Peter Hochstein's story of how and why he became a writer and, for a while, a newspaper reporter. What it boils down to — aside from the fact that the only thing Peter ever did well was to write — he was misinformed. His whacko mother led him to believe that all writers with millionaires. Peter wanted to be rich so he could become a chick magnet. He went to a college that offered a creative writing program only to discover, when he got there, that the program had been discontinued. In his search for people who knew something about writing, he discovered the campus newspaper. This led him to a short career in the newspaper business where he was a reporter and then an editor for a now-defunct chain of New Jersey community weekly newspapers, a reporter for a small town Ohio daily newspaper, the editor of his own college newspaper, a reporter for The New York Post, and finally a writer for the king of sleazy news stand tabloids, Bob Harrison, who was starting up what turned out to be a very short-lived newspaper called Inside News. All this happened before his 24th birthday, which is where the book ends. After that he became an advertising copywriter, starting in the Madmen days. But books about that have been done to death, so Peter says you shouldn't expect him even to try.