We lived in close quarters in those days: Kant, Virginia Woolf, Kafka, Sam Johnson, and me, Dickens. Sam Johnson lumbered to the dinner table with a huge dictionary and took supersize portions. Worried that the rest of us wouldn’t get enough to eat, Ginny appealed to Sam Johnson: “Sam, it’s only fair that you put some of that back.” “It’s the lithium and the steroids,” he said, taking another large portion of mashed potatoes. “I’m always hungry.” Ginny clicked her tongue and looked at her own plate filled with greens, while Kafka offered Samuel Johnson his whole plate. “I’m just not hungry,” he said. At night he slept on the floor on a bed of straw telling jokes to himself and laughing. Kant irritated everyone, because he took over conversations, pontificating and throwing out quotations from famous philosophers that just didn’t seem to apply. The nurse said he had been traumatized as a child, but so had the rest of us. I kept to myself as much as possible, but observed everyone closely. I would sneak off to a corner, writing a novel on scraps of paper. Each scrap of paper was a chapter, and each chapter ended with someone falling out a window.

Bio: Jeff Friedman