You’re a young mob doctor and you live a pretty interesting life. Your work, in and of itself, is incredibly engaging and the people you find yourself interacting with both inside and outside of the mafia are fascinating individuals who could each have an entire book written about them.
Which is why your wife won’t be surprised in the least when you start writing a novel based loosely around your life. You’ll write it from the perspective of several characters: a defense attorney you oversaw the torture of, a reticent soldier you once removed three bullets from and an aging Don who feared that he would leave nothing but a legacy of violence and greed who you mercy killed some time ago.
They will form the center of a rich, ficticious web which you will weave. It will be given authenticity by your experiences, and eventually you’ll find yourself inserted into it in odd places. Your fear for your family’s safety will be reflected in the attorney, your grim resignation to a life beyond your control in the soldier. As was the case when you helped him find some peace, you’ll find more and more that you have quite a lot in common with the Don.
Eventually this encroaching age will become an overarching theme, and you’ll have made a book about what it means not just to live in the world of organized crime, but to live in a senseless world where men only grow older, not wiser. You’ll have written about a world where human life is slowly but surely becoming more commodified and disconnected, a world where people with incredible power are powerless.
Eventually you’ll insert a few section breaks from the perspective of the wife of the attorney, and the whole thing will fall together. You’ll have written a novel which flawlessly and unpretentiously captures both the wonder and horror of living in the present day, of straddling worlds as we all do and feeling out of place in all of them.
Your wife will read it and begin weeping before she embraces you. Your children will struggle through it, coming to see you in a new light. The soldier will read it and see himself reflected in your words, and become inspired to write his own novel, which will become the second greatest novel ever written, in the natural course of things. And your publisher will read it and call the Don’s son, who is a sociopath.
Once he catches wind that you were planning on putting him and his old man in some fruity, fancy pants book, he’ll have you executed in your sleep. If not for your lengthy service he would’ve also killed your wife and children, but instead he’ll just have them beaten by professional thugs.
The only suggestions we have for you here are to either find a new publisher who isn’t connected to Penguin and therefore the mob, or to put another copy of the manuscript in a safe so that it will go to the police, who can see to it that it will get the attention and publication it deserves after your death.
Whatever happens, congratulations on completing the greatest novel ever written. It taught us a lot about ourselves.
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