One night as I was turning into my driveway, I saw the odometer numbers on my car turn from 9999.9 to 10,000. I found myself wondering if there might not be a story in an odometer that ran backward-the car, I thought, would get "younger" instead of older, finally collapsing into its component parts. The next day I started writing it. I thought it would be a funny short story-a kind of American Graffiti. Instead, a fairly long novel came out, a supernatural tale about girlfriends, boyfriends, and Christine.
