Editor’s Note: Julia Reed’s new book, The House on First Street, is now available! Click here to check it out.

This year, I spent the Fourth of July in exile from my husband, my dog and my friends, holed up in my mother’s beach house on Florida’s Gulf Coast, trying to gain independence from the book deadline that has been hanging over my head for so many months.  I’ve gone slightly crazy. In the interest of simplicity and structure, I have put myself on the “wrinkle-free diet” I found in the kitchen drawer (salmon, oatmeal, melon, berries for breakfast; salmon, salad, melon, berries for lunch; salmon, spinach, melon, berries for dinner) while pathetically opening e-mails from Williams-Sonoma, advertising their mini-burger press and grill pan, and accompanied by a truly gorgeous photograph of tiny hamburgers topped with melting pimento cheese sitting on Parker House rolls.

I was feeling good about being so diligent — and curious to find out if my face would miraculously become wrinkle-free — when I came across a passage from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. I have it with me because I just wrote something for The New York Times Book Review about her new novel The Maytrees, which I recommend, but The Writing Life is the kind of book that seems designed solely to make other writers feel guilty and to bore the rest of the population to death. Anyway, she describes working on a book on the second floor of an empty college library; it’s the Fourth of July, but she professes not to know it (“I had forgotten all of wide space and all of historical time”). She says it took a half hour for the steady pop of fireworks to even register, and when it did, she assumed she was hearing June bugs flying into the glass. She didn’t know what was going on until she opened the blinds, “and it all came exploding in on me at once — ah yes, the world.”

I am apparently way too much of this world to ever attain that level of Zen-like concentration. I know perfectly well that what I’m hearing outside is fireworks, and they are oddly comforting, as are the shouts of the children and the faint strains of the small-town philharmonic soloist singing “God Bless America” on the green. If I were Dillard, I imagine I’d keep the door shut, but then if I were Dillard I probably wouldn’t have taken a break on Sunday to watch “Foyle’s War" (my favorite of the PBS “Mystery!” series) or on Monday for “The Closer” (I am crazy about Kyra Sedgwick and all her detective sidekicks). There was no Internet when Dillard wrote her book but had there been, I’m sure she would not have availed herself of mass e-mails from a kitchen catalog, nor would she have thought — a lot — about those burgers. (When she’s writing she generally eats once a day, she tells us, at night, before a long walk and more writing).

Still, in my own way, I soldier on, piling my bags of spinach and romaine on the checkout counter and resisting the Soap Opera Digest in front of me, with its cover story on “General Hospital,” even though I am worried to death about Jason and Elizabeth. I’m getting there, I’m getting there. And next year, I vow that I will be truly independent, grilling those burgers or some lobsters or whatever happy people grill on the Fourth of July — grilling for my husband and my dog and my friends, who will fill this house. And then we will watch the fireworks and listen to the lady sing.