on writing Westward; his time at Yaddo (where he met Jay McInerney); his first brushes with the emptiness of fame; a temp creative writing teaching job at Amherst as a 25-year-old; being unhappy and descending into TV, drinking, drugs, and loneliness; some legal issues with GCH; stops taking Nardil; encounters Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City (for which he wrote a blurb that went unused); goes back to Tucson and teaches creative writing at U of A; GCH finally comes out; goes to Yaddo again; starts a PhD in philosophy at Harvard and tries to commit suicide