The Write Start: "Back then, I thought a teaching job was the ultimate reward for writing a good book. I thought maybe I could publish a couple of books, they wouldn’t sell, but they’d be nicely reviewed in the Times, and we’d move to some nice college town and have the nice middle-class life we’d always thought we wanted. But when I did finally do some teaching, it completely ate me up. I was spending three days a week on one class, and it just didn’t seem compatible with writing novels in the long run."