The following is an archive podcast presented by the Branson and Hudson Foundation for Podcast Recovery.

This podcast is entitled My Dinner with Andrew.

It is the first and only episode of the podcast.

Welcome to episode one.

It's tough being a best-selling novelist.

It's tough having to speak with professors and journalists regarding the societal impact of your work,

going on book tours and getting bras thrown at you.

Sometimes they get in your mouth.

Every once in a while, a fan of your work goes on a shooting spree,

and you have to go on Ellen and tell her that it was misinterpreted. The reasons you've gotten to

writing to express the human condition to ponder love and loss, the lost feelings, rattling between

the cracks of the fragile psyche, those get replaced by contracts. Deadlines. A million-dollar New York

Times cocaine parties where David Franzen tries to make out with Tilda Swinton on a human bed

composed of migrant workers in the prone position. I'm in the high hills north of Terre Haute.

It is cool having rained yesterday.

There is thick with water.

In my past life I may have considered this an opportunity to forge for mushrooms, or go

mudding in a Ford F-150 Super Duty.

Alas, that part of me has changed.

I have cast down the oafish cold can for the nobles Khoroff, filled with vintages

no less than a decade, from the dusky La Mancha vineyards to the evergreen hills of the Bordeaux.

Oh, how the wine talks to me. And I have listened. After a few voyages across the Atlantic, I thought

...