Had Picasso been in my family, he would have ended up an accountant. When engineering is considered exciting, there isn’t much room for a painting of a dancing banana, like the one I made for my cousin Ali and never saw again. Mine is a family with one successful author, my cousin Mehdi, whose book Process-Centered Software Engineering Environments is everyone’s favorite, although no one in the family, with the possible exception of Mehdi himself, has read it.

With my muse dead and buried, I moved on to college, marriage, and motherhood. This explains why two decades after my last hobby, when I announced that I was writing stories, my parents were speechless.

When I found an agent, they didn’t react. When I got a contract with Random House, they showed no reaction. “You have heard of Random House, haven’t you?” I asked.

“No,” they replied.

“It’s a very big deal,” I told them.

One month later, I received a phone call from my father, out of breath with excitement. “What’s that place called that wants your stories?” he asked.

“Random House,” I told him.

“They’re HUGE!” he exclaimed.

My father had apparently been watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon with my niece, or the other way around, and one of the characters was reading a book published by Random Mouse. Seeing the publishing house mentioned in a cartoon was a water-shed moment. From that day on, my dad was very excited. Daily phone calls ensued.

“Make sure you mention that I bought a condo in Newport Beach.”

“Did I ever tell you about the time I flunked a guy even though he offered me a bribe?”

“Do you have fifteen minutes? I just remembered a story.”

“The last chapter should be about me.”

When the stories were finished, I let him read them. He loved them all except for one, “America, Land of the Free.”

“That chapter makes me look cheap,” he complained.

“Enjoying freebies is a universal experience,” I assured him.

Displaying his usual generosity of spirit, he agreed to let the story stay “if it’s important to the book.” He did complain, however, that he now felt self-conscious at Price Club. “There are no pictures in this book, are there?”

The book was completed in the summer of 2002 and was slated for release the following summer. My father did not like this. “If it’s finished, why do we have to wait so long?”