Early in the '70s, I wrote… I had an idea for something, a story, a novel, about a girl who blows up a building in her home town as a protest against the Vietnam War. And... probably I wrote this in about '72, perhaps '73. – the war was finally coming to an end. But I couldn't get anywhere with it. I think now I... the reason I couldn't get anywhere with it then was the war was too close. I was responding to the war in a very immediate way which wasn't...  didn't help what I was writing. But after... every book that I wrote in the years following, as soon as I finished the book, I would go to my drawer and take out this 60 or 70 pages of manuscript that I had written about the girl who blew up a building, and say to myself, there's something here. But I couldn't for the life of me figure it out. And every single book ended the same way. I'd finish the book—I'd get it out of the drawer.

And then in the 1990s, the mid-1990s, after I wrote Sabbath's Theater, I took the 70 pages out and I suddenly saw how I could write this book about the girl who blew up a building. In part, it was because I had written Sabbath's Theater, which is about a...a mischief maker, a terrific mischief maker in Mickey Sabbath, not a man to everyone's taste. And I enjoyed writing that book, but now I felt like writing about a very different man, and that man was Swede Levov, the character in… the father of the girl who blows up the building.