Even The Presence Of My Kids Cannot,

It's More Like I Write Multiple First Drafts, Handwritten. So With My First Novel, I Wrote Whole Drafts From Different Points Of View. There Are Different Versions Of That Novel In A Drawer On Loose-leaf Sheets. I Won't Even Look At The First Draft While I'm Writing The Second, And I Won't Look At The Second Before Writing The Third.

When I Write A New Draft, I Don't Like To Feel I'm Tied To Any Previous Version. That's Why I Don't Use A Computer To Write. The Text Looks, On The Screen, Too Much Like A Book. It's Not A Book - It's A Bad First Draft Of Something That Could One Day Be A Book.

The Trouble Is That America's Become A Utopia Accessible Only To Some People. Others Get Trampled On. Perhaps It's A Problem Of Size. Robin Dunbar, An Anthropologist, Once Gave The Ideal Number Of A Given Community As 148. That Seems About Right To Me. There's Something Idealistic About That - In A Group Of 148 People You Can Get To Know Everybody.

And She, The New Mother Of A Daughter, Felt A Fierceness Come Over Her That Seized At Her Heart, That Made Her Feel As If Her Bones Were Turned To Steel, As If She Could Turn Herself Into A Weapon To Keep This Daughter Of Hers From Having To Be Hurt By The World Outside The Ring Of Her Arms.

My Son Is Actually Named After Beck, The Musician. We Heard Beck On The Radio And Thought That Was A Good Nickname For A Child. We Named Our Son Beckett So We Could Call Him Beck - We Reverse Engineered. And Then After He Was Born And I Saw The Name On The Birth Certificate I Realized Beckett Was A Really Pretentious Name, Way Too Literary. Luckily He's Grown Into It. We Nearly Named My Second Son Dashiell. Can You Imagine? Beckett And Dashiell. It Would Have Been A Disaster Of Pretentiousness.