We’re So Famous was my first published novel, but it is not the first novel I wrote. I originally attempted to emulate my hero F. Scott Fitzgerald, attracted to and influenced as I was by his narratives about sad young men, a thread I’d pick up later for my trilogy about Charlie Martens. But when my first novel failed to sell, I cast about for another theme that interested me, and didn’t have to ruminate long before recognizing my intense interest in the culture of celebrity. It seems naive to claim that back in the late 1990s, celebrity culture was a relatively new phenomenon, but fame for fame’s sake seemed new and curious to me—previously those who wanted to become famous aspired to be athletes or actors or musicians or models—and so it was the perfect subject for a novel in that moment in time before the Internet truly became the enabler it is for any and all attention seekers. (As proof of how pre-Internet this novel was, I remember a late-night trip to the record store to confirm the spelling of the name of one of the singers in Bananarama, at the behest of the copy editor.)

As I contemplated the afterword for this new Bloomsbury edition, I tried to transport myself back to that time and place in my life when I was obsessed with and amazed by fame, to create a little sketch meant to provide the context in which the novel was written. Instead a torrent of words issued forth over the course of a month, and when I was finished, it was apparent not only why I wrote We’re So Famous, but also that it was a book I was destined to write.

—Jaime Clarke

that vanessa williams thing was right around the time of the mcdonald’s massacre you couldn’t turn on a television without hearing about those poor innocents just eating lunch and then a circumstance occurs like earlier when the teenage sears security guard shooed away the kids gathered around the in-store video game console and the youngest boy whose father would become the host of america’s most wanted ended up dead at the hands of a child predator or the time before that when someone was putting something in tylenol and that’s the prevailing fear in the backseat of the gray family ford ltd except maybe the troublingly named indian school road the map of phoenix a geometric marvel you don’t think you’ve ever seen a city made of a grid but over the years it will become apparent that unlike other places you’ve lived everything about phoenix was master-planned except the freeway to los angeles which ends...