He agreed to put me on the list, but he didn’t mince words: The likelihood of my getting the gig fell somewhere between winning the lottery and surviving an asteroid impact. For one thing, I’d published zero books. At the time, I was an editor at The Paris Review, a literary magazine that I didn’t know if Prince had read or even heard of—no doubt his worst-selling album had found a wider audience than the Review ever had. I was twenty-nine. Next to the more seasoned hands up for the job, many of whom had loved Prince for longer than I’d been alive, I was a guaranteed also-ran.
