In any art form, people have been equally fascinated not only with the skill of a practitioner but also the lifestyle embodied by the artist. For me, great writers come to mind: Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway. People loved these authors not just for their books, but for the way in which

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I read new fiction, as I knew writers must, but the stuff that everyone was talking about back then was written by men - Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, John Updike, Philip Roth. I read them dutifully, and admired them, but I couldn’t see any way into that world.