No, mostly because I have no idea how to do that. And I’m not a very money-minded person—I didn’t know how to manage my finances at all when I started. At some point in the nineties Mike Tyson went bankrupt and all these assholes were screaming about what a profligate moron he was, and I remember thinking that they didn’t know what they were talking about. Tyson probably had had no instruction on how to deal with money, except maybe some from Cus D’Amato, and he had way more cash dumped on him than I did. If you’re not used to it, it’s unreal to you. My advance for Bad Behavior was five thousand dollars, and at the time I thought that was a lot—I wasn’t planning to quit my job, but I thought it was cool that I could pay off my student loans. Then the paperback sale was seventy-five thousand, and there were foreign sales as well—I thought I’d made it, and I didn’t understand how quickly that money would go. I started using credit cards, and by the time I was thirty-six, I was fifty thousand dollars in debt. I didn’t get totally out of debt until just a few years ago.

I supported myself by teaching and, for a while, by writing magazine articles, because in the nineties places like Elle, Mirabella, and Vogue liked to hire fiction writers. People would ask me why I’d written something silly like “On Choosing Not to Dye Your Hair,” and I’d say, “They pay two dollars a word.” A lot of the things I’ve written have been because I needed the money. The one thing I said no to was when The New York Times Magazine asked me to write an article for their fashion issue about getting dressed for a party. They wanted me to assess my figure coldly and critically, analyzing the pros and cons of each part of my body and how it looked in different clothes. I said, “Are you kidding me? You don’t think women have enough problems? Whose idea was this? I’d be happy to come over to his house”—and it was a he—“and coldly assess his body part by part.” I checked later on to see if they’d found anybody to do this, and saw that instead they’d had a man—my former boyfriend, in fact—write about a beautiful suit his girlfriend had bought him. Anyway, that was the only time I ever said, I don’t care if I need the money—I’m not doing that.