The narrator of The Radiance shares Akhtar’s name and much of his life. After leaving New York for a small Hudson Valley town, he ends up getting hit by a pickup truck during a bike ride. When he awakens from the subsequent coma, something is different: things appear lit from within and bathed in silence; and he’s impotent. The luminous state has since deepened after an evening during which his cousin, Tanveer, disclosed a terrible family secret about his father. Lucie Neroponte, the friend who calls him in the passage below, teaches at a local college; an essay about the affair she had with her own professor when she was twenty made her name.

Like Lucie, I had qualms about teaching, though mine had nothing to do with eros. Rather, I worried that the security of a job in the academy might dull me as a writer. By my mid-twenties, I’d begun to see a pattern: an inclination toward fantasy over fact, a tendency to cling to illusion long past the point any evidence could justify. Reality always won—usually after the painful humiliations to which my delusions led. I was too compelled by the comforts of my imagination—which was, of course, why I wanted to be a writer in the first place. But those same attachments, I came to see, kept my work from feeling real.

Early experiences in the theater proved salubrious. Humiliation was a reliable corrective, and I found that the ruthless impersonality of a paying audience made the shame bearable. I learned from jokes that didn’t work and story threads that didn’t track. Mid-show walkouts and anemic applause hurt, yes, but not so much that I couldn’t learn to heed them. My skits and plays got better. I grew as a writer. As my peers took on teaching jobs with health care, pension plans, and just enough to live on, I was tempted to follow. But I worried about what I might lose in finding protection from the forced encounter with audiences. Plying my trade in front of paying crowds without a safety net, I concluded, was the only way forward.

It was a path that would be protracted and painful, and all the “usual words,” to quote James Baldwin, applied to my struggles too: “discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” I endured—and in my case, it was only by the grace of what I gleaned from audiences that I found my way. The value of crowdsourced wisdom, then, was the only lesson I felt qualified to share when I finally accepted an offer to teach young playwrights at a university in St. Louis.

It was the summer Michael Brown was shot; a few miles north of campus, Ferguson was ablaze. I sublet a place within walking distance of Dred Scott’s grave. Twice a week, I rode the bus to a dim room, barely larger than the table around which my students and I sat reading aloud from their work. I couldn’t get past how managed and opaque our responses were compared to the clarifying disinterest of a paying audience. Without the help of an audience, we all discovered how little I actually knew about what I did. When the workshop ended, my parting remarks were an apology by way of exhortation: My weaknesses as a teacher, I explained, were perhaps best seen as extensions of my strength as a writer: my trust in the public. I urged them to dispense with the class critiques and get their work in front of paying crowds. The paying part was essential. Our art was not a gift but a form of commerce. To know the audience’s truth, I told them, it had to feel owed pleasure for what it had paid. When I left St. Louis at the summer’s end, I didn’t see myself teaching again.

More than a half dozen years later, and just a month after that dark and miraculous evening with my cousin Tanveer, Lucie called to ask if I might be interested in teaching a newly orphaned section of creative writing at the college. I was surprised to hear myself tell her that I was—and embarrassed to admit it.

“Who’d want to teach after listening to you talk about it?” I heard how harsh it sounded. “Sorry—that came out wrong.”

“No, I get it. I complain too much. But it’s the closest thing I’ve ever felt to a calling.” She paused. “A good student, a really good student, that’s still the best part. It happens. Not often, but it does. So don’t take me too seriously.”