Well, for one thing, you know my dad was a cop.
I had a consuming ambition to possess a miller's thumb. I believe I have never since wanted anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to be flattened as my father’s had become, during his earlier years of a miller’s life.
My father was a guy most comfortable in the company of bricklayers and carpenters and electricians. And I have a lot of that in me also. I love those people.
When I swapped studying for a wage and a proper job, Mam and Dad were devastated. I was rejecting an opportunity they never had. But their eldest son, at 16, wanted only to follow his father down the pit. It was to be the biggest education of my life.
I'll tell ya this: I come from an educated family. My father was an attorney representing blue collar workers, and my uncle was a chemical engineer... on my mom's side, all my uncles were engineers - all ten of them.
My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.
My mom's a lawyer. She was part of the group that wrote the bar exam. My father is a dentist. They've always worked.
My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.
Most writers are middle-class and are the children of doctors or lawyers.
