Lauren Slater wrote "Three Spheres" with no revision. For Slater, an experienced writer of fiction as well as creative nonfiction, this was a surprising and thrilling experience because, like all authors, she usually needs to revise her work before publication.

"'Three Spheres' was one of those pieces that was pushing at me and pushing at me, and when I finally allowed its exit from the interior of my head to the white light of the page, it was pretty much fully formed. That's always a treat, a rare occurrence."

Part of what Slater means by "the white light of the page" is the process of self-discovery she experienced while writing the essay. "Three Spheres" is the final essay in a book-length collection to be published next year by Random House, and it is the most self-revealing of those essays: the others tell the story of Slater's practice as a psychologist in Boston, but in "Three Spheres" Slater directly addresses her own recovery from a debilitating psychological illness and the impact her recovery has had on her practice of psychology.

Slater thinks "Three Spheres" emerged in such a polished form because of the urgency of questions she had been asking herself for quite some time about her recovery. Writing "Three Spheres" helped her formulate answers and taught her that there's more where "Three Spheres" came from. "I have learned, from the writing of this piece, that there are questions about myself yet to be answered, scenes yet to be rendered," she said.

When she began writing "Three Spheres," Slater was not conscious that she had so many questions; she just wanted to write a story about her illness and recovery.

"In the original conception of the essay, I wanted to capture the complexity of my own 'mental illness,' its niches and caverns the twists of its corridors," she said. She discovered while confronting "the white light of the page" that she wanted to be more specific about some aspects of her own story, more general about others.

"The essay is a bit more general when it comes to the detailing of my own personal history-my relationship with my mother, the trajectory that led me into foster homes-than I originally intended. However, the subjects of my own illness and the routes I have travelled toward health are broad and in many ways still mysterious to me, a subject sheathed still in some fog. I'm not sure a 20-page piece could accommodate so large a topic as this one might be were I to fully unravel it."