Behind the scenes of writing the free will essay for The Missouri Review

Also, a kind of director's cut or extended version of the published essay. Plus thematic analysis like, What was with all the alliteration?

Writing and revising the free will article took me years. Yes, years. Looking at my computer files, I can see that it was way back in December of 2022 that I was researching the role free will played in denying line-of-duty death benefits to surviving family members of police officers who commit suicide. I first corresponded by email with Robert Sapolsky in June 2023. The drama with my first submission, revise and resubmit, their offer and my withdrawing the piece, happened in March 2024. The piece was finally accepted February 2026. April and May were spent cutting for length or resisting such cuts in back-and-forths with the assistant editor. The essay will finally come out in June or July. What was it like writing the piece? Did denying free will have the effects on me that the studies reported on would suggest?

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Years ago, I had the good fortune to housesit for a friend while he and his wife were traveling over an extended Christmas break. They were med students at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. So, their place was not grand. As on-campus, institutional housing, it was not much more than a glorified dorm room. Nevertheless, I luxuriated in the quintessential feeling of the house sitter: that uncanny sense of newfound freedom. In this unfamiliar space, all my old habits were wiped away. I had a clean slate. I could reset, reboot, start fresh. Anything was possible.

Each shivering weekday morning, I would take the three-dollar interborough bus to my publishing job in midtown. After work, I’d ride the subway to the Bronx Zoo station and happily trudge home through the snow in the relative warmth of the afternoon. In their apartment, the thrilling sense of possibility persisted. I took in all the unfamiliar stimuli: the anatomy textbooks on the coffee table; the mini Eiffel Tower on the bookshelf (we had first met in Paris); the aluminum-edged kitchen table adorned with a plastic yellow and white daisy in a cobalt blue vase; and three comfy reading chairs, any of which I was free to choose to sit in, to read any book I wanted until I wanted to do something else.

I was as free as the Spring wind until one day I came across a box of See’s Candies, a pack of cigarettes, and two mesmerizing bottles of bargain booze. I had to eat them all, smoke them all, drink them all.

I tried to resist but couldn’t stop myself. Deterministic procedures booted up in my brain. I could feel my free will evaporating, as a multitude of open possibilities collapsed into one closed necessity.

As soon as I’d finished indulging my physical addictions, my old habits of mind returned too. The house sitter’s quintessential experience of open-endedness was spoiled. My longstanding mental and behavioral patterns resurfaced, predictable as ever. I was me again.

Sound familiar? We’ve all experienced such joyous feelings of freedom. And we’ve all had moments when we felt our free will was compromised, in one way or another, to one degree or another.

If you’re not sure what I mean, try not eating for three days. Really set your conscious willpower to fasting. Then you will know the inner struggle against physiological drives: vectors of psychic force, pushing you, imposing on you, enjoining you to eat. Perhaps you can distract yourself by drinking water, but the metabolic need for calories is too basic. Thoughts about food bubble up, until food is the only thing you think about. Lure and temptation transform to need and command and, ultimately, to unfreedom.

There certainly are occasions we seem to lack free will, such as irrational outbursts, split-second instinctual reactions, persistent bad habits like nail biting, procrastination, and any case of acting against our better judgment. Think of Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “I can see, and I approve, the better course, and yet I choose the worse.” Think of Paul in his Letter to the Romans: “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” To act unfreely in this way often feels terrible, like self-hatred or holding oneself in contempt.

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Thinking about the philosophical problem of free will, or what comes after denial, may therefore seem a fruitless endeavor to some, a mere spinning of our cognitive wheels, which never gets us anywhere. However, for the two deniers I profiled in my Missouri Review essay, Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris, the so-called problem of free will is in the rearview mirror. They are convinced. They know we don’t have free will, even if they don’t always believe we don’t. The changes to society they envision will simply have to accommodate the truth that it’s a hard truth to believe, but a truth all the same.

