But my father did not keep all the automobiles he'd owned in his life, and he never tried to build an automobile inside the schoolhouse. My mother outlived him, and he and I were never estranged. We had our problems, though. As someone who always knew I'd grow up to a man who worked with his head rather than his hands, I rejected all of my father's lessons about mechanics, maintenance, and practicality. I resisted helping him sharpen the lawn mower blade or change the oil on the beetle-back Dodge or the sparkplugs on the Hudson Hornet. I was bored by his lectures on plumbing and electrical wiring, and for years we fought like caged dogs. And yet, as I grew older, my father and I developed enormous respect for each other, even though he never had a clear idea of what I did with my own life. “You still writin' them articles?” he would ask me. “Yeah, Dad. I'm still writing them.”
        One day when I was about thirty, I asked myself how it was that Father and I could be so different and yet get along so well in the end. To answer this question, I asked another: What if we had both been slightly different sorts of men? More stubborn. Less forgiving. What if one of us had made some kind of serious mistake? How would we have turned out then?
        I chose the form in which these questions would be answered: the novel. At first glance, this choice seems to leave me, the author, in total control of the pursuit of the answers. After all, in a novel the action can go in any direction the author chooses. Or can it? The conventions of the genre come into play, of course, and the writer's use of these is crucial. But what intrigues me about this process is not the influence of literary conventions, but the influence of memory on the writer's imagination. Are memories just raw material for stories? Do memories merely inspire stories? Or does the act of recalling an event, an image, or a sensation somehow “make” a story?
        Are the boys in the picture my father and my uncle? What form should the answer take?
        When I recall the image of my father telling me the story of his own father chopping the Model T into junk, who is in control of what I see next?
        In the novel, Lucky's serious mistake is abandoning his wife and son late in the summer of 1961, as Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle race to break Babe Ruth's home run record, and the Yukon National Bank forecloses on Lucky's life's dream, a garage and autobody shop. While Lucky is gone, he takes up with an easy woman he used to know when he worked on the railroad. My father had been a railroader before he became an electrician, but he never abandoned Mother and me. The most crucial actions in the novel are inventions.
        Nevertheless, my father's memories fuel the story. At one point in its pages, Lucky recalls how his father would get drunk on pails of beer he brought home from his job at the brewery, then beat Lucky's mother with a belt—exactly as my father had told me my grandfather Louis Aloysius, drunk and mean, used to beat my grandmother Rose. The bastard, Lucky and my father said. For twelve hours a day he'd make beer and whiskey, then he'd come home at night and try to drink up every drop he'd made all day. Then he'd get after ME, and Mom would step between us. Ten years after he was dead, you could still see lash marks on her legs.

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