I'm writing about the time when they're living in the dorms, hanging out, when Peer Contraceptive Counseling makes its annual fall visit, when they're spending nights in shanties on campus engaged in political protest. The first words of the novel are "Out! Out! Out!" which are the first words Julian said as a toddler. All his life he's wanted to get out--he's been waiting for that moment when he can go off on his own, and now, finally, he's gotten there.

I remember my own freshmen year of college as a time when I had broken loose from my shackles. No bedtime, no one watching over me. Like Julian, my parents were in New York and I was in college in Massachusetts, but I might as well have been as far away as Mars. I'd had a pretty strict and early bedtime when I was small, and even when I was a teenager and going to sleep a good deal later I had this idea that I was missing out on something, that things were happening--the world was buzzing--while I slept. I recall my freshman year as a time when I didn't want to go to sleep. I'd be up with my girlfriend till three, four in the morning for no good reason other than that I had the sense that if I went to sleep I might miss something. It was a year of not great hygiene--of eating badly (I gained twenty pounds), of misplacing my shaver for weeks at a time, of going to sleep at four and waking up after noon (it's a wonder I didn't fail my classes), of spending every night asleep with my girlfriend on the common room floor. Her room was a double (her roommate slept on the bottom bunk and my girlfriend slept on the top), so our strange idea of privacy was spending the night on the common room floor and having her suitemates step over us on the way to class the next morning. It wasn't the healthiest year, but it was both memorable and important in my development, and though I've changed the details in the novel, it's that time in my life that was the inspiration for Matrimony.