In Spite of the Fact That You Have a Large Metal Plate in Your Head, or, Just Because You’re a Distracted, Flaky, Obsessive-Compulsive Nitwit with Attention Deficit Disorder Who Can’t Even Type, Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Write a Book

In spite of the fact that I never sat down to write it, my book, New York Notebook, was published last year by Chronicle Books. Hyperillustrated, overdesigned and just plain nutty looking, it is ostensibly a combination journal and guidebook to New York City, but I think it’s the design crowd that’s been buying it. They send me fan mail. I get a lot of letters from frustrated graphic designers telling me that they’re frustrated. I patiently explain that they, too, can enjoy the liberty and originality that my lifestyle and my work express. All they have to give up is money, security, marriage, children, respect, acceptance and health insurance.

Now that it’s going into a second printing(!), I thought I should share my thoughts on how this piece of highly personal insanity came to be a real book. Illustrators and designers often ask me this question. I know what they really mean is, “How the hell did you get away with that?”

The answer is quite simple. I had no idea I was writing a book. And if I had known, I would have freaked out. Because I can’t write a book. Here’s how it happened:

First of all, I was born in Manhattan. If it’s too late to arrange this for yourself, try to arrange it for any offspring you might be planning, or not planning. Just move to New York and procreate like mad. Because New York City’s an ideal place to raise children. This will almost guarantee them a type A personality, a boatload of raised expectations and more baggage than Luggage Belt Three, JFK Airport International Arrivals, at Christmas time.

As a proud, yet restless native New Yorker, my issue was this: When you’re already in New York, where can you go?

I went to Europe and made a lot of friends.

Friends who would, in years to come, make liberal use of my guest room.

In 1984, my grandmother died. I came into some money and bought a SoHo loft with it when this cost about as much as a studio apartment in Pikeville, Kentucky. Because I’ve lived on and off in Europe (Paris, Milan and, just for fun, Gothenburg, Sweden) and I’m the only badly-paid illustrator chick with a guest room in Lower Manhattan, this makes me quite popular with the thrifty international set.

Which brings me to this: These charming and cultured foreigners, these attractive, seemingly worldly hipsters knew nothing about New York. Nothing. They didn’t know where to get their hair cut, or how to find snow frog jelly, or how to pronounce “Houston” or anything! And who did they turn to in their quest for knowledge? That’s right. Moi. Io. Jag.

I know these things, and many more. Now, it just so happened that in a totally unconscious, flagrantly random and quite possibly neurotic way, I have been keeping a list since I got my first Mac, in 1989. A behemoth of a list. It used to be in Quark. No fields, mind you. Just a really, really long list. Now it’s in Word, but that doesn’t help, because I don’t know how to use either Quark or Word. It is, however, unbelievably long, and contains some rather vital information, to wit:

Here is a random chunk of the list:

Secret Places with No Signs.
Where Hervé Villechaize had his suits made.
That bizarre place that serves only omelettes.
The Haitian cab driver cold remedy.
Gus Librizzi is a good name for a barber.
At Dim Sum a GoGo order the chicken and chives and the mini GoGo burgers!
World Gym is open all night so you can feel guilty 24 hours a day. You could be there right now!
Write a new NYC etiquette book, because when did they decide that clipping one’s nails on the subway was an acceptable thing to do? Here’s the new rule: when you leave a public place, all of your DNA should leave with you.
That “true mirror” window on 1st street where you see your self non-reversed—how other people see you.

It goes on.