Something in my friend's voice on the phone felt to me like she was drowning. A cold, damp image drifted into my body like smoke, sharpening into a scene of the writer Virginia Woolf, depressed beyond hope in 1941, her overcoat pockets heavy with stones, wading deeper and deeper into Sussex's River Ouse, to her watery grave. (The gentle Ouse flowed behind the rural home of my English parents-in-law, and her village, Rodmell, was only a few miles away. I used to think of her every time I gazed into the water.)