A: First of all, I didn't really want to go to medical school. I was in this quickie MD program, a year at Penn State, then to medical school. When it was time for me to start med school, I wanted to quit. But it was the height of the Vietnam War, and my draft number was 5. So because of the war, and family pressure, I stayed. I didn't really know what I wanted to do; I had no particular goal. But then a couple of things happened during my psychiatry residency. I had a brother, and he died very suddenly. He was a musician; he was the rebel of the family; everybody else did medicine or nursing. The last conversation I had with him, I asked him, "Who are you listening to these days?" and he said "Me." And I said, "That is so egotistical. Don't you think you have anything to learn from Monk, or Duke, or whoever?" And he said, "You don't understand. The music I want to hear has not been written yet. I'm going to write it."

That conversation took place in August; by October, he had died. The conversation came back to me. I'd never heard the creative process described as inside, as happening independent of the audience. It's something he had to do, for himself. And I remember thinking to myself, "Child psychiatry is such a mess." I really thought I'd made a bad mistake because the field was so mushy. When it came closer to the time to graduate, and I realized I had no empirically-based skills, it seemed an easy decision that I wanted to do research. There was a psychiatry that I wanted to read that hadn't been written yet, and maybe I could write it.