(Guest post by David Haynes)

“I’m a very dangerous boy. I’ve been known to say almost anything.”

Marshall Fields Finney said that.  He’s the narrator in Right by My Side, which was my first novel. It’s fair, I think, to consider the first paragraph of my own book for the MPP—since I don’t remember much about writing the book, and it is, after all, now an official “Penguin Classic.” Which has been my occasion for revisiting Marshall and company, thirty years after publication and close to thirty-seven years after hearing that first line in my head. When a book is reissued, you are assigned by your editors to read it again in search of necessary updates, mostly copyediting errors that slid by the first time (a painful subject for a different essay). So, I did, and it very much felt like reading any book that’s new to you for the first time—until it wasn’t, until it was like, “Oh, I remember this guy.”  Both Marshall and the guy who dreamed him up, that is. And still that first paragraph blows me away, in that way that openings that stick with us tend to do. 

“I steal.”[1]

“I was not there, yet I was there.”[2]

“When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy.”[3]

“I am born.”[4]