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in British Columbia. So he had achieved none of my three goals.
    The summer before college, Cockroaches Convene blew my mind. I read along as Proudfoot tramped through the cemeteries, and then I went back and read it all again. But Jim Dinwiddle, the man who invented all that, was found dead by Memphis police in a Dumpster in 1978, with a plastic bag taped around his head. Likewise, 0 for 3.
    After the impossibly good Well Bred, Helen Eisenstadt morphed into a gnomish far-left scold, whose essays about “oilocracy” appeared in the shrillest of alternative newspapers. I don’t know what became of Kim Szydlowski ( Quiet, You Bastard ) or T. T. Hauser ( Storm Drain ), but they were never on TV, so doubtless grim fates had met them, too.
    The financial success of an author is inversely proportional to the literary worth of the book. Take the authors of the Bible. Those garment-rending saps ate cockroach dung in caves in the Gaza desert and scrawled tortured epiphanies on papyrus before being stoned to death or dying in plagues. Or Herman Melville, who barely staved off debts by assessing tariffs on crates of importedwool in New York Harbor for twenty years. Meanwhile Pamela McLaughlin, whose books can be read and forgotten in the time it takes for ordered Chinese food to arrive, flies in a private helicopter to the Caribbean island she owns. She named it—and this is not a joke, I read it in Vanity Fair —“Bellissima Haven.”
    Rule 2: Write a popular book. Do not waste energy making it a good book.
    I decided to head to the big bookstores in downtown Boston. There the behavior of book buyers could best be studied. Grabbing Hobart’s two-week-old New York Times Book Review from my room, I headed downstairs.
    While waiting for the subway, I saw a woman with cat’seye glasses reading Dexter Eagan’s Cracked Like Teeth , which is what cat’s-eye-glasses-wearing women were reading back then. Sadly a memoir wasn’t an option for me, because my youth had been tragically happy. Mom never had the foresight to hit me or set me to petty thieving or to enlist us in a survivalist cult. I wasn’t even from the South, which would’ve bought a few dozen pages. Lying wouldn’t work; these days memoir police seem to emerge and make sure you truly had it bad. And the bar for bad is high—reviewers have no patience for standard-issue alcoholics and battered wives anymore.
    I spent the train ride scouring my memory for an angle. Once a wasp had flown up my pants and stung me several times. Sometimes when I was a kid “Funny Mom” would appear, singing Patsy Cline and wanting hugs, and I later learned this was drunk Mom. One February vacation I’d spent at a vegan farm in Vermont, cross-country skiing with my lesbian Aunt Evelyn and her friends. They’d made me write a prayer to the Earth ondegradable sorghum paper and leave it in a crevice in a boulder. Still, pretty thin cheese.
    Rule 3: Include nothing from my own life.
    My experiences were dull. If I’d led an interesting life, I’d be a smuggler or a ranch hand or an investigative reporter penetrating deep within the sinister world of Tokyo’s yakuza.
    Emerging from the T at Downtown Crossing, I strode down Washington Street and into Borders Books & Music.
    Placed like an altar for entering customers to pass was a table arranged with neat stacks: BEST-SELLING AUTHORS . Preston was there, and Pamela, and Nick Boyle. Most fascinating was Gerry Banion’s Sageknights of Darkhorn. The cover art was like the geometry-class doodle of an unsocialized ten-year-old: a square-bodied king wielding a crude sword with his stumpy arms from the back of a horse that appeared palsied. Both man and beast were lumpier than is natural—the king’s left leg had a bonus knee.
    I ran my finger along the smooth covers. These weren’t novels you creased with rereading, and pressed into the hands of trusted friends, and carried around in beaten backpacks. These were tidy candy-package novels you