Like almost every writer I know, I was an avid childhood reader: Tom Sawyer, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, etc. The moment at which I decided to try my own hand is indelible: as a romantic-hearted, muddle-headed fifteen-year-old, I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (itself a romantic-hearted, muddle-headed novel) on the brick terrace of my father’s house in Malibu. Sunday afternoon. I lowered the book to my lap, stared out at the Pacific, lit an Export A cigarette (for I was a pretentious and foolhardy fifteen-year-old as well), and thought, I could do this. I’d LIKE to do this. My initial reasons, perhaps, were egomaniacal, but I found in writing, as nowhere else, a recognition of both the world as I yearned for it and of my own vulnerable adolescent being. The first time I sat down to write a piece of fiction, I was flooded with terror, a sense of hopelessness, and a tiny spark of exhilaration. I was like a castaway armed with two sticks. Neither the impulse nor the gesture has changed much. Day in, day out, in the face of variable conditions, I try to generate the old friction. To tamp down the contours of my egotism, strike one bit of wood against another, and thus to burn.

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