The cognitive space where Sapolsky and Harris have arrived is new territory, an intellectual position with novel paradoxes, but—most importantly—a position that brings with it a number of urgent moral imperatives.

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The essay opens describing Kelly as my fiancée. Relationship trouble is hinted at throughout the story, from beginning to end. My sleep-peeing—sleepwalking and peeing in the closet unconsciously—made Kelly display a “pent-up prickliness,” as I wrote. (Pent-up because she believed she could not hold me responsible since I did it all unfreely.) Additionally, during the info-dump about psychology studies which show that people become more aggressive when primed with thoughts about free-will denial, we have, sure enough, a few too many aggressions ourselves.

In a longer version of the piece, we break up before the end of the essay. Early in the writing process, an editor I consulted over Zoom asked me “What is this essay about?” A simple question but not so simple to make sure there is a good answer. After thinking about it for a while, I decided the essay should be about: How do Kelly and I explain our breakup without referencing free will? That is nice and specific. That is a specification of a more abstract or generalized expression of the point of the essay: how would society and the individual change if they were to deny free will? How does denial change one’s self-conception? How do you explain the behavior of yourself and others without referencing free will?

I had to think back to why Kelly and I broke up, which was not a pleasant experience. Neither thinking about it nor the actual process of our break up was pleasant, but I meant thinking about it was unpleasant. I had to explain it in the essay, but I did not like even to try to explain it to myself in my own mind, my own inner monologue. But thinking about it in the context of free-will denial was different; it felt different and ended up in a different place. I recalled that Kelly had said she would try to help the relationship by going off birth control, which she speculated might be suppressing her libido.

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Think of my “Behind the Scenes” series as like the special features of a DVD, like the director’s audio commentary. What was I doing or what do I think I was doing in the essay? There are certain themes I was hoping to evoke and certain tactics that might be interesting for me to point out to the reader now after having already read the essay.

There are a few recurrent events or images throughout the essay. One of them is involuntary furrowing of brows.

I also self-consciously tried to introduce words that might evoke free will versus determinism, such as “control.” The first time I drop a five-word alliteration on the reader, it is introduced as a way to “get distance from disgusting deeds.” But when I do alliteration again without any such reason, I say, “Sorry I couldn’t control myself.”

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Excerpt from cut section:

Then, one day, like an event without a cause, Kelly broke up with me. We’d started to fight more while we’d been reading Sapolsky together. About unimportant things. We were just more impatient with each other, quicker to anger, just more easily irritated.

I had thought I was pretty rational. But she was more rational than me. Yet I could tell she was not getting what she wanted because she became quicker-to-anger and impatient. Even when I stifled the irritable reactions of mine I knew she didn’t like, she began to dislike the stifling. Kelly said she had learned from her first formative relationship—with Blane, not his real name—that emotions and bad moods and being irritable is fine; it’s all fine, as long as you do not act on them. You can be in a bad mood, but it does not need to manifest. You can be irritable, but do not get irritated. So, rather than snap back at something she’d said that irritated me—usually some way she failed to spare my feelings—I would not say anything. And then I would see her face darken. I thought keeping it on the inside would satisfy her. But then she started noticing my silences, my hesitations, as I quashed my own irritation… and this irritated her. There’d be a flash of tension between us, and I’d go silent, and she’d suck her teeth.

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But this is not a story about our breakup. It’s about how I explain to myself the failure of our relationship without making any reference to either of us acting of our own free will. I call our dogs “robots,” affectionately. But what happens when I think of the two of us as robots too?

