Les Keeler

Mrs. Ford leads a privileged life. From her Blenheim spaniels to her cottage on the coast of Watch Hill, Rhode Island, she carefully curates her world. Hair in place, house in place, life in place, Susan Ford keeps it under control. Early one morning in the summer of 2014, the past pays a call to collect. The FBI arrives to question her about a man from Iraq - a Chaldean Christian from Mosul - where ISIS has just seized control. Sammy Fakhouri, they say, is his name, and they have taken him into custody, picked him up on his way to her house.

I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries.