I was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, where my novel takes place. I come from a family of pawnbrokers. For more than thirty years my maternal grandfather, parents and now my brothers have run and operated pawn shops downtown, right off Freemont Street. Sometimes, when my siblings and I were little, my parents used to have us stay in the back of the shop after school or during summer vacation, when there wasn't summer camp, or they didn't have anybody to watch over us. We'd occupy our time with sodas from a nearby casino's gift shop, comic books and a television that got wavy reception, and we'd do small chores, rolling coins or filing the previous day's pawn tickets. The store often had a line of people waiting to pawn their goods, local customers who worked in casinos and also spent all their spare time playing blackjack and slot machines, and also tourists who had blown all their cash, and maybe their plane tickets home, and now were desperate, and hung over, and needed loans on their wedding rings, not so they could buy new tickets home, but so they could go back into the casinos and win back their money. I'd sometimes stare out of the back of the store and watch the people in line and take in their faces. Lots of times my parents would be put in the position of having to tell these people that their wedding ring was only worth a fraction of what they'd paid for it, or that, say, the diamonds in that ring were brown and flawed.

Then, from the back of the store, I'd watch as the customers exploded and called my parents dirty Jews and cursed at them and threatened them at the top of their lungs. It's impossible in situations like that not to feel for everybody involved -- to be horrified, sure, but more than that, to be saddened by the spectacle, to want so much more than that out of life for everyone involved. That perspective, obviously, has been deeply ingrained inside of me. My novel does not, repeat not, revolve around a pawn shop, Judaism, my parents, or any such things. It is not a roman à clef or a veiled memoir; instead, it is about a boy who goes missing, teen runaways and some adult film stuff, but that same aesthetic and worldview is there. Sympathy. Empathy. I think that it keys all my work, every sentence I write.

At the same time, the novel does take place in Vegas, and I have untold stories about what it was like to basically grow up in the heart of the gambling world. I also have some pretty decent thoughts about the difference between the city I grew up in and the monstrosity that LV has become.