And I wanted it to be a novel that was very much about the contemporary world. If there was going to be music, I wanted it to allow me to enter into the contemporary easily. If I'd only been trying to write a novel about rock 'n' roll, or about the rock business, it would have been a lot less interesting for me. Well, for example, the Vietnam War. It was the first war that was really articulated by rock 'n' roll.
Celebrity culture is another example.
Those are such big things, and yet you say you wanted to write a love story, which is such an intimate thing. What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture. It's very difficult to write about people like that and let readers continue to feel any kind of identification with them. Obviously they still have an interior life, but it becomes so impossible to conceive of them that way. There are great deformations of ordinary life that result from great fame, but I think they're more external.