To me, there's nothing on earth other than women. It's why I get out of bed every morning.

When I was a kid, Eisenhower had been President forever, and all of a sudden, everything in the world was all about Jack Kennedy. I was 12, interested in politics; my father was from Massachusetts, had an accent like Kennedy.

I'm not interested in popular culture. I hate Quentin Tarantino. I rarely go to movies. I hate rock 'n' roll. I work. I think. I listen to classical music. I brood. I like sports cars.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

I needed to address that I've had some profound moral shifts in my own life.

I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn't stand to be ignored.

History is a state of yearning. I yearn for Kay Lake throughout this entire thing. There's an essay I've written where I talked about living in the past. There's a whole motif in the book of then and now. And I lived there.