Robert Hellenga used to ask, "What is the meaning of life?" Now he asks, "What experiences make life meaningful?" He's settled for an adjective rather than a noun. High on his list: teaching a good class, finishing a novel, sex, getting married, having children, cooking dinner, playing the guitar. The usual. But perhaps the highest on his list is having his three daughters leave after Christmas-because it's so sad. It's nostalgia, he realizes that. It's what he tries to avoid when he writes about Christmas, as he does in all his books. But he understands that the only thing worse than having the girls leave would be having them stay. According to Anais Nin "We write to taste life twice." But we also write to explore mysteries. Mystery is the reality; clarity-seeming clarity-is the illusion. Clarity means you've lost touch with the mystery, that you've succumbed to habit, which, in the words of Proust's Marcel, "conceals from us almost the whole universe." Mystery means that you're still awake. Hellenga is the author of six novels: The Sixteen Pleasures," "The Fall of a Sparrow," "Blues Lessons," "Philosophy Made Simple," "The Italian Lover," and "Snakewoman of Little Egypt." "Snakewoman" was included in The Washington Post list of best books of 2010 and the Kirkus Reviews list of top 25 novels of 2010.