I began Portnoy's Complaint without a book in mind. I just had an idea of writing a story about a patient speaking in analysis. And I wrote a very modest story called A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis, which I think appeared in Esquire, and it was 25, 30 pages. And I wouldn't say that I had found my freedom there. I was laying something out rather carefully. And I had no idea I was going to go anywhere with that, at all. I… it triggered… but that first quiet chapter triggered something, because I realised the amount of freedom that was possible to me by having a psychoanalytic setting… a psychoanalytic session as the setting.

And so, this… going forward I began to write this completely unbuttoned chapter about masturbation. By treating masturbation as a comedy, which it is… which it is, and it's a very funny thing to do. And treating it as a comedy and talking about what it was like for this guy as an adolescent, all of it in the psychoanalytic setting, and I was free, as I hadn't been in the first chapter. But had I not established the premise of the first chapter, I wouldn't have been free. And I had a good time doing that and I was delighted by it. And I'd never done anything like that before. It was look this was new for me too, you know. And this isn't what I studied literature for at the University of Chicago.