but happily margaret at work, ian mcewan and buried unsworth came with me to doubleday. when i was at houghton, pat conroy had a new editor for every single book and they assigned me to him and he got along terribly well. that was the prince of tides. i remember -- every writer is very very different. pat sends a thousand plus pages and it's up to you to do with it what you can. having never worked with him i didn't know what to do so i've made like a movie scheme of timeframes, themes, characters and when he came to new york to work with me, he looked at it and shook his head and said nobody had ever read my work this carefully. so as you know it was quite a success and so we signed him up for another book. just after that time, i went to doubleday and pat came to me and said, i really don't want to stay here without you so i will come to doubleday too. i said you have a perfectly good contract. i can do anything about it. it's entirely up to you. what he finally said was he was never going to write another book so he came to doubleday and after i had been there two yea