Rules for Others to Live By: Comments and Self-Contradictions

Between worrying about his artist friends and reconciling his complicated feelings about New York City, Pulitzer finalist Richard Greenberg still finds time to be something of a hermit - and it seems to be working out for him. As a playwright, he says, the time spent alone making up stories about fictional characters has sharpened his sensitivity to real life and all of the bizarre, unpredictable, and even unimaginable people beyond one's front door. In Rules for Others to Live By, he shares stories from his life, observations from two decades of residence on a three-block stretch of New York City, and musings from his brilliant, if not a little unusual, mind. Spanning a range of topics from friendship to writing, urban life to visiting parents, health crises to hypochondria and other paranoid tendencies, Greenberg's distinct and hilarious voice articulates our own mild obsessions and the idiosyncrasies we can only hope will go unnoticed in a crowd.