What I do know is that I’d like to get rid of some of my “friends,” especially a woman whom I hadn’t seen in thirty-four years who nags me to answer her e-mails. And that fan mail from strangers warms the heart, but then I feel compelled to produce considered, literary replies. And that’s the problem with Facebook—it’s so very public, and one can’t exactly ignore the writing on the wall. Who has time to be in regular communication with hundreds of people? But I don’t dare dump anyone just yet. The paperback only came out in July, and then of course there’s the next book.

Judith Matloff is a contributing editor to the Columbia Journalism Review. She is a veteran foreign correspondent, who teaches a course on conflict reporting at Columbia, and is the author of Fragments of a Forgotten War and Home Girl.