I also drew a lot of inspiration for Veronica from the place where I was living, a very isolated area in Marin County, and from a canyon I used to walk in out there, which was so fecund and alive—you felt a living, humorous, playful intelligence in extraordinary motion even though, to the human eye, everything was still. I’d moved there because I didn’t want to be in New York anymore. After I published Bad Behavior, I’d had a parasite, giardia, for a year without knowing it, and had lost a tremendous amount of weight. I was feeling very unwell physically, and also confused about my place in the world. I had wanted so badly to be published, I had wanted the media attention I’d gotten, I had wanted people to read my work, but internally, I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t know how to behave at parties—everyone seemed to expect me to be so sharp and sophisticated, and I was not. Before that, I’d gone out mostly by myself and had dated sometimes, but it never really worked out. I hadn’t had much of a social world—I was on the outskirts of different scenes, with friends here and there but no real group. Suddenly people started seeing me as some cosmopolitan creature of downtown New York, but I wasn’t really.