After that, I was a writer. First I wrote rip-offs of Kerouac, and then I found a voice. It wasn’t much of a voice at first, but it was the only voice I had, and over time it got louder. It was hard to work out what to do with that voice at first, though. I wrote some science fiction stories and someone printed them. I wrote some horror stories and someone printed them, too. I was just about to try my hand at true romance when the voice said, “Jake, what is this? You have to figure out who you are before you write anything else.”

So I got on the bike and I went—you guessed it—on the road. I rode from Detroit to New York. I went to smoky clubs and I saw the kids who were kicking out jazz and replacing it with protest. They were protesting about nuclear war, which seemed kind of pointless when there was so much else to protest about. I went out west and saw the Pacific. Nobody was protesting in Los Angeles, but I did meet Ginsberg in San Francisco. He told me to “keep writing.” I told him he was too fat for me.

And then I came home. My pa was dead and my ma was drunk. I sold the motorbike and married a local girl and worked nights at the steel factory to support us. During the day she worked in a movie theater and I wrote. I had a plan. I was going to write The Great American Novel. It was a simple plan, and it didn’t work out. First of all I wrote The Worst American Novel, then The Shortest American Novel, and finally I wrote The Okay American Novel, and someone printed it.

After that, it was easier. The voice and me were getting on okay. The voice told me what to write, and I wrote it. The books got better, even if they didn’t sell. Then one day, the publisher phoned me and said I needed to give them a hit or they were going to drop me. I said I’d see what I could do.

What I could do, it turned out, was nothing. The voice was no good. It was too quiet, too ordinary. It was like someone you were close to when you were a kid, fun to hang out with and kind of provocative, but when you’re a man, when you need men around you, it’s no use. I needed a different voice.

Then one night, after I’d finished my shift at the steel factory, I went to a bar, just to relax before I got home and had to listen to the wife telling me all about her day, which was always the same day, except they showed different movies. They changed the movies but she never changed her day.