Peter Hochstein

I became a writer because that was the only thing I ever learned how to do. In retrospect, it's amazing I could even do that, given the focused-on-failure mindset of my immediate family. They were nuts. On the outside they seemed, well, merely a bit uptight. But trust me, my parents, and especially my mother, were batshit crazy.

Evidently it ran in the family. I learned only recently, years after my mother's death, that my mother had a sister who had been sent away to a state insane asylum before my birth. The poor woman was never mentioned in front of me. After a lot of prying I learned recently that her name was Gussie, short for Augusta. She was the real life equivalent of the fictional crazy aunt locked up in the attic.

You want an example of crazy? My mother was terrified that I would do something, or say something, or live someplace that would reflect badly on her. And her standards of what reflects badly were indecipherable. That may explain why, wherever I lived, she wept bitterly. She wept bitterly at my first apartment, a small townhouse studio in Greenwich Village, looking out on a charming flagstone courtyard. Later, she wept about an apartment on a high floor with sweeping city views. Still later, she wept when I bought and moved with my now ex-wife and child into a large two-bedroom apartment with a chichi Park Avenue address.

Nor was the problem that she hated city living. I spent nine years as a suburbanite, in a big house with a large back yard and beach rights - and that, too, brought her to paroxysms of tear-gushing grief.

But I was talking about writing. I became a newspaper reporter when I was 18. I sold my first book - thank God under a pseudonym! - when I was 22. I got out of the journalism business for a very long stretch and went into advertising, at the age of 23, because it paid better than journalism.

These days I do almost anything that involves putting my fingers on a keyboard and wiggling them. I still write TV spots, and brochures, and junk mail. I report and write occasionally for business publications. And I turn out books. I ghostwrite autobiographies. I write biographies on commission. Of course, I also write my own stuff. Why?

Because it's fun. And I've always figured that if I'm having fun writing, people will have fun reading my stuff. So please do order my books and have a few laughs before it's too late. Remember, nobody's getting out of here alive.