Elsewhere in the barn, a tall, thin shelf stands between two windows. Brooks asked me if I could guess how the authors collected on it — Ann Patchett, Michael Lewis, Donald McCaig and Jane Mayer, among others — were connected. After a moment, I admitted that I had no idea, fearing that I had failed some sort of professional test of readerly expertise, but there was no way I could have known: They were, she told me, all writers who had slept in the barn at one time or another.
A long, sunlit office fills the back of the barn, one of its walls lined with still more bookshelves. It was mostly used by Brooks’s late husband, the journalist and historian Tony Horwitz, whose death she describes in wrenching detail in “Memorial Days.” Today, the office is mostly used by Nathaniel when he’s home. Brooks donated most of Horwitz’s books to various university libraries, but the shelves are still filled with artifacts from the couple’s shared literary careers.
