Or, anyway, the apparent modesty of an opening line. Really his one is genius, considering the story that follows.

Not that I’m trying to write Moby-Dick, or that I should compare myself to someone like Melville, but that at least I agree with him in the modesty of an opening line.

Which is maybe all a first sentence can be expected to do, I don’t know. Didn’t Herman Melville begin his novel Moby-Dick with nothing more than the statement, “Call me Ishmael”?

I am a divorced Catholic. I guess that will be the first sentence of this book. It will have to suffice, anyway, even if it isn’t a very good one, or is good enough only to tell you something about myself that you otherwise wouldn’t have known.

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