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I had been living in Dallas for six months when one of my old boyfriends, a bad boyfriend but someone who always made me laugh and had been in my life when my first novel was published, contacted me to meet for lunch since he was coming to Texas. He had been in Israel when I met Kevin, and by the time he returned to New York, I was engaged, pregnant, and soon to move to London. I wanted to see someone who knew me back in New York when I was thin, single, and possibly cool. Now, I was none of those things, living in suburbia with my wonderful, albeit demanding baby and my busy, mostly silent husband. I lived in a ranch house on a cul-de-sac with largely invisible neighbors, except the boy across the street who spent most of his time waving at anyone or anything (squirrels, cars, dogs) passing his porch.

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I had a list of observations about Dallas: It was incredibly hot, no one walked, the architecture was a mixture of Versailles, Victorian, and Hollywood excess, the women all had blowouts, wore tons of makeup even at breakfast and had perfectly manicured nails unless they were dressed as maids, while the men were costumed as cowboy executives, used sports analogies and drove around in construction vehicles that were spotlessly clean and had no connection to how they earned money. The highways merged without warning; there was nothing to do, nowhere to go; it was freezing cold because of the air-conditioning and blazingly hot.

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Kevin came home one day and said he’d been offered the job of bureau chief in Dallas. I had been to Texas. I had been drunk off my ass in Houston and picked up the scion of a hotel family, telling him I was Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s daughter which I’m not but then again he didn’t believe me. He met me in a Denny’s where I had ended up after a long night in a cowboy bar. Otherwise, I had no clear impression of Texas.

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