Everything was revised or overwritten, both initially, at the time of first publication, and then for this book. I don’t know if my most recent thought is my best thought, but I tend to give it the benefit of the doubt. What starts in improvisation, which is my basic method of composition for essays, has the benefit of lots of later reflection. I’m not saying I always revise but that I always rethink. I can’t help myself. I am a man of constant second and third thoughts ( and I’ve seen trouble all my days ). And often the key revisions for me are paratextual in nature: the footnoting, the acknowledgments, the visual layout of the paragraphs, the organization of the sections, and all the issues that come up in copyediting. Endless fussing. I was very lucky to work with Carol Saller, author of The Subversive Copyeditor and The Chicago Manual of Style Online’s Q&A. Since my essays are filled with linguistic anomalies, rebarbative inconsistencies, and counter-conventional turns of phrase, ferreting out my errors from my mistakes takes a verbal sleuth. More often than not I fool myself. It’s great fun when copy-editing is taken as collaborative and constructive rather than punitive and regulatory. (Carol even makes a cameo appearance in one of the footnotes .) But then it’s surely Susan Bee who catches most of my errors and points out many of my mistakes, too. I seem to make more unintended typographical errors as each day passes; Susan has her hands full and I am grateful she has not yet given up on me.

I love editing probably more than I love writing. Writing does feel in many ways like I’m making mud or making clay, material that I then, in the editing process, can shape and make into whatever I want it to be. But, until I make that mud or whatever, there’s nothing else I can make. After finishing a rough draft, I go back and start rewriting oftentimes within the draft, which is kind of a bad habit because it means that I’ll take more shortcuts. With the first novel, I started to do something that I think I’ll do forever because I love it so much, which is reading out loud. I probably read my novel out loud like six to 10 times.

So I don’t ever feel the urge to kind of rewrite the work.

There were things that I wanted to add. Things that I wanted to take out. Things I wanted to correct. Things had changed for me as a writer, as an author, as a thinker.

I want to make a movie. I’ve got a very strong movie in my head. And I’ve spoken to some movie people and I’ve said, “If you say it’s no go, I’ll drop it.” They said — two different people — “Do the script.” So I’m encouraged enough to do that.

I look back on it with a sense of achievement at having been part of that tremendous process.

He’s been a total delight. So I now have a son of 41, a son of 40 and one of four.

I’d been introduced to Freud through all this because I couldn’t understand why is it so difficult to be brave. There was something inside me that wanted to collaborate all the time with the people who wanted to destroy me, and I was searching for it, and I found there was a thing called the unconscious that everybody has. And you’ve got to be in touch with the unconscious to understand a lot of your behavior. And I read through volume after volume after volume of the collected works of Sigmund Freud.

What are we fighting for, if not the right to express our humanity in all its forms, including the sense of fun and capacity for love and tenderness and our appreciation of the beauty of the world?

I would try to keep myself going by inventing games, and I would sing songs, a song beginning with “A,” “Always.” “Because,” “Charmaine,” “Daisy,” go through the alphabet. ... I would try to remember the states in the United States of America.