Edgar was one of the people telling stories that night. He tells a story in this book. You get the story in these pages, but you do not get Edgar’s gentleness or his openness, and you do not get the remarkable accent, which is the sort of accent that a stage-struck Transylvanian vampire might adopt in order to play Shakespeare, accompanied by elegant hand-movements that point and punctuate and elaborate on the nature of the things he is telling us about, whether Southern Gothic or New York personal. I watched Edgar tell his story in the run through (he managed to cut about ten minutes when he told it on the stage, and it was as if I’d never heard it before) and I knew I wanted to be part of this thing, whatever it was.