I decided to write "Blind Pig on Second Street" after reading the memoirs of Uncle Li, which were published in Russian in 1963. The book titled "Left Pleurisy: Memories of an American Red" — which could have a subtitle like "The Romance of American Communism" or something similar — narrates Li Phillips's life from 1918, when he took a ship to America, until 1961, when he left Memphis, Tennessee, to settle in his beloved Moscow.

I wrote a few pages every night on the way to California, where I went to meet my brother Patty, and then in Montana, where I traveled alone just to see how Mary Kay is twenty years later. The manuscript — three hundred twenty pages typed on a typewriter, with scribbles and erasures — I had placed in the glove compartment of the station wagon among various small items: a flashlight, a pair of woolen gloves, the car's registration, and two traffic tickets for speeding. And I would have forgotten it there if I hadn't gone back to Memphis, to Harry White's junkyard to trade the station wagon for an old Oldsmobile.

No one asked me to tell the story of the Phillips family and our city, Memphis, Tennessee. No one asked me not to tell it. So, I told this true story that is full of lies.