[First paragraph of Preface] I set out to write an essay three years ago that started with the line “I always find God in the bathroom—don’t ask me why,” which is entirely true and says so much while explaining so little. Within a page and a half I briefly introduced a scene, a memory,where I had sequestered myself in a toilet stall in the bathroom on my sorority’s dorm floor at Eastern Kentucky University. I mentioned the scenario—I was hiding from a serial rapist who, for some reason, decided I’d be a good target—in just a few paragraphs and moved on as if it had the paltry significance of last week’s soggy newspaper lying under the dog bowl. After all, I only wrote it because it was a required exercise in my first graduate writing class; I was going to write my thesis in fiction.