Behind the scenes of my process writing the free will essay for the Missouri Review

Placeholder: Behind the scenes of my process and experience writing the essay on free will published in the Missouri Review.

Writing and revising the free will article took me years. Yes, years. I corresponded by email with Robert Sapolsky in June 2023. 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. The drama with my first submission, revise and resubmit, and my demurral, happened in March 2024. The piece was finally accepted February 2026.

*

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.

*

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 that never gets us anywhere. For Sapolsky and Harris, however, 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.

*

The essay opens describing Kelly as my fiancee. Throughout the story, there are hints at relationship trouble. My sleep-peeing—sleepwalking and peeing in the closet unconsciously—made Kelly display a pent-up prickliness. (Pent-up because she believed she could not hold me responsible since I did it all unfreely.) During the info-dump about psychology studies which show that people become more aggressive when primed with thoughts about free-will denial, we have a few too many tiffs.

In a longer version of the piece, we break up before the end of the essay. Along the way, 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 live while denying 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 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. [Bare details.] 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. It is not comfortable to think about one’s romantic and sexual and life partner having a low libido. Indeed, when I go to explain the break up to friends who do not know Kelly I say “She said … it was like trying to be romantic with a roommate.” I suspect that it had been that way since the beginning. If I am a detective of the human heart, I’d guess that she moved in with me for a variety of reasons—some of which were economical—and hoped that she would become attracted to me in that way over time.

Related Links