The better you know someone, the less well you often see them (and the less well they can therefore be transferred into fiction). They may be so close as to be out of focus, and there is no operating novelist to dispel the blur.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

In 1980, I published my first novel, in the usual swirl of unjustified hope and justified anxiety.

I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. ...the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. [p. 68]

And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability.

The land of embarrassment and breakfast.

Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic. And for this serious task of imaginative discovery and self-discovery, there is and remains one perfect symbol: the printed book.