Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself by David Lipsky Page B

…
    Michael really wanted that taken out, and I sorta loved it, and it was only a page and a half. I said, “Just give me this one.”
    A lot of the stuff that comes off as drugs in the book is intended to be more or less plausible.
    2015 is when it takes place?
    I had to get the dates right—I believe it’s 2009, but don’t quote me.
    You know, I wanted it set in just enough so our kids would be in adolescence.
    [Interesting and very sad: setting the novel the year after his death, somehow this is heartbreaking. His having no idea this is coming.]
    I don’t think it’s as late as 2015.
    So when you say a late puberty—sixteen, fourteen?
    I’m not talking about when you have nocturnal emissions, I’m talking about when your physique changes. There’s this huge deal in junior tennis between whether you’re playing with the physique of a boy or a man. And like I didn’t start to put on any kind of meat until I was in college. So I was basically playing with the body of a boy until I was seventeen years old.
    I had withdrawn before—
    I started to smoke a lot of pot when I was fifteen or sixteen, and it’s just hard to train when you smoke a lot of pot. You don’t have that much energy. (Laughs) So I was, like—you know, I was still going to tournaments. But I was mostly doing it, going to like hang out with the guys and party. And I was getting to the quarters instead of the semis of these tournaments. And there was just a general kind of slippage.
    Second year of high school then?
    Yeah: fifteen, sixteen, somethin’ like that. I mean, starting really to kind of like it. And also other stuff: did a lot of Quaaludes. And by the way, there’s certain stuff about this stuff that I won’t talk about.
This
I don’t mind talking about.
    Heroin?
    No. I didn’t like it that much. I didn’t have the constitution for it. And I’m serious—I’m not. There’s no way to be a heroin addict and work that hard.
    You could dispel that rumor?
    Yeah—except what if they just think I’m lying?
    People in New York have heard this rumor—what came down to us is that in Boston you’d gotten very involved with drugs and had some kind of breakdown
.
    Heroin doesn’t make you break down until you stop doing it. I don’t know if I had a breakdown, I got really really depressed, and had to go on a suicide ward in Boston. It had nothing to do with drugs. It had nothing to do with drugs. I had already started to lose a lot of interest in drugs sort of before then.
    Worried by this rumor in publishing circles?
    No, although I’d heard—Adam Begley [the
New York Observer
] had reported this rumor that I was a cocaine addict. He said Vollmann told him that, which I didn’t really believe. But it just seems laughable to me, because I did I think once at a party, and I found it excruciatingly unpleasant, like drinking fifty cups of coffee or something.
    It just, it seems odd to me. There are fairly well-known writers, and I don’t just mean Burroughs, but writers who are big now, like with the initials D. J., who are fairly well known to have been heroin addicts who got straight. And they don’t make it a secret. If I’d ever been a heroin addict, I don’t think I’d have a problem saying it.
    It’s weird—I, like—I mean, I’m somebody who spent most of his life in libraries. I just, um, never lived that kind of dangerous life. I wouldn’t even stick a needle in my arm.
    How do you think that rumor got started?
    Who—whom did you hear the rumor from?
    Don’t know
.
    [What do I say? From my office this early morning, while you were doing good work with shampoo, hair brush, and towel?]
    It’s very odd—I’ve got no idea how it got started. None. I think the only thing that I ever conceivably had a problem with was marijuana, and marijuana was a huge deal for me when I was about the age of Hal in the book. And then once I got to college, I mean, college was just so
hard
, it was hard to get stoned and read. And I