The Wages of Gin

As Saul Bellow said, “Fiction is the higher autobiography.” This “memoir” is a work of fictionalized fact. I have used fiction to tell the truth in order to avoid negative consequences. It’s true that I have endured the writing life documented here. I toiled as you do under the autocrat’s hammer. I routinely drifted off into homicidal dreams, but in fact I never murdered anyone. All else is true. The book characterizes people I have known and jobs I have held as I toiled away in high school and college, just like you, as well as in newspaper and magazine publishing, advertising, and e-commerce during the halcyon three-martini lunch days of the Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, the no more long lunch Nineties, and the can’t afford lunch anymore Two Thousands. Cheers!