Mrs. Pierce answered one of my burning questions, the one I discussed in “Making It,” which is the mystery of why Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe got divorced. It turns out Hilary said exactly why in a Vanity Fair article by Leslie Bennetts called The Lady’s on a Roll in August of 2006. Where was I? Living in a hole, apparently, because there was a pretty public reason why their marriage ended.

“Would I say that his substance-abuse problem caused our divorce? No,” Swank says. “Would I say that his substance-abuse problem helped us? Absolutely not.”

For her, the deeper wound was the erosion of trust. “I knew something was happening, but I didn’t know what,” she says. “When I found out, it was such a shock, because I never thought he’d keep something from me. And yet, on another level, it was a confirmation of something I was feeling that was keeping us from being completely solid.”

And then there was a part of the article that sent a lightening bolt straight down the center of me. What’s my deepest fear? Secret Eighteen, Revealed.

In retrospect, however, she’s grateful that she and Lowe never had children. “In hindsight, you realize why you didn’t do it,” she says. “Neither of us was ready. We had too many things we were working through. Because of our troubled pasts, I don’t think we wanted to have a family until it was the right time and the right decision for both of us. I really want to have a family someday, but I’m certainly not going to rush into doing it.”

I want to make it, and so did they. I want to wait to have children until there are less things to work through, so did they. Am I, are we, like them?