“For a kid who's lost his mom and all the rage and grief that no one was able to talk out of me, football was a very therapeutic sport. Very.”

“Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned ar”