I.
Once upon a time writers were all hot, or if they weren’t hot they were striking and sharply-dressed, and they all lived in Manhattan and London and everyone slept with everyone else and threw drinks in one another’s faces at parties and you could live for ten years off the proceeds of a modest bestseller, all the while commanding a corner table at Elaine’s between Warren Beatty and Henry Kissinger. The New Yorker paid $50,000 in today’s money for a short story and only slightly less for a listicle on what pants to buy this season. Dick Cavett would call you up, personally, three times a day, and beg you to fly to Hollywood and dispense a few bon mots for his viewers. Sorry, Dickie, you’d say, I’m veritably chained to the old Selectric, and anyway I find television talk shows rather a shallow sort of thing, don’t you agree?
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