I was swimming in my swimming pool when 'The Secret Lovers' popped entire into my head. I got out, dried off, went upstairs, and finished the book in about 50 days.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
That was the - It was an exciting time because it was as though I was sort of tied up in a paper bag or in a gunny sack with a rope around the neck of it, and all of a sudden with the acceptance of that first book everything sort of spilled out!
In course of time my first novel appeared. It was a love story.
When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity.
It was at a vividly bad time in Norman Mailer's life that I met him, and a sort of water-treading time in mine. He had stabbed his wife, and I was a copy boy at Time magazine.
Having a day job again I found really kind of fueled my fiction, because it became almost this forbidden thing where I had to sneak off and do it in private.
At a pool party, with everybody around, a guy and I had sex in the pool, but nobody knew it.
Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.
My second husband encouraged me to go to a writing group at our local theatre. It was my 'coming out of the closet' moment.
I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat - just to get the darned thing finished.
One day at my grandmother's house, I discovered 'The Secret Garden' and read it. This was the first book I found entirely for myself, and I cherished it.