I put the last touches on The White Devil on a laptop in the Fall. The book will be published in May. It is now January and New York is buried in snow.
I am in that weird zone—beginning to emotionally separate from The White Devil, while waiting to hear what anybody thinks of it.
This book consumed two, almost three years of my life.
As with my last book, one of the strangest things about writing a book is recalling what I was doing when I began, and when I finished.
When I started this one I was just starting my first “executive-level” job, and feeling both ambition-fueled and terrified.
I remember taking my first business trip with my new boss (at the time) and carrying a biography of Byron with me. The ideas that snowballed into the book were just beginning.
I had a child.
I bought a house.
I flogged the first chapter for months, trying to get it just right, before moving on to the rest of the book.
I listened to songs which, to me, were the book’s soundtrack—Comfortably Numb, by Pink Floyd, for one—which were the soundtrack to my own morose teenage years, over and over again, and was overwhelmed by the emotion they conjured up. I was equally overcome by gratitude that I had worked my way out of some of the despairing traps of those years. I did this on New York City buses, going up Third Avenue.
And now I am forty.
This is probably rather a late time in life to overcome teenage despair.
I have always been something of a late bloomer.
It’s cool. I’m in touch with it.
Soon this book will be in people’s hands.
I receive emails sent by kind readers who enjoyed my first book. It’s gratifying that people see different angles in a novel. For my first book, one person might grab onto the religious content. One person might identify with the feminist mother character. Another—surprisingly—found a host of buried Beatles references. (Who knew?)
It delights me that for a few hours, I can be the voice in your head. I am not apologetic about it. I put all my stuff into these books.
In this one, I fell in love with Persephone Vine.
I craved those lonely, London tube rides.
I tasted acidic mint sauce.
I smoked.
I acted in plays.
I witnessed a murder.
I chewed match-heads. (You’ll have to get far into the book to find this one.)
And now, I hand it over to you.
Like a ghost, I am finished with the life of this book.
But I will appear to you in apparitions and echoes.
