So would you say this was an opportunity to sort of map out your own life with the advantage of hindsight?
Well, I didn’t reflect on it, I just described it. In fact, in the first draft of the book, I did reflect a fair amount, it was 400 pages, rather than the 300 that got published. And most of what I took out was my reflections. I just wanted to describe things as I experienced them, I didn’t want to analyze and meditate on what had happened. Though there’s still a little bit of that left—it’s kind of a regrettable tendency that I have, to analyze my own experience and perceptions.

Well I think that’s kind of an unavoidable tendency, especially when writing a memoir. You can’t take self-reflection out of the equation altogether.
No, you can’t. And I was aware of that. Most of my intention was to just accept what was inevitable: that I am writing it from age 63, so I’m gonna have some kind of take on it—that’s unavoidable. But what I wanted to do as much as possible, was keep it pretty point-blank in its descriptions of what happened, rather than force it into some kind of context. I didn’t want to talk about it from here, I wanted to put myself back there.

In that vein, how do you think the memoir would have differed if you had written it when you were, say 30?
That’s an interesting question. I kept notebooks and I gave a lot of interviews during the period when I was making music and so a lot of that can be kind of checked. 30 was towards the end of my music career, and I was pretty demoralized; I was a drug addict, but I also had a lot of ideas and intentions about what I wanted to be saying in the work I was doing. And so probably what I would’ve written at that time would have reflected that.

In the course of gathering materials to help me write the book, I got boxes and boxes of stuff from my mother. And my sister also sent me a bunch of letters I had written her. And there was this one letter from my sister when I was a teenager still—17 or 18—when I first came to New York. And it was really eerie to read this letter because I literally did not recognize myself. If someone had shown me the letter without telling me I wrote it, I would never have guessed. And I kind of touch on this in the book, when I talk about running away from school with Tom [Verlaine] and I say I don’t know if I can really put myself back in that frame of mind.

In the book you say Sable Starr once said she would give you a blow job any time you wanted, and you called it “just about the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me." Are you saying an offer of “anytime blowjobs” is the ultimate compliment?

[Laughs]

Some kind of an altruistic act or a giant sacrifice?
Um, yeah.

Why do you think that?
I don’t really have anything to add. It would be an interesting subject for an essay. Laughs. You planted a good idea in my head. I’m not gonna answer that question right now, but I appreciate you asking it.

Well if you end up writing an essay about it, let me know.
Ok I will.