Comfortable as I was in my new house, rich as I felt, I didn’t have time to write. Not at first. I bargained for time, I made trade-offs for time, and I eventually sold this book to buy time. “I think writers are often terrifying to normal people—that is, to nonwriters in a capitalist system—for this reason: there is almost nothing they will not sell in order to have the time to write,” Alexander Chee observes. “Time is our mink, our Lexus, our mansion.”
