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But whatever my failure, I have this thing to remember - that I was a pioneer in my profession, just as my grandfathers were in theirs, in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer.

A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.

I could not bear to think that I wrote a five-hundred page novel just because I needed to love my father.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

My father's father wrote for a Philadelphia newspaper and aspired to be a playwright. We had in our house a couple of crazy unproduced plays that he had written. For the one creative writing class I took in my life, I didn't do any writing - I decided that I would plagiarize his terrible play to not fail the class.

When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.

All my life, I've wanted to write a book inspired by my relationship with my grandfather. Basically, my grandfather was a guy who everybody in the family regarded as disagreeable at best. But I loved him intensely. He was wonderful to me.

After seven years of writing - and working many jobs to support my family - I finally got published.

My mother wrote a book. Unfortunately, it ended up being published posthumously. But I'm glad she did, because it taught me a lot about my family that, otherwise, I probably wouldn't know.

My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.