It became clear what might be interesting to say on a panel for people simultaneously interested in bringing more adolescent boys to literature and blocking access to the subject matter known to particularly interest that same slice of the population.

And then it was done, gruntingly, warm and sticky with me not knowing what it was—my biggest clue to just how young I was when this happened—that was on me. More people came into the room, and on top of whatever bad struggling thing that had just happened to me was layered a newer, more familiar struggle, that of hurriedly pretending everything was

“It’s turning into an orgy,” was my go-to joke for such friendly, unwieldy times, until I was publicly chastised by another children’s author for saying such a horrid thing. (By strange coincidence, I had written a critical review of her work some years previous.) “It probably didn’t occur to you,” she said, “that some of the women in the lobby

We each have one, a literary canon, and we make it ourselves, not out of what is respectable or prestigious or prominent or lasting or moral or even well-made. We make it out of enthusiasm, out of what we love. A sustained thread of enthusiasm, to which I try to connect myself, conjuring it up when I’m writing, from the books I have with me, on the

Then I would compose, on the typewriter of the Computer Science Department at the City College of San Francisco—because that’s what I had on my desk, at the Computer Science Department, a typewriter—

In this whole book I’ve tried to lay out my canon for anyone who might be interested, little pieces entangled necessarily with little pieces of my life, because of this ecstasy.

The adults around them are corrupt, and as the children become adults as well, they’re corrupted, too. We all are. The more we participate in the world, the more culpable we become for the mess and troubles we face.

opening a book I thought would be something like the spooky books by Stephen King or V. C. Andrews I read sometimes,

old books and movies with suspicious millionaires, secret societies, murder and intrigue in mansions and garrets, not quite pinpointable in time or place past a certain old-fashioned European vibe—