I owe my life to a horse. After her favorite stallion in the Royal Danish Stables was bought by a breeding farm in Kentucky, my mother asked for a job there and crossed the Atlantic. She met my father, a diplomat, at a party in Cincinnati. Their marriage broke up in Brazil just as I was born. My father was having an affair. I was her fourth child. As a single mother, she still made our lives magical. But when she died young, we learned quickly that life is brutal. Magic and horror are the stuff of fairy tales. But they come from everyday moments: coincidences, charm, sudden malevolence. I’ve lived a privileged life. Not one of money—quite the opposite—but rich in experience. When I was five years old, I met John Glenn in Liberia during a world tour after his one orbit around the Earth. I shook his hand. At ten the American ambassador was machine-gunned to death two blocks away from me in Guatemala City. So in a way I had already touched the apogee of human experience and its ultimate decline.
You don’t live apart from your dreams. Because of John Glenn’s orbit I aspired to be an astronaut. But the assassination of Gordon Mein, its repercussions and the way it echoed in my memory, put me on another path. Why was he killed, and why did I happen to be close-by? I wondered what it all meant: how these random events fit together. These are the kinds of questions that made me want to be a novelist. It is a great advantage in life to know what you want. But don’t get me wrong: I have handled my career as a writer very poorly, from the perspective of having a career at all. It has been a hidden vocation. I made a living doing other things. I wrote about film for a local paper and some magazines in the 80’s, worked as a security guard, then as an art handler driving trucks. That side-step led to a web of artists, collectors, politicians, and businessmen. Many of the colleagues and clients I encountered over the decades were geniuses. So I stumbled, in the role of a servant, into a kind of elevated world. That has been my life. In the meantime I wrote my books. Each has a different story, texture, and place: but hopefully they embody the wonder and terror we all encounter after being born.
