When asked by my esteemed publisher — whose judgment I have come to trust mostly, if not at least sometimes, more than my own initial (emphasis added) instinct about things — if I would mind writing a short-ish biography (this, after writing a book about pretty much all of what I consider to be my important views of life, which included a play entirely about my life story, sanitized for perceived self-preservation purposes), you may well imagine that I literally raised an eyebrow. What’s that? More needs to be said? And this request for expounding on my self-revelations delivered with an end-of-day deadline, and received by me after (emphasis added) I had already committed to two well-made margaritas. (As in, they were consumed.) Well, as I have said, there’s the trust factor. So here we go:

I’m a North Jersey person. Let’s begin with that. The first twenty-something years of my life, not counting college in Reading, Pennsylvania (home, or thereabouts, of John Updike!), I lived in Essex County, New Jersey. The hub of North Jersey, in my estimation. Other counties will claim the same — Bergen, Hudson, Union, Passaic, and perhaps others not really worth mentioning — but they are wrong. Essex County is quintessential North Jersey. Why else do you think David Chase decided to have Tony Soprano grow up in (West Orange) and then live there (West Caldwell) as an adult? Do you think that choice was random? In addition to The Sopranos (and related to The Sopranos), we have Newark, with its arena and airport and Portuguese section with incredible restaurants (there are other ethnic neighborhoods that boast the same) — and of course you have its old cathedrals, and the NJIT campus, and the Budweiser brewery and the Pabst Blue Ribbon one that you could see from the Parkway, its giant brown bottle, a now-demolished and -disappeared skyline icon, looming over, as I remember it, the giant cemetery that went on and on, on either side of the highway, as you whizzed by it from your car. It always made me wonder, who were those people and when did they die and how did they all end up there?

College we mentioned, and through that period of my life there really was no writing. That happened (the writing, that is) after I read a John Updike book, which happened after I got out of graduate school, and which I purchased in a bookstore in New Hope, Pennsylvania. I read one book, which happened to be a great novel, and that triggered the desire to try writing for myself. So I tried it, and thought, as soon as I began doing it, that I liked it. A lot. Early on I felt that I had some ability, that maybe I was good at this. In any case I enjoyed it. And that was really the thing. I kept writing. And for a time, I’m pretty certain that I thought I was better than I was. Then came the crashing feeling of realizing I wasn’t as good as maybe I thought that I was. And on it went: Writing, writing, failure, self-doubt, life interruptions, writing, writing (re-writing, mostly, because that is what I enjoyed most and for some reason felt was most important to do). On and on it went some more. Until I wrote a book which, I knew at some point while writing it, would get published. This belief evolved into a sense of certainty, the result of having purposefully planted the seed of belief. Now here we are.

For more details about me and my life, may I recommend the aforementioned play, especially, in Life Stands Explained. And then let’s continue to fill in the blanks through various forms of social media, as we stand them up (for they are not, right now, standing). It is also my intention and very sincere hope that I am able to talk to kids in schools about the importance of self-belief and why they should have it, to convince them that they should, because if I can add a little self-belief to a kid or two here or there then we are on the right track with all of this. Hopefully this writing thing helps kids believe in themselves more, so they can do more for the greater good and therefore make this world a better place.

Oh, by the way: It’s Maplewood, New Jersey, to be specific. That’s the part of Essex County I’m from, after five years of being a baby and then a toddler and then a wide-eyed kindergartner in Bloomfield, where my parents and grandparents (except my Scottish maternal grandmother) are from. (And where they shot the last scene of The Sopranos; yet another non-coincidence that is, rather, a reiteration, for emphasis: Epicenter. North Jersey. It is Essex County. Obviously.)