BG: I read them a number of times in the original

BG: I read them a number of times in the original — well, the original

translation — before I wrote. Sometimes a celebrity sprang to mind

immediately. Sometimes the matches were more difficult. And sometimes

I zigged after zagging: in other words, I followed a story with an

obvious match (I gave one about a wayward husband to Tiger Woods) with

a more surreal or strange pairing (I put Jack Nicholson and Adam

Sandler at the heart of Chekhov’s Little Trilogy: “The Man in a Case,”

“Gooseberries,” “About Love”).

I've been re-reading some helpful books on writing, especially those that deal with memoir,

autobiography and personal history. William Zinsser in his classic On Writing Well has a chapter,

Writing About Yourself, in which he mentions some memoirs, including one by Alfred Kazin (A Walker in

the City). The esteemed literary critic, according to Zinnser, preferred the literary genre he termed

"personal history" more than others because of the honesty and the willingness of the author to place

themselves into the landscape of American literature through such personal writing.

I like that. Where does your life...and your writing...fit into the landscape of "literature"? The

genre of personal history may be non-fiction, but a well written personal narrative can often be

outstanding literature.