Rick Joukowsky

This is a letter your grandfather wrote.

You never sent it.

By the time you're 72 years old, whether you can write a novel or not should be relatively clear to you.

And though I'd written a couple, they were never good enough to publish.

And the notion that one could write a novel was totally out of my head.

And one day, what happened to me, do you ever have that thing where a song comes into your head and you can't get it out of your head?

At the moment, what's happened to me is I'm writing a book about the 1950s and the song is How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?

It's absolutely appalling.

I can't make it go away.

Anyway, what happened to me was not that a song came into my head, but a voice.