After I finished Writing Down the Bones, I called my agent, Jonathon Lazear. "Okay, Jonathon, now I want to write my memoirs."

　　"You're too young to write your memoirs. Wait until you're sixty. Write a novel."

　　I hung up the phone. Write a novel? My friends were writing novels.

　　Okay, I would write one. My decision to write a novel was that dumb. Someone said, write a novel, and I responded, okay, I'll write one. Maybe that's the only way I would have gotten into it. I didn't know at the outset how hard it would be. I hear that about having children, too. That it's harder than you expected. And better, too. I had fifteen years of writing behind me, so I had a trust in myself. If I didn't know how to do it, I'd figure it out.

　　I was turning a corner on Don Cubero Street in Santa Fe when I thought of the hippie name for the main character,

　　Banana Rose. Somehow, having the name, I knew I could write the book. She would become alive for me.

　　And I did have a story I wanted to tell, something I'd half lived and half felt, and I needed the big space a novel afforded to tell it. But, finally, I was a writer and liked to keep my hand moving. I wanted another project. The road was out there and I wanted to ride it.

　　I'm sorry I don't have brilliant reasons for beginning a novel. As you go along, you make up reasons to do what you want. There's open space. Enter it.