Writing some books makes you feel pregnant. You can't deny that you are growing something mysterious inside you. It swells in your gut, it moves you to complain that life is growing hard and thorny. Your back aches. You want sympathy, someone to hold your hand and reassure you that things will work out. You need consolation. You feel pity for yourself and wonder how women can endure the pain and agony of giving birth. It makes you stagger at the miracle of existence, and you go on, each day carrying more weight and pain until you lie down in the dark and your organs grind against one another and the thing you may not have wanted to create is suddenly there, a helpless, wrinkled mass of new life. When you behold the thing that grew inside you, questions arise at once. Is it something you want to be responsible for, that you are willing to protect and nurture to maturity? I'm still groaning and tossing around in my hospital bed, you might say, uncertain if I have given the world anything it wants or needs. But there it is, the created thing, the idea that grew flesh and bone, and is crying for attention. When I named the book, I was compelled to wake from a dream and go down stairs in the dark of night and write "The Unraveling of America." I dread the thought that I could be right, that something was coming undone and was beyond my power to change. But the times are hard, and the forces arrayed against each other terrify me. I believe in liberty, in democracy, in all the ways I was made to believe in my country. But the erosion of faith and doubt in the future have also sickened me and filled me with dread. That is what this creature is that I felt wriggle free of my body and now stands before me.