Every American writer has to write a book about baseball, it's in the contract, you know, Malamud [Bernard Malamud] had written a good one and Mark Harris had written several good ones and I think Coover [Robert Coover] wrote a baseball book, and Updike [John Updike] wrote a brilliant essay about Ted Williams, the great baseball player, and so I wrote a book called: The Great American Novel, which was about a homeless baseball team and I threw in it everything I knew about baseball. I don't believe there's one thing I knew that isn't in that book and I knew a lot, I knew all… I knew the... the real story of baseball, I knew all the law of baseball, I knew about the baseball player from my era, and I wrote this funny book about baseball. At one point I went up to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, one winter day and I stayed there about three or four days and had access to the library there and their archives, and heard some wonderful recordings of ball players and so on. And I was… I was absolutely surrounded by baseball books by everything, this was before the internet of course.

So I wrote that book, one of the farcical books, and then when I finished the baseball book, I think virtually the day I finished it, I had an idea about a story about a man who turns into a breast and so over the next six months or so, I wrote a story… I wrote a story called The Breast, about a man that turns into a breast. So all this was happening over a four or five year period and I was in very high spirits during those years and very happy and I think that out of this happiness and high spirits and out of the literary experiment with farce, these books were born, you know.