When Jeffrey Eugenides moved to New York, he was 28 years old and things were not looking good. After graduating from Brown in 1983, he and Rick Moody, a college friend, had driven out to San Francisco with no real plan other than making a go of it as writers, and lived together awhile on Haight Street, listening to the sound of the electric typewriter coming from the other room. Eugenides stayed in the city for five years and didn’t publish a thing. He calls these “the lost years” now. “My life just didn’t seem to go forward.” In 1988, Eugenides moved into a cheap place with roommates on St. Johns Place in pre-gentrified Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, when muggers freely worked the area. A $75 payout on a scratch-off lotto card was a bright spot of that summer. Eugenides would look out over the darkening rooftops at the Manhattan skyline and think, How can my writing take me from here to there?