I had been dreaming about the moment for so long that when it actually happened, it caught me by surprise. It was a Wednesday afternoon in 1995, and I was sitting at my desk in my tiny Back Bay basement apartment. The walls around me were covered in rejection slips - 190 of them, to be exact - from nearly every book editor in the country. My desk was weighed down by the nine unpublished, seemingly un pub lish able manuscripts that I had written since graduating from Harvard four years earlier, a 3,600-page morass of words in search of a voice.
While most of my classmates were finishing up law school or bringing down six-figure salaries on Wall Street, I was subsisting on peanut butter and jelly and using multiple credit cards to pay my rent. Maybe a little more foolish than noble, I was getting used to failure, getting good at failure. So when the phone rang that afternoon, I assumed it was just another creditor checking to see if I was alive.
By: Ben Mezrich|Date: Aug 4, 2002