The Library Is My Cheers 

The library in our town is like my own personal version of Cheers. I walk in, and everyone knows my name. For a while after I moved to Hinsdale, in fact, the librarians were probably the only people who knew my name — my first friends. I wrote the majority of my newest novel in the Hinsdale Public Library, walking there through the snow, finding refuge and blessed, blessed quiet. Now the library is simply part of my routine. I go there almost every day to write, squirreled away in a study room where the Internet access is — thankfully — erratic. I sit in a hard, wooden chair in the silence, among the scent of books, and try to push forward, to make something new, in one of my favorite places in town. —Cristina Henriquez

About Cristina Henriquez

Cristina Henriquez is the author of The World In Half and Come Together, Fall Apart: A Novella and Stories, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection. Her newest work The Book of Unknown Americans, will be published in June 2014. Henriquez’ stories have been published in The New Yorker and in the anthology This is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers.