But I’m with Disraeli when he says “Madam, when I want to read a good book, I write one.” I wrote The Last Unicorn for me to read, and for no other reason that I understand just yet; and when I was through with it at last, and off the tightrope, I couldn’t bear to look at the thing. People whose opinions meant a good deal to me liked it, and I was glad, but it didn’t make any difference. I couldn’t see anything but me hacking away on the text‌—‌without grace, without love, without pleasure. Hell of a way to treat a unicorn.

But it’s all right; it’s all right; it’s a good book! I know that so securely now that nothing else matters, even if The Last Unicorn is on the 77-cent tables before school is out. The damn book is full of happiness, and I don’t know where it came from. I swear I don’t remember putting it in.

I have been recounting that story about the story to readers and live audiences for the last forty years. I’ve never said it better‌—‌or even as well‌—‌as I did then, and I’m not going to try to improve on it now. It touches me deeply, in ways I don’t usually talk about, and which I mostly forgot until I re-read the piece when preparing this new edition. I was twenty-nine years old when I wrote that essay, trying to learn how to take care of a wife and three small children‌—‌and all those cats‌—‌on a freelancer’s income. Money went a good deal further then, and a book advance would carry you for awhile; but even so, there were many months when I couldn’t come up with even a hundred dollars for the rent. And the electricity would go out for weeks during the rainy season, and we’d have to take refuge with my sister-in-law in town‌—‌if the car would start, and if we could get down the washed-out, boulder-strewn mountain road. That was the world in which The Last Unicorn was written.

And yet, a year or so after the Chronicle essay was published, when we had moved to a larger house in the Watsonville area‌—‌a mansion by comparison with the red shack‌—‌I was the only one at all wistful about leaving. It took several trips back to load all the animals into the car, and each time I’d walk the empty house and the wild land around it (all paved and gentrified today), lingering in the half-ruined stable in the woods where I slogged away for so long at that damn book…in the back bedroom where I worked at night, or in bad weather…in the kitchen, where I scared the hell out of myself one afternoon, creating the harpy…in my oldest daughter’s bedroom, where I used to tell her the adventures of the world’s worst magician every night….

I was happy there. Frightened‌—‌God, yes!‌—‌but happy. I hadn’t known until that night in the coffeehouse, when I could finally read my own book and see it for what it was.