Long before writing fiction began to absorb my time, to the point that I ended up arranging my teaching and my career so I could accommodate longer hours in coffee shops, I was an art historian. Back in graduate school, before I had any notion that the challenges and pleasures of fiction might someday loom so large that they could actually displace my career, I was struck by a book on the subject of linear perspective written by a French art historian, Hubert Damisch. Instead of thanking people who had helped him, or talking about the art he loved, he opened with the line, “This book was born of impatience.”