“After a ten-month courtship, I married Maggie, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the novelist Thomas McGuane and the actress Margot Kidder. I was thirty-four. I did things my way. Now, three years later, we had a baby coming and lived on a ranch that I’d purchased on a whim and had no notion of how to run...Two years later I was divorced. I worked too hard. We’d never been a match. Mercury was in retrograde. Things change. Compared to what else can happen in this world, and to what almost had the day after my birthday, the divorce felt like business, a sad adult procedure. I’d married a teenager, what did I expect? To be the exception, as usual. Guess not. The sentimental turns to the statistical. I hung on to the ranch for a time, which seemed important, but cash ran low and I sold it to a neighbor who happened to be a real estate agent. A few days later he resold the place to a wealthy buyer he’d had waiting, pocketing a nice margin.”