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What explains our breakup? Were our Myers-Briggs’ incompatible? Kelly “says” it was my irritability and that, over time, it felt to her like trying to be romantic with a roommate. For debunking explanations, I turned to the scientific literature on lust, limerence, and romantic relationships. The dry, academic language was oddly reassuring: “Women’s sexual attraction to their partners wanes as relationship duration increases.” Studies, additionally, show that living and working together—spending 24 hours a day together, as we did during COVID—makes both partners have increases in prolactin, and decreases in testosterone and dopamine. Prolactin makes for more domesticity—the roommate remark—and drops in testosterone and dopamine causes libido to decrease. Prolactin “reduces a woman’s neural response to the expectation of erotic stimuli.” Hormones, in general, cause “alteration in women’s pair-bonding behavior,” which, even less romantically, is sometimes labeled “affiliative behavior.” Less reassuringly, the ruination of my romantic partnership, home life, and general wellbeing was referred to in one paper as the “relationship side-effects” of hormonal changes. They meant hormonal changes that happen because of changes to circumstances like too much time together causing prolactin to go up. But they also meant hormonal changes that happen when a woman goes on or off birth control.

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While we were trying to make it work, Kelly went off the pill to see if it was suppressing her sex drive. Where’d she hear it might do that? Hormonal contraception, such as the pill, makes the body think it’s pregnant—the “pregnancy-mimicking mechanism of keeping progesterone levels elevated and steady signals the brain to stop releasing FSH (follicle-stimulating hormone) and LH (luteinizing hormone), which prevents ovulation.”

After reading the science, my hypothesis—uncomfortably close to what I imagine a jilted tech bro or even an incel would come up with—was that, while pregnant, the woman had no need for a male partner with the traits that evolutionarily-speaking signal genetic wellbeing and a good choice for reproduction. Those traits being roughly whatever a cavewoman would consider the ideal of masculinity: symmetrical face, broad shoulders, high status, physical strength, well-tailored loin cloth. Instead, a cavewoman who’s pregnant becomes attracted—because of natural changes in her hormones—to a potential partner with more feminine traits, like gentleness, caregiving, and lack of violent capability. Because: the baby’s on its way, time to team up and raise it.

When I looked in the scientific literature to support this hypothesis, what did I find? There are studies showing that women who meet their partners on hormonal birth control, and then stop taking the pill, report finding their partners less attractive upon cessation, unless their partners display typically masculine traits. It’s about incongruency at the time of pair-bonding versus the time of the experimenters’ survey—with respect to hormones. Women who had chosen their partners off of the pill, then started it, tended to report higher levels of sexual attraction to that partner following subsequent discontinuation of the hormonal contraception. Read that again. Think it through. Find what’s natural and the causation. It makes sense, even if it triggers some of our progressive sensibilities.

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While researching and writing the free will denial essay, I started to drink more heavily. I decided I needed to quit for a while. It became an illustration of another psychological effect of denying free will: denial makes it harder to muster your conscious willpower to change behavior. But I had a few tricks. I did not want to promise myself that I’d not drink and then break that promise, so I did not resolve to stop drinking. Instead, I waited for a day when I didn’t feel like it and tried to ride that wave. I often felt like it. But a day came when I was kind of sick of it, bored actually. For some reason, that day it did not hold out the promise of relief or release. So I didn’t drink that night. After that it was just a matter of not breaking the chain. In this way, I did manage to stop drinking.

But it was not via willpower. One day, after three months being dry, I decided I could let drinking back into my life. Not the old binge drinking. But just a glass of wine with dinner. I decided this at work before heading home. But, on the way home, I didn’t stop by the store to get wine, booze or beer. And when I got home I forgot to open the liquor bottle someone had gifted me. I just did my regular, new-normal night routine: walk the dogs on the beach, feed them, make dinner, watch the WNBA on DVR while eating. Once done eating and the TV programs were switched off, then I’d do some grading until it was time for bed. I never got around to getting my drank on. Previously, my habitual drinking made it hard to will my not drinking. Now, my habitual not drinking made it hard to will my drinking. I was too much in the habit of not drinking to start drinking. It was kind of embarrassing. I was a creature of habit, through and through.

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Looking back, it feels way too easy and self-serving for me to chalk up the relationship’s failure to Kelly’s imbalanced hormone cocktail. In weaker moments, I’ve taken the excuse for a test drive. It feels good. It’s an explanation, and sense-making is inherently satisfying. Plus bewilderment is unpleasant. It has the additional merit of allowing me to avoid looking too closely at myself, at my role, at my failings. For all those reasons and more, it’s really off limits.

Nevertheless, during my research, I looked at my genetic test results to see if I have the MAO-3 variant, called “the warrior gene,” the gene for aggression. Turns out, I have it. By aggression, they more specifically mean that having that allele makes it more likely you will react with rage to perceived slights. My irritability was often occasioned by my perception that Kelly was thoughtlessly failing to spare my feelings. “These kitchen knives are all dull as shit,” she’d say. I bought those; it’s my kitchen, it’s my fault. I should do something about it—is what she seemed to be saying, which made me defensive, even though, now in relative tranquility, I’m sure all she was saying was that the knives were dull. But she coulda said it nicer, knowing it’d make me feel bad. Ugh. Yes, I can hear myself.

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Maybe my irritability could be chalked up to my MAO-3 allele. When you discover some new fact about your genetic make-up, what are you supposed to do with this information? It seemed my options were: to positively endorse it, i.e., adopt it, take pride. I am capable of aggression, yay! I guess I am not as much of a doormat, people pleaser as I thought I was. Another option: my occasional angry moments with Kelly and the rage I keep to myself are coming at least in part from this genetic inheritance. Rather than endorse it, this second option is to reject it, or rather, aim to struggle against it. It’s not much different than knowing that my dad had anger issues and trying to think about how much of that side of him might be in me.

But I didn’t know about the birth-control-loss-of-attraction thing, nor about my warrior gene, until after Kelly broke up with me. So we couldn’t try to counteract them or factor them into what was going on. But after the fact the explanations that appeal to these non-standard reasons—reasons not based on the relationship nor on either or both of our personality traits—felt good.

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If Kelly broke up with me because I was too irritable, then postulating that my MAO-3 gene was involved could be a “bunking” explanation. It supports the same explanation (hers) just at a different level of analysis. Debunking explanations, on the other hand, come in and displace extant explanations. So rather than breaking up with me of her own free will, the hormonal birth control explanation would be the real explanation. Of course, that only works if we think, had it not been for the pill—being on it when we met, and going off it when the relationship hit the skids—she would have felt differently about me. But what would explain her attraction, or lack thereof, in those cases? Some other debunking cause, like elevated prolactin increased by living and working together during COVID? When we met, and if I imagine (counterfactually) she were off the pill, I have to ask: would she still have chosen me? On what basis? Her own free will? Was it pre-determined not to work out? Was I pre-determined always to be alone?

Additional Peeks Behind the Scenes

There are a few motifs to look out for while reading my essay, “Sleepwalking Towards Bethlehem.” Try to keep track of the number of times Kelly is irritated with the narrator. And count the number of times the reader can tell Kelly’s irritated but the narrator seemingly doesn’t realize she is.

Watch out for cognates of the words “determine,” “cause,” “control,” and the like in passages not explicitly about free will.

Some words like “pierce” or “piercing” repeat in ways that build interesting connections to otherwise unconnected ideas.

Are there moments when some passage got your blood up? Are you in control of how these passages affect you? Did you ever find yourself morally outraged? Why? Which came first, those reasons or the outrage?

The first use of alliteration is excused, diagetically, within the text. But it happens again. Can you imagine reasons why?

Why are there so many twenty-dollar words like sphexishness, lalochezia, micturition, clinamen, frisson, disapprobation, benightedly and criminogenesis?

Does the narrator always put his best foot forward? Is the narrator in control of the impression he is making? Because the narrator’s words are in your head, is the narrator in control of the experience you are having? Are you in control of the experience you are having?

Where do your answers to these questions come from?

Another Peek Behind the Scenes

A natural resonance happened between something Kelly said and one of Sapolsky’s statements about “mitigated free will.” Did you catch it?

Good sections cut for length from the free will essay