"I worried that giving my time over so fully to crosswords would somehow prove symptomatic of relapse."

"But I uncrossed the wires—puzzles ≠ disembodiment ≠ anorexia ≠ relapse—and took the job. Four days a week, I rode the Metro-North train from the city to Pleasantville, New York, to join [NYT crossword editor Will] Shortz at his home office.... Shortz is known for editing up to ninety per cent of the clues in a crossword submission, tailoring its references to suit a desired level of difficulty and an imagined audience—one that could be as broad or as narrow as Shortz wanted it to be.... We had markedly different frames of reference—he was a sixty-two-year-old who had grown up on a horse farm in Indiana, and I was a twenty-three-year-old who grew up in Tribeca—and the collision of our backgrounds made for good conversation and better crosswords. One of my proudest moments was getting him to rewrite the clue for bro (traditionally, 'Sister’s sib' or 'Sibling for sis') as 'Preppy, party-loving, egotistical male, in modern lingo.' But, when I constructed a puzzle that prominently featured the term male gaze in the grid, he insisted that the phrase wouldn’t be in the average Times solver’s lexicon; it wasn’t 'puzzle-worthy.' (Although I lost that battle in 2014, the term appeared three years later, under his editorship.)"

 
Writes Anna Shechtman in "Escaping Into the Crossword Puzzle/If, by the dumb logic of my eating disorder, I was losing something special about myself by gaining weight, I was bolstering my self-esteem by creating crosswords, something I knew to be difficult, precocious, and exceptional" (The New Yorker).