An excerpt from Devotion: A Memoir.

Arthur Miller takes the bus, the real estate agent in Connecticut said, killing four birds—writer, Jew, Democrat, New Yorker—with one stone. The bus being the sole mode of public transportation to New York City. Arthur Miller being a resident of one of the towns in which we were house-hunting. Arthur Miller takes the bus became such a frequent refrain that I began to envision a blow-up doll of the great playwright propped up in the back seat of the Bonanza Bus from Southbury to the Port Authority.

In truth, my husband Michael and I had no idea what we were doing. We were flying blind—amazed that the proceeds from the sale of our Brooklyn brownstone could buy us these ten acres, this house. It was safety, security, peace of mind we were after. It had been a rough couple of years. The plain facade of the saltbox, the hand-split wood roof reflecting the autumn light, the gentle slope of the land—it spoke of a simplicity that seemed not only preferable but essential to our family's well-being. But beyond the proximity of Arthur Miller, we knew next to nothing about the place where we were setting down our roots. We were going on instinct. This sense of rightness about the house was a feeling—nothing more.

Before we made a final decision to leave the city, we made an appointment for our son Jacob to see an expert in early childhood development. Jacob's speech was still lagging, and he had been the last of his peer group to learn to walk. The medication he had taken—the stuff that had saved his life—had a sedative effect. For a year of his infancy, he had essentially been tranquillized. If he was going to need intervention—speech therapy, occupational therapy, who-knew-what—then maybe we should stay in the city where I imagined such things were more readily available.

After spending several hours with Jacob doing a comprehensive evaluation, the doctor called us into his office.

"You realize that most children who survive infantile spasms are eventually diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder," he began. And then—after a brief, sadistic pause: "Jacob is fine. He exhibits no signs of autism."

We moved into the house on a cold, muddy day in early April. I was about to turn forty. Jacob was about to turn three. Michael—heading towards fifty—had switched careers from foreign correspondent to screenwriter. I had spent the previous two years struggling to write a novel. The future was unclear. We had no money to speak of, nothing resembling financial security. Two writers, post-9/11 refugees, strangers in a strange land. We should have been petrified—we should have questioned our own sanity. But we had learned something about what was worth being petrified about, and what wasn't.

The summer after we first moved to Connecticut, we were invited to a barbecue by the lake. I saw a boy—he must have been seven or eight—running around with the others. He looked like Samson, his raggedy mane of blond hair reaching all the way down his skinny back to his waist. This was Connecticut, not Berkeley. The boy stood out.

One the women saw me notice him, and filled me in. "He was very sick as a baby," she said. "He very nearly died. His parents became born-again. They made a promise to God that if he saved their son, they would never cut his hair, until he was old enough to cut it himself."

I watched the boy whooping it up with his friends. His parents, who had been pointed out to me, were a good-looking couple, blonde and rangy. The wife leaned back on a beach chair, balancing a gin and tonic on one tanned knee. It would be years before I exchanged a single word with her, but still—born-again Christian that she was, lapsed Jew that I was—I felt like I knew her. I searched the shoreline for Jacob, my toddler. He was crouched down, examining a rock, his back curved, as if in supplication.

When we were still living in Brooklyn I craved comfort food and cooked it every night. My favorite was a recipe for meat lasagna that included a cup and a half of heavy cream. Also high on the list was spaghetti carbonara: bacon, garlic, eggs, and more heavy cream. I wasn't concerned about calories or fat content. Only with flavor, texture, satisfaction. We opened bottles of good red wine usually reserved for special occasions. Dipped hunks of crusty French bread into leftover sauce. Cleaned our plates. Ate dessert.

During the days, I had begun to work on an assignment for The New York Times Magazine. Jacob had spent one night when he had been ill under observation in the pediatric step-down intensive care unit at Mount Sinai Hospital—the hospital on the Upper East Side where both he and I had been born. The ward was filled with very sick kids who mostly lived there. Two girls were awaiting heart transplants; the older one had been in the hospital for nearly a year. A seven year old boy lived along with his stuffed animals inside an isolation tent with tubes coming out of his stomach. The halls and doors of the step-down unit were decorated with the children's art projects: watercolors of rainbows, stick-figure drawings of families. Some of the rooms were equipped with video monitors so that they could communicate with their parents at home.