Then, finally, Julie had an idea that caught me off guard. She told me that at one point during those weeks when she believed she was about to die, she was waiting in line at Trader Joe’s and found herself mesmerized by the cashiers. They seemed so themselves in the ways they interacted with their customers and one another, making conversation about the small daily things that are really the big things in people’s lives—food, traffic, the weather. How different she imagined this job from her own, which she loved but which also came with a constant pressure to produce and publish, to position
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