This time, my novel has a new narrator. She is, for reasons too obvious to explain, a waitress. She works the graveyard shift at a roadside diner called the U Dine Here in Barstow, California. She spends a lot of time thinking about what it's like to be halfway between someplace special and nowhere at all. For now, she has no name, and who she is will remain a secret until the end. Until recently, I was working on a proposal for a nonfiction book about Porn Valley. At one point, the manuscript consisted of a sample chapter about a porn star named Justine Joli. At the end of it, there was a scene that imagined her in bed, flipping through the pages of a glossy magazine, and dreaming of other things. That voice is the voice of this narrator. How do these things happen? According to Auster: "The question is the story itself, and whether nor not it means something is not for the story to tell."
