A funny story about the birth of the book

One December, Terry, my wife, suggested that my writing was good enough to be aired on N.P.R.'s All Things Considered. I doubted she was right but the next day, while between patients, I looked up the web site. At the time the site asked potential contributors to mail a tape with three essays to the address listed and they claimed they would get back to contributors within 6 weeks.

The next night I made a tape of a few of my essays and mailed them in. Nothing happened.

Months went by. Seasons. One day I got a call from an Amy Dickinson who said she was from N.P.R. When I heard where she was from I immediately responded, "I sent in that pledge." She sounded confused and then explained that she was from All Things Considered and that she wanted to aire one of my essays. We taped it the next afternoon in one of the University of ArizonaÕs taping studios. I submitted another one a few months later and it aired as well.

After the second essay aired a man left a message on my home machine suggesting that he was "Horace Butkiss" from Random House. I was half way through dialing the phone number when I realized it was just the best man from my wedding tormenting me. Horace Butkiss? So the next day, when a woman left a message in our clinic claiming to be a literary agent I laughed and wasn't going to call. Then I realized that my friend was too lazy to look up the number of the clinic and phoned back. She turned out to be quite real.

I worked with my agent, Judith Riven, for 6 months, sending essays back and forth. In January of 1999 she mailed 80 pages of the manuscript (all I'd completed) to 20 houses. She called me three days later and told me to come to New York. In total I met with 7 editors from a variety of houses. After some bidding excitement, the book sold to Harmony, a division of Random House (my friend was right about the house), who will publish the hardcover and Vintage, who will publish the paperback.

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Last updated April 18, 2003