Beneath the stylish prose and the incisive, fluent engagement with subjects of worldly intellectual talk lie subterranean debts that obliquely reveal other preoccupations.
"I would be nauseated for days leading up to a talk, lying down, unable to practice or to think, which of course made the anxiety worse," she says.
At the heart of these talks lies the question of whether Pakistan can and will use its leverage with the Taliban to bring them to a political settlement.
An anti-war protester will try to paint a false picture by talking lies on a subject he knows nothing about.
The true obstacles to talks lie in the two sides' internal troubles.
That may mean that more tedious and difficult talks lie ahead.
But more difficult talks lie ahead on what to do with the North's stockpile of nuclear fuel and its latest batch of spent fuel rods.
"Dan, after all those hours of talking, lying back on John's bed, Christ-like, with his arms flung open, weeping for what the United States has turned into".
