Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

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This is not an autobiography. God forbid! Autobiography is fueled by ego and I could make a long list of persons whose belly buttons I’d rather be contemplating than my own. Anyway, only authors who are household names should write autobiographies, and not only is my name infrequently tumbled in the lapidary of public consciousness, but those rare homes in which it’s spoken with any regularity are likely under police surveillance. I’ve even made an effort to avoid the autobiographical in my novels, wishing neither to shortchange imagination nor use up my life in literature.

I’d like to think Tibetan Peach Pie isn’t a memoir either, although it waddles and quacks enough like a memoir to be mistaken for one if the light isn’t right. What it is more precisely is a sustained narrative composed of the absolutely true stories I’ve been telling the women in my life — my wife, my assistant, my fitness trainer, my yoga teacher, my sisters, my agent, et al — over many years, and which at their insistence I’ve finally written down. In order to remember events sufficiently, I’ve had to arrange them in more or less chronological order; which, of course, contributes to the book’s resemblance to a memoir, as does the fact that the stories, as I’ve said, relate my own experiences, encounters, follies, and observations, not those of, say, Abraham Lincoln.

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