

Partly, I was crushed. But even more, I was puzzled. How could I have been so off in my perception of my manuscript? This wasn’t a hurried work of a few months. For three years, I had steeped myself in Churchill, Orwell, and their times, reading hundreds of books, which were scattered in piles across the floor of my office in the attic of my home in Maine. The biggest of the piles was books by Churchill himself. The second biggest was diaries, memoirs, and collected letters by British politicians and writers of the 1930s and ’40s.

Scott followed up with a lengthy letter—I think it was about 10 pages—detailing his concerns. I live on an island on the coast of Maine. I received the letter the day before a major snowstorm. A few hours after it arrived, several old trees along the road downed power lines, taking the internet with them.

Cut off from email and other off-island communication, I spent that snowy day reading and rereading Scott’s letter. The next morning dawned crystalline and blue. I climbed into my pickup truck and drove slowly over 15 miles of icy backroads to the library in Blue Hill, on the mainland, where the internet was still working. The whole world was sparkling. I sat down in the sun-splashed reading room of the library, powered up my laptop, and sent a note to my literary agent, Andrew Wylie, asking him if Scott, being so negative, actually wanted to back out of the book altogether. If he really wanted out, then I didn’t want to dive into the job of rewriting it.

Andrew’s reply came flying back, within minutes. (He may be the world’s fastest email replier.) He also knows Scott well. No, Andrew replied, Scott is just trying to emphasize to you how much work you have ahead of you to make this a good book. I found this reassuring. I even felt contented, for reasons I don’t completely understand. If Scott was still on board, well then so was I.

* * *

I spent the next five months, from mid-January to mid-June of 2016, redoing the whole book, rethinking it from top to bottom.

I began by taking his letter and his marked-up version of the manuscript with me to Austin, Texas, where my wife and I were taking a break in February from the long Maine winter. (Austin is a great town for live music, food, and hiking—and its winter feels to me like Maine in the summer.) I sat in the backyard and read and reread Scott’s comments. I didn’t argue with them. Rather, I pondered them. If he thinks that, I would ask myself, how can I address the problem? I underlined sections. At one point he pleaded in a note scrawled in the margin, “If you would only defer to the narrative, you could get away with murder.” I liked that comment so much I typed it across the top of the first page of the second draft, so I would see it every morning as I began my day’s work.