Author's Comments About You Poor Monster
Authors will often tell you that, just as they do not have favorites among their children, they do not have favorites among their books.
This is complete nonsense.
If Nabokov told you he liked Invitation to A Beheading as much as Lolita, he'd be lying to you.
And, yes, I know he's dead and not in any position to offer such an opinion, but that's not my point.
My point is, get a few drinks in them, and every writer I know will finally admit which book is his favorite.
You don't need to ply me with alcohol. I'll tell you flat out, without hesitation, that You Poor Monster is my favorite. And it isn't even close.
The book, originally called Our Poor Napoleon, was serialized in The City Paper in Baltimore over the course of 36 weeks back in 1993. It was a big, unwieldy mess -- 600-plus pages -- and I set to work revising it.
For almost 10 years.
After all that editing, God only knows if there's anything left of the original book, except for the name of the author. (When I tried to run a computer program to compare the text of the two drafts, I swear I saw smoke pouring out of the little holes in the back of the computer.) It's not only half the size now, but the characters, plot and dialogue have changed dramatically, as have the fates of the various characters.
While two of my other novels were published in the intervening years -- The Locklear Letters and My Wife and My Dead Wife -- it was the publication of You Poor Monster that I was most been looking forward to.
Why?
Because I will never write anything better than You Poor Monster, for reasons that cannot be explained here without giving away too much of the book.
And also, not incidentally, it was this book that I used to propose marriage to my wife. True story. On her birthday dinner last March, I gave her a copy of the manuscript and asked her to turn to the dedication page, where it reads, "For my wife." Fortunately, she didn't say, "I didn't know you were married!" Instead, when she stopped crying, she said yes.
I'm sure this would be my least favorite book if she'd said no.