When my perfect dog Sadie died fifteen years ago, I bought the first new car of my life a week later, a soft minty-green VW bug. God told me to, and it helped for a few days. When a large newspaper’s book critic panned my previous book, saying it seemed to have been written by someone who was spending too much time with the Kardashians, I felt humiliated. The paper has 500,000 readers. How to deal with this? A Cinnabon is a thing of perfection, and the extra frosting costs only 71 cents.

