I'd Excluded New York From My Writing,

Those Promises We Make To Ourselves When We Are Younger, About How We Mean To Conduct Our Adult Lives, Can It Be True We Break Every Last One Of Them? All Except For One, I Suppose: The Promise To Judge Ourselves By Those Standards, The Promise To Remember The Child Who Would Be So Appalled By Compromise, The Child Who Would Find Jadedness Wicked.

The Arts And A Belief In The Values Of The Civil Rights Movement, In The Overwhelming Virtue Of Diversity, These Were Our Religion. My Parents Worshipped Those Ideals.

I Had Always Wanted To Be A Writer Who Confused Genre Boundaries And Who Was Read In Multiple Contexts.

I Don't Know Why The World Has Changed So Much That Writers Are Now Expected To Appear In Public And Talk About Their Work. It's Something I Find Very Difficult. And Yet, One Does Have Some Sense Of Responsibility Towards One's Publishers, To The People Trying To Sell The Book.

It's Impossible To Overstate How My Relationship To Music Forms A Preserve For The Esoteric Or Even Spiritual Aspect Of My Relationship To Cultural Stuff, To Human Expressivity... It's A Safe Enclosure.