When I was growing up in Mississippi's Piney Woods, everything I liked was either illegal, immoral or fattening. During my misspent youth and middle age, from standing in a lynch mob to staying in a Cairo brothel to surviving a coup attempt on the king of Morocco to suffering some three dozen in-my-sleep seizures that dislocated my shoulder nine times, I continued to write fiction and nonfiction. The short version of my story is that I went to bed...