The Finish Line

Or, an Ode to My Wife and Daughter

When I came up with the idea for Moses and the Doctor, which goes on sale today, I was living in a one-bedroom apartment in Queens that had a gas leak. The smell wasn’t overwhelming, but it was discernible. Concerning, really. It was fall and I called the super to investigate. He examined the stove, fiddled with some pipes, and then opened a few windows and said, “This should work.”

My first book, Our Team, had gone through several printings. I’d sold the movie rights. A paperback was in the works. It was a success. Yet there I was, coming to the realization that I might not be able live in New York City any longer.

My lease ran out the following summer. I had nine months to figure out what to do. Every Friday, I’d head to Astoria Beer and Cheese, order a pretzel burger and a beer, and skim basketball books in one of those makeshift sheds that lined the streets in the years after Covid. I took notes, read widely, and figured out the narrative parameters of a book that I’d lost faith in writing before I’d even started.

The lone reason the book happened is because of one person: my wife, Jane. By the time I met her, in January 2022, I’d taken more than a hundred pages of notes but hadn’t written a thing—not a single paragraph of the proposal. I loved her from the start but steered her away from my apartment, embarrassed at my by-then indifference to gas and its hazards.

In March I attended a literary festival in Tucson, Arizona. I did a sold-out panel with Joe Posnanski, who’d just published The Baseball 100, a massive bestseller. Afterward, attendees mobbed Joe. The moderator, a former major-league pitcher named Pat Darcy, whose claim to fame was giving up the twelfth-inning homerun to Carlton Fisk that gave the Boston Red Sox a Game Six victory in the 1975 ALCS, walked over to me and asked what I planned to write about next. I demurred, muttering that I wasn’t sure if I was going to write another book. Despite being seventy years old, Darcy still had the build of an athlete. He grasped my shoulder with one of his strong, enormous hands and said, “You should write another book. You’ve got the gift.”

The next month, Jane went to Hawaii. I stayed in her gas leak-free apartment in Hoboken to watch after her cats. When she came back a week later, I never left. That summer, we drove to Queens every weekend to pack up boxes of my belongings. By the time I’d emptied out my apartment, sometime in late August, I opened up a blank Word document and typed:

Moses and the Doctor

A Proposal by Luke Epplin

Would I have written this book if I’d never met Jane? Possibly. But I doubt it. She was an anchoring force in my life, someone who offered me the comfort and stability I needed to wade back into the watery churn of book-writing. She gave me a home, a sense of place, a room of my own.

In the leadup to the publication, I’ve done a few interviews and podcasts, and the reporters all marveled that I managed to write a book during a three-year span in which I got married, bought a house, and had a daughter—not to mention maintained my full-time job. How did I find the time?

Here’s the thing—It didn’t feel pressed to me. The time is there if you make it, but you have to be in the right space for writing. Because I’d found someone I couldn’t wait to marry, I felt freer, looser than with Our Team. I wrote in the early morning, I researched and conducted oral histories during lunch, I outlined at night. Every weekend, my wife and I went on dates or, in the last year, watched our daughter become a little human. I turned in the manuscript to my publisher on schedule and at the contracted word count.

That’s not to say it was easy. Writing a book is a years-long process. I got exhausted. I worried that the finish line was too far ahead. I got anxious about how the finished book would be received (still am). And as with my previous book, I questioned at the end whether it’d been worth it. What compels me to put myself through this?

I don’t know the answer. But I do know that if I choose to do it again, I won’t be alone. I dedicated Moses and the Doctor to my wife and daughter. The book is as much theirs as it is mine. The same will be true of any other book that I write as well.