I'm the writer of several novels, including Lucky Town (Harcourt Brace) and Final Performance (Morrow), and a memoir called The Los Angeles Diaries (HarperCollins). Been published in GQ, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, and most recently (Sept. 2008) Ploughshares.
I've been at it so long, since I was a kid, and I'm 51 now, that I'm not sure exactly why I write anymore. I just do it, maybe out of habit, maybe out of some foolhardy belief that I'm half good at it. More seriously, I write because I feel I have a story to tell and want to make sense of it, my life, this crazy world we live in.
I'm a big fan of Raymond Carver and Tim O'Brien and Flannery O'Connor and David Mamet and Hemingway and Virginia Woolf.
No one has written on James Brown's wall.
No one has written on James Brown's wall.