Our apartment in Paris, featuring my right foot and Jalaire's back. I was just starting with the digital camera and was a little too eager with the solarized look. But in this shot I like what it does to Jalaire's blouse.

At the very end of my book leave, in June of 2007, I rode my bike from Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Water, near Pittsburgh, to Montclair, stopping en route at Gettysburg. (I'd like to free up more time so that I can bike the Oregon Trail.)

I started at BusinessWeek as the Mexico City bureau chief. My whole schtick back then was Latin America. I'd worked in Venezuela and Ecuador, and at a paper, the Herald-Post, in El Paso.

I was working in Pittsburgh in the mid-90s, covering steel, when I noticed that the magazine was giving me very little space for my stories. When I started writing about software and the robots at Carnegie Mellon U., they got more generous. That was during the first Internet boom. I moved into technology.

My favorite novel, at this moment, is Richard Ford's Independence Day. I also love John Updike's Rabbit series. Earlier in my life, I used to say that my favorite novels were Julio Cortazar's Rayuela (Hopscotch) and Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. In late 2013, I started reading Marcel Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. It wasn't going to be quick. But I realized that part of the reason it seemed so difficult in the past was that translations wrenched the French into English syntax. Reading it in French is a lot more fun, and it's smoother. One other note: When I reading the paper book, I would often confront two pages of the same paragraph and find it daunting. No paragraph breaks, no dialogue. Just two pages of gray. But reading it on the Kindle I simply scroll downward. It's a stream of French. It took me more than a year, but I finished it. And unlike many books I read, I'll never forget it.

I went to college at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, majoring in Spanish and History, and I took my junior year at the University of Madrid. Later I got a masters in journalism at Columbia.

Back in Pittsburgh, I wrote a novel that takes place on the border between El Paso and Juarez. It's called Donkey Show. I haven't published it (yet), but it shows up on a shelf in The Boost, which means, I guess, that I'll have to publish it sometime between now and 2072.

I decided to become a journalist when it became clear that fiction-writing wasn't going to earn me a nickel. (The stories I wrote in my early 20s managed to be both pretentious and shallow at the same time, which is not an unusual combination.) I had moved back from Ecuador and was living at my parents' house in Philadelphia, earning money doing yard work and taking care of my infant nephew. One day my mother told me that I would never find a job in journalism without looking a bit more actively. About a week later I got a call from a friend. There was a job at a weekly in Ludlow, Vermont, the Black River Tribune. Was I interested? That was my step into the trade.

After I worked at a paper in Venezuela for a year in the mid 80s, I thought I was finally ready for a large U.S. daily, one big enough to send me abroad. I applied in Miami and Dallas. They had loads of Spanish-speaking foreign correspondent wannabes on staff. Here's how it works, they told me: You go to a suburban bureau, cover school boards and fires and crime. If you do well, you get a job at the metro desk. And eventually, you might get a foreign assignment (but probably not). I went instead to the El Paso Herald-Post, not a great newspaper by any stretch, but lots of great colleagues and a wonderful and wacky city for news. (Much of the action in The Boost takes place along that border.) After a year there, I got the job as BusinessWeek's bureau chief in Mexico City.