Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors

by Sarah Stodola

For Price’s 2008 novel, Lush Life, the going out meant heading down to New York City’s Lower East Side, where the novel takes place, and talking to whoever would give him the time of day. He knew he wanted a story that incorporated the myriad worlds coexisting in the legendary neighborhood: hipster, immigrant, yuppie; housing projects and lingering ethnic enclaves; the major and minor players in crime and punishment. He spent three years observing the neighborhood, hanging out in Schiller’s Liquor Bar, which would become the model for the main character’s workplace and the image on the book’s cover; in the nearby projects, where a good chunk of the action takes place; and with the remaining Orthodox Jews, the Chinese immigrants, the cops—always looking for those quirks that give a place its texture.141 He found himself particularly rapt by the jarring juxtapositions of gentrification, such as two side-by-side tenements he discovered that from the outside had nearly identical weathered brick facades. Behind one, though, was a yuppie couple’s carefully redesigned apartment; behind the other, a boardinghouse for Chinese immigrants, who slept on narrow boards, several to a small, dank room—two worlds separated by nothing more than a century-old wall and, at the same time, by an enormous, less tangible chasm. These were precisely the anecdotes he’d been looking for.