After the disappointment of Love Me, Hate Me, I needed a commercial and emotional pick me up. I found that with Boys Will Be Boys.

I still remember the day: I was walking away from a Barnes & Noble in Dallas, where my book talk drew, oh, 40 people. It was a tiny bit depressing, and then my phone rang. It was my agent. “Guess what, motherfucker!” he screamed. “You’re No. 6 on the New York Times list!”

Holy crap! Holy, holy, holy, holy, holy crap!

One of the highest moments of my career.

Boys Will Be Boys was an absolute blast to research and write, because the names were so huge (Aikman! Emmitt! Irvin! Jimmy Johnson! Jerry Jones!) and the characters so rich. Throughout my career, I’ve always been a fan of chasing down the little-known stories and making them big, and Boys Will Be Boys was wonderful for this. I’ll never forget meeting Clayton Holmes, the former cornerback, who sat with me in the tiny wood shack he called home. It was located in his mother’s front yard in Florence, S.C., and lacked running water and electricity. I’ll also never forget Robert Jones, the former linebacker. I sat with Robert in an Austin Cheesecake Factory, and he told me about being a small child, and his father murdering his mother. He was crying, I was almost crying… painfully emotional.

Painfully gripping.