I was at college. After an all-night party I was walking through a neighborhood of student housing. Being something of a petty criminal myself in those days, I had an eye out for anything that might make a nice addition to my life. This particular morning, on the porch of one of the ramshackle houses, I found a paperback copy of TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE, by Norman Mailer.

I took it because I liked the cover art – a colorful photo of a man standing on some stairs at sunset – not because I knew anything about Mailer. TOUGH GUYS grabbed me right away. It’s the story of Tim Madden, a kept man. He’s alone, drinking heavily, and finds himself a suspect in one murder, and later a party to several others. Madden is, on the one hand, a typical tough male protagonist. On the other hand, he is a man with profound doubts about his own masculinity. He, and the people he meets, are at best misfits, and at worst utterly amoral. The action takes place during late fall in the all-but-abandoned summer resort of Provincetown, Massachusetts. The writing is moody and dark, becoming nightmarish as one corpse after another begins to appear out of the autumn mists.

I thought, ‘Mailer really gets it. Why doesn’t everybody get it?’ It was the first time I remember thinking that this was a writing style I wanted to mimic. I read that book over and over. It became magical to me. I would open it and read passages to myself like they were scripture. I kept the book for years, long after it started to disintegrate. The cover came off. The pages started falling out. I held the whole thing together with rubber bands.

Eventually, I left it at a book swap in a backpacker hotel in Portugal. I’ll bet some scruffy kid picked it up, read it and thought, ‘Wow! I want to write like this.’