FAQs
Your book is coming out soon. How does it feel?
It feels like a book. Kind of papery.
No, how do you feel?
Oh, that! Pretty much the way you're supposed to feel when your dreams are coming true. I'm very, very happy.
Your editor is clearly someone with exquisite taste. Do you mind telling us who is it?
No problem. It's Andrew Corbin at Doubleday / Broadway.
This is your first book. Have you ever published anything else?
Yes. I wrote several articles in The European Lawyer and The International Business Lawyer. They're deathly dull, so I wouldn't read them before operating heavy machinery if I were you.
Where do you do your writing?
Either at home in my apartment in Paris, or at the library. My apartment has a tiny little room under the eaves where I set up an office and that's where I do most of my work. Otherwise, I go to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and write there.
What, you don't write in cafes? Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
In theory, yes. But one of my favorite things to do is glare at people who absently drum their fingertips against the tabletop, and that kind of glaring only makes sense in libraries, not in cafes.
Do you write longhand or on a computer?
I write directly on a computer. I have a laptop that I bought because it was shinier than all the other computers in the store.
How'd that work out?
It didn't. The computer hates me. I'd like to hate it back, but I'm afraid that it's learning how to read my thoughts, so I don't want to say anything too bad about it.
Speaking of technology, your website is fabulous. Given that you can't work your cell phone, how did you manage to come up with such a spiffy site?
I had some help from Becky, my Digital Life Coach. A lot of help.
Now, tell us, where did you grow up?
I was born and raised in Schooley's Mountain, New Jersey.
Never heard of it.
Schooley's Mountain is about fifty-five miles west of New York City, near Hackettstown. Hackettstown, in turn, is famous because the remains of a wooly mammoth were discovered there. The wooly mammoth is now on display at the Harvard Museum of Natural History where it is incorrectly identified as the "Harvard Mastodon." Nice try, guys. It's the Hackettstown Mastodon. It's also the last candidate from Hackettstown to get into Harvard.
What did you want to be when you were little?
I wanted to be the guy who reads the news on TV. And I still would, if they'd let me roll my eyes and add jerky, sarcastic quotation marks around things I don't agree with.
Speaking of jobs, you worked for a hideous law firm for almost ten years. Was it hell on earth?
Yes. Yes it was.