I had never really meant to write this book. I’d been working on another novel for some time and I had yet to admit to myself that it wasn’t really coming together. Sometimes books behave (one I wrote in six months), mostly they don’t (one took me 15 years). This was the beginning of the pandemic, I was stuck at home like everyone else and home now, and for the next many months – though we didn’t know it to begin with – was all there was. I wondered what on earth I was going to do with this time.
I kept thinking of Xavier de Maistre’s , which was written under house arrest in 1790 in which, to keep the author’s mind active, he wrote a guidebook to the room he was detained in. What might I do sitting in a bungalow in central Texas with my beloved wife and children and with a new and very outspoken cat who
