I Think It's A Very Bad Idea

The Thing Is, For Me, As A Fiction Writer, I Don't Think There's A Finer Testament To Our Lives Than This Thing That's Being Spurned - The Emotional Intelligence, The Ethics, The Beauty. It's All There. It's All So Fully Contained In A Novel That Succeeds. But At The Same Time, I Understand The Impulse To Put Away Childish Things.

The Whole Time I Was Writing, I Had To Fight My Normal Inclination To Be Funny, To Sort Of Patch Humor In, In Order To Convey All Of The Disruptions Of The Disease To The Family Dynamic, The Loss Of Individuality, The Impact On Professional Life, And The Sanity Of The Main Character. Of Course, That's Not To Say It Never Sneaks In; There's Some Black Comedy In There, Like When He Shows Up To Court Wearing A Bicycle Helmet And Won't Take It Off.

I Always Knew From The Beginning That This Was The Only Way To Write Then We Came To The End - That It Had To Be In First - Person Plural If It Was Going To Illustrate How The Individual Becomes Part Of The Collective. I Had No Interest In Writing The Book In A More Conventional Voice. It Goes Back To That Fascination I Had With Telling A Story In Multiple Ways. It Was The Only Choice I Gave Myself, Really - I Said "this Is It, Pal. If You Can't Tell A Story This Way, You're Going To Have To Abandon The Book. Write It This Way Or Give Up."

A Multifaceted Writer, Very Easy On The Surface To Pin Down But Incredibly Difficult Once You Actually Read Him With Any Depth.

We Told Him To Get On With It. We Liked Wasting Time, But Almost Nothing Was More Annoying Than Having Our Wasted Time Wasted On Something Not Worth Wasting It On.