num_pages: 150
description: Somewhere around 1969 I began to grow dissatisfied with the underlying principle of most novels---that a disembodied voice in the first or third person was telling us a story. I liked the idea of novels passing themselves off as documents, and drew inspiration from Mark Harris's WAKE UP, STUPID, and Sue Kaufman's DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE, the first ostensibly a collection of letters, the second, duh, a diary. (One could, of course, go back further, to the very beginnings of the English novel in the works of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson.)I also found myself interested in writing with greater candor about sexual topics. I had knocked out dozens of soft-core paperbacks, and wanted to try anew with greater freedom and more realism.I wrote three paperback original novels for Berkley under the pen name Jill Emerson, two of them in diary form, the third a presumed collaborative novel written in concert by the three viewpoint characters. These were fun to do and worked out well, and they led to RONALD RABBIT IS A DIRTY OLD MAN. Some of the circumstances of the book's emergence are covered in an introduction to a special 1995 limited edition, which I've included at here the end of the text. I wrote the book thinking it would be another pseudonymous paperback, and that no doubt gave me the freedom to write it as I did; after it was written, the friends who read it liked it so much that I was persuaded to publish it as a hardcover novel, and under my own name.I sent an early copy to Isaac Asimov, who wrote me that it was either the funniest dirty book or the dirtiest funny book ever written. I told him that would be a wonderful blurb, and he said "over my dead body," or words to that effect. Well, Isaac's been gone over fifteen years now, so I feel free to use it. Thanks, Isaac!Enjoy!---Lawrence Block
language: English
title: Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man
titlecomplete: Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man
genres: Fiction, Mystery, Humor
ratings_count: 130
publisher: Subterranean