Theo Downes-Le Guin, son of the late author Ursula K. Le Guin, remembers well the second-floor room where his mother worked on some of her most famous novels.

Or at least how it seemed from the outside.

“She was very present and accessible as a parent,” he says. “She was very intent on not burdening her children with her career. … But the times when she was in there to do her writing, we knew that we needed to let her have her privacy